When I was young, my Italian immigrant father would say of a carpenter, cabinetmaker, lawyer, teacher or physician, “It’s a good living.” As a teacher and a parent, I’ve wondered about what he meant. Having lived through the Great Depression, most likely he meant that one could earn a living doing any of these things. But it strikes me that he may have meant more than that.
Could he have meant that satisfaction is important in whatever job one has? And how does one measure that?
To be good at something, and to be paid reasonably well for doing it, is what one strives for. Beyond that, one has to enjoy one’s job. Unfortunately, we are now in an era in which enjoyment is secondary to having a job. This was true in the 1980s, when business and management degrees became popular.
It was true in the post-World War II period when medicine, law and engineering became the goal of most men. (Women had the choices of nursing or teaching, and not much else.) In other words, strange economic conditions breed an enthusiasm for the utility of education, rather than its intellectual ends.
A recent Georgetown University study examined the significance of a college major on ultimate earning power. No one wants to attend college, acquire debt and then find oneself unemployed. However, employment itself is not the only determining factor. I think that some students want fantastic remunerative employment. To them, unlike my father, a “good living” is four bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths and a two-car garage with two BMWs. (Some of my pre-medical students chose medicine because, as one put it, “Rich people get sick, too.”)
How do educators and parents balance their advice to beginning college students? (It is interesting that we have popular books with such titles as “The Joy of Cooking” and “The Joy of Sex,” but none with the title “The Joy of Learning.”)
An education is for learning. I can teach a philosophy major how to be a biomedical technician in two months. Another dedicated professional can impart the wisdom of how to survey for oil deposits in about the same time. The secret is that anyone who has learned how to think can learn how to do something quite different from what he or she was taught.
Learning is hard work. But learning also must be pleasurable, and not a series of credentialing hoops. You often hear the wise tell students, “Yes, study literature, but take accounting just in case, to fall back on.” Nonsense. The ability to appreciate and analyze literature is in itself a means to understanding the human condition, the possibilities of human achievement and the way to think deeply about problems. Now, some will say, “But what can you do with it? Who would hire you?”
Probably nobody. But one has numerous ways to acquire job credentials. The primary goal of an undergraduate education is to learn what you want to learn — as broadly as possible — and then to seek the required skills for a specific occupation. Done in this way — learning how to learn first — makes the second task much more endurable, and perhaps, with a special perspective on the technical training, even enjoyable.
I point out to my students that life consists of one-third working, one third sleeping and one-third ... what? What do you do with one-third of your life?
We seem to be preoccupied with the first third, accept the second third as necessary and, when it comes to education, neglect the last — and perhaps most important — third.
Russell Aiuto is a part-time professor of biology and physics at Kennesaw State University.
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