In addition to an Oscar-nominated film, “an education” is the title of life in my household this September. Both my kids are off to university and, to my delight and surprise, both are in liberal arts programs. This ought to feel like a milestone when we parents get all misty-eyed and say sentimental things that begin with “I remember when …” but to be truthful, we’ve been too busy to notice how we feel about these changes in our lives. There have been laptops to buy & load with software, finances to work out, a daughter to move into residence, a son to steer through a week of frosh parties. Only now, as classes begin, have we parents had time to reflect.
I’m worried. I haven’t given my kids any advice. I’m supposed to have accumulated all sorts of parental wisdom which I can now pass on to my children. The problem is: I can’t think of anything to say. It feels as if I was entering university myself only a couple years ago; I couldn’t possibly have lived long enough to acquire any wisdom. I look at my kids and they seem capable and, in many ways, self-sufficient. They’re smart and fun to be with. Despite a few tense moments growing up—evenings in the emergency ward, unexpected calls from teachers—it’s been a delight to watch them grow. I’m not sure they need my advice.
If there’s any wisdom worth passing along, it’s this: beware the wisdom of grown-ups.
By definition, people are grown-ups because they’ve forgotten important things about how to live. That’s one of J.M. Barrie‘s insights. We know we’re grown-ups when we forget how to fly.
In the case of young adults starting university, grown-ups are people who have forgotten what education is for, and these days there are a lot of grown-ups nattering on about education.
If we are to believe the grown-ups, education ought to be understood as an instrumentalist institution. It is a means to an end. The purpose of an education is to get a good job, one that pays well so graduates can buy nice stuff. Education policy is determined by broader economic policy. If policy-makers decide that what we really need is a strong manufacturing sector, then education funding gets skewed in favour technology and business.
We can see that happening in Ontario. Witness our newest university, UOIT or University of Ontario Institute of Technology, founded in 2002 as a deliberate effort to enhance Ontario’s competitive edge in the global marketplace, or rhetoric to that effect. Last year, my son and I went for a tour of the campus. I kept my mouth shut. After all, it was his decision to make and I didn’t want my bias to influence him. In fact, he might be surprised to learn now that I was appalled at what I saw. It isn’t a university. It bears that name and has degree-granting powers and will no doubt crank out highly skilled players in our new economy. But it isn’t a university. Not in the classical sense.
For years there has been a drift towards privatization and deregulation in higher education. This is true not only of Ontario, but of higher education in most western countries. It’s endemic of our times. But as universities become increasingly dependent upon large corporate donors, the potential for conflict of interest arises. Big Pharma has a choke hold on our medical schools. The same is true for Big Oil and our engineering faculties, financial institutions and our business schools, technology firms and our computer science departments. Whether or not large corporate interests affect curriculum and teaching methodology is beside the point. Conflict of interest is a matter of perception, not of fact. The mere presence of large corporate interests creates the perception that they influence curriculum.
Meanwhile cultural studies are pushed to the margins, deemed unproductive and therefore irrelevant. Music and literature are fluff. Visual arts are saved from complete denigration because they’re useful in the advertising business. And, ominously, the study of our history is losing ground as a legitimate area of inquiry. These are incidental pursuits for youth who have lost their way or need to rationalize a four-year pub crawl.
When I was a student, I made the mistake of choosing my course of study based on instrumental reasoning. I started in a liberal arts program, studying English literature and Latin. But it was the age of Reaganomics and everywhere I turned I could hear the grown-up voices telling me no one had any use for incidental pursuits like mine. By the time Gordon Gekko had arrived in the theatres, I was half way to a law degree and had adopted a more grown-up view of things. I find it strange that a generation later, Gordon Gekko has decided to bless my children with his wisdom in a sequel—Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I hope more students today are alive to the story’s ironies than my peers were when I was in law school.
As I learned the hard way: you can’t follow someone else’s path. Some people are well-suited to the practice of law; for others, like me, it can be soul-deadening. It was hard for me to admit to myself years later that I had wasted so much time and energy on a course of study which, had I been honest with myself, I would have known at the outset was thoroughly unsuitable for me.
I don’t know why I persisted so long with something I hated so much. It’s not as if my parents cared one way or the other. Maybe I was trying to please them by trying to satisfy imagined expectations. But I doubt it. I think it was something subtler. I think I was sufficiently passive and uncritical that I allowed the rot of the times to seep into my bones. I didn’t even know it was there—this cultural rot that has flared up once again and threatens my children.
It’s the rot of an unimaginative pragmatism. It’s the mind-numbing talk of the free-trade ideologues. It’s the jittering dance of the global-economy marionettes.
So, to my kids, and to anyone else who cares to read this, I repeat: beware the wisdom of grown-ups. If anyone speaks to you in phrases that begin with “should” and “ought”, give them the finger. Do whatever it takes to feel alive. Because this is what education is for: in its broadest sense, an education is the condition you create for yourself to facilitate a sense of deep fulfillment.