Mostly bookmarking for myself, but this piece by Martin Bihl struck me since the Spring semester begins tomorrow about a movie featuring a WWII bomber pilot back home after the war looking for a job. He’s told by an employer that because he doesn’t have degrees he won’t hire him:
He tells him that he didn’t know anything about flying bombers, but he knows how to learn. And that makes sense to the worker, so he gives him a job turning these flying swords into prefab ploughshares, as it were.
And it occurred to me that that, that right there, that’s the point of education.
It’s not to learn dates and names of battles and prime ministers. I mean, sure, those things are important to give you some understanding of the world you live in and how we got here and why things are the way they are, so you can make intelligent decisions and not turn the planet into a firey hellscape. But it’s not the point of education. Not really.
Education teaches you to think about things in ways you don’t think about them. It teaches you to learn not just things, but to learn different ways to think. Look, the way you solve an algebra problem is not the way you solve a physics problem. For one, the answer is actually embedded in the problem. The other requires observation and trial and repetition. One’s not wrong, one’s not right. They’re just different ways of solving problems. Same is true of accounting or literature or history or flying bombers or demolishing junk metal. Different ways of thinking.
So it’s not so much that you need to understand calculus because it’s going to come in handy at the grocery store, or that knowing who wrote Ulysses is going to help you fix a fuse in your basement. It’s because calculus is a different way of thinking and Ulysses is a different way of thinking and the more ways of thinking you have – and the better able you are to use them and adapt them and adapt to them – the better equipped you are to deal with the changes that life throws at you. Which it will. Because it does.
The other thing may be even more important.
Education signals to the world that you can learn.