There are
a lot of issues I have with Mark Edmundson’s article “Where Should I Go to College?”
– the cynical tone, the thinly disguised
objectivity, the simplistic stereotypes, the predisposition to create good guys
and bad guys, purity v. impurity – the list goes on. For Edmundson students are just abstractions
to be categorized. Whatever truth I might
think his argument contains, as an educator I refuse to put my students in a
box, conveniently label them, and then climb on my high horse of educational
purity in the midst of “corporate” slime.”
But as
is the case with most arguments that touch a nerve, there is an element of
truth in Edmundson’s thesis, and to deny it is equivalent to putting my head in
the sand. Education and learning have for many become simply a means to the
“good” life, a way to stem the tide of inter-generational downward mobility.
Resume-building trumps intellectual curiosity as students feel the pressure to
attend the college that will most help them advance their careers.
But the
two values – learning for learning’s sake and
learning as a means – can be reconciled. The “good” high school as Edmundson
sarcastically refers to it can serve excellence and true learning. The key component is the value the school
places on student quality of experience, students using educational experiences
to discover what they love, what they don’t love, what they’re good at, and who
they are. The experience becomes a
mechanism for gaining self-knowledge. I
see this happen all the time at Rivers because quality of experience is one of
the critical values that defines “Excellence with Humanity.”
I am the
first to agree with Edmundson that too many schools produce “achievement
machines.” But I refuse to dismiss those
students who, through experience, have come to realize that they are practical
learners, that they want to see how the ideas in the classroom become relevant
in the real world. Again, the critical factor is schools focusing on quality of
experience as well as excellence, the journey as well as the result. Please don’t tell me that the two are
irreconcilable; they are both on full display at Rivers every day – the
really smart kid who loves to bake and is encouraged to start a bakery stand at
the local farmer’s market, the kid whose imagination is sparked by an assembly
on robots and within a year the school has a robotics club and a computer
science program, the kid who finds a talent for acting and is encouraged by her
drama teacher to “go for it” and apply to acting schools. Yes, “excellence” can
be perverted without the emphasis on quality of experience, but excellence
plays a critical role in helping young people discover who they are and what
they are good at – a sometimes painful but often
ultimately rewarding journey. The key is that the school has to value quality
of experience and its necessary sidekick, relationships, so that students know
that they are valued beyond what they achieve.