Who Taught You to Think?
A few weeks ago, I watched Bill Maher interview Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. Higher-education institutions have been taking heat lately for alleged political bias, and Roth was there to discuss it.
They had a lively conversation about Wesleyan specifically, and Higher Education in general, needing to shed some political biases. I imagine most reasonable people would be fine with a balance, as long as popular conspiracy theories from either side of the political spectrum were not on the agenda.
It was also obvious that Roth was cheerleading for colleges and universities as a whole. He made a statement of support that I’ve heard before: College teaches kids to think. And by think, I believe he was talking about the mental skills to better handle life.
Do you think higher-education institutions teach that?
When I was in school, I had plenty on my plate to absorb from a challenging engineering curriculum. If I was also being groomed with some mysterious thinking skillcraft, I sure as hell wasn’t aware of it. My training in thought concerned balancing chemical equations, calculating hyperbolic orbits, doing integral calculus, etc. … so where does that other stuff come in that Professor Roth refers to?
I submit that mental skills to handle life don’t come from a college curriculum. They come from a life beyond the classroom, in spite of what college faculty, or even parents, may tell us.
My parents used to be shocked when, on some rare occasions, I’d exhibit rude behavior. And you’re attending college? they’d say. I’d joke that I skipped Manners 101.
I hope that higher education prepares one for a career after graduation, but let’s not attribute too much else to college. I think that learning to think and developing mental skills to handle life comes from elsewhere.
“Sound mind, sound body.”
Know where I picked up that life lesson? If you guessed Batman, bingo!
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
That’s from Star Trek.
“Do right by people, no matter their race.” That theme permeated The Lone Ranger.
And most importantly, good parenting is critical for the development of young minds too. After all, that comes before TV and comic books.
All of that, and perhaps more, contributes to thinking skills well before one applies to the college of one’s choice.
So, do you agree that higher education teaches one to think? Or is it just tired dogma that survives as propaganda for the industry?
The End
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I believe that learning how to think, and behave in modern society, starts at home. Parents (and all adults in a person’s life) should model the behavior they want to pass on to the next generation.
You really can’t teach someone how to be nice, or kind, or show (feel) empathy. That has to be shown and modeled from a very early age.
School (even primary education) should be for learning specific things. Communication (language, math) is the most important ~thing~ that should be taught. How to be a good citizen (history, civics) is another. How to survive in modern society (nutrition, economics, basic science) is another.
Primary education should lay the foundation for how to learn. College education should focus on the specifics of what the student wants to continue to do.
Curiosity cannot be taught. It cannot be learned, either. It is an innate part of being human, and can only be encouraged, ignored, or squashed.
Thinking cannot be ‘taught’. It can be encouraged, ignored, or squashed.
Curiosity and thinking are related somehow.
Trying to figure out the ~how~, the ~why~, and the ~what’s next~ can be encouraged by studying historical figures, and scientific principles. Figuring out the cause and effect of anything is a good exercise.
If someone is spending all of their mental and physical capacity on just surviving, they are not going to have the internal bandwidth to solve problems with innovative solutions.
Every time I would read about the early masters (Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Euler, Maxwell, Newton, Michelangelo, DaVinci, etc.) my first thought would be “they must’ve been government employees – they had the time and resources to figure these things out”. So, my goal was to create a life where I could stop worrying about shelter and food so I could focus on expanding my thinking and reasoning.
My parents encouraged my curiosity and modeled (mostly) how to behave in civilized society. I questioned, and prodded, and annoyed a lot of teachers in primary school, but I learned.
In college, for my last degree, I was the age (or older) of most of my professors. I spoke up, I questioned, I answered questions, I dove in head first into getting my Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering. I had the benefit of running an engineering firm while I was finishing school, so I could apply what was taught, and question what wasn’t taught.
I learned how to think by not letting anyone squish my curiosity, and being able to search for answers to questions I couldn’t fully articulate.