Saturday, November 01, 2003
It's parents' weekend here, which is a plus for me since the dining halls put on their best face and present their best food in order to convince the visiting parents that the ridiculous prices they pay for their kids' meal plans is worth it. Tonight I had fried fish, grilled chicken, curried veggies, roast duck salad and sushi. Not bad, though it's troubling how noticeable the difference in the food is, both at the beginning of the school year and during parent weekends, when the administration has reason to suspect that the quality of their service is under scrutiny. It bothers me how corporate the environment here is.
Speaking of school, I've been thinking of something a Frenchman named Saint-Exupery once said: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." In the context of my college life, and having done a small share of teaching myself, I take this to mean that in order to educate, one should be less worried about passing on pure knowledge, and more focused on inspiring young minds to see the beauty of that knowledge and desire to learn more on their own. Education is more than mere training, after all, and the curious mind does not need to be fed a continuous stream of facts, as it will go out and find it on its own.
After two and a half years as a student of the sciences and liberal arts, I don't think I've ever felt that my professors here would have agreed with me on this point. To me, education in this society is industrial; a sort of support infrastructure for the greater consumeristic industry that drives the capitalist cycle that this culture has become imbued in. Every problem set that I struggle through, it seems as if my mind is being pounded and molded into yet another fine piece of machinery that will take its place in the industry, but I'm still left thinking that being educated should not feel like being caught in some kind of giant factory. I don't know when I became so obsessed with the material that I'm learning that I lost track of why I'm learning it in the first place, to a point where sometimes I'm not sure where the factory ends and I begin. It seems like the way that my classes here are taught and the way that my classmates react to it tends to perpetuate this kind of an attitude; the lectures uninspiring and the problem sets long and difficult.
So it seems that to my ever-distant professors, it is not the learning that counts, but rather the results. It is not as important to think about and appreciate the implications of the problem that I just solved, as it is to finish it and turn it in; there is another problem that must be moved on to, after all. It is an overwhelmingly consequentialist kind of attitude, as that is the trend in this society, but as Drew points out, it is also only the most immediate consequences that matter. I take classes with students that are being that are being trained to become the best scientists they can be, yet never have we been challenged to consider how our work affects the world and those around us... the challenge has always been "how much work can you get done?" It's as if we've become so obsessed with maximizing the efficiency of our factory that we've forgotten it was never supposed to be a factory in the first place. I, at least, came here hoping to be inspired, and to grow.
So, the corporate attitude that I see even the dining service of this Ivy League institution take has been something of a final insult. The cherry on top, as it were. Well, at least it was a delicious cherry... I do have to applaud them on the curried veggies.
Speaking of school, I've been thinking of something a Frenchman named Saint-Exupery once said: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." In the context of my college life, and having done a small share of teaching myself, I take this to mean that in order to educate, one should be less worried about passing on pure knowledge, and more focused on inspiring young minds to see the beauty of that knowledge and desire to learn more on their own. Education is more than mere training, after all, and the curious mind does not need to be fed a continuous stream of facts, as it will go out and find it on its own.
After two and a half years as a student of the sciences and liberal arts, I don't think I've ever felt that my professors here would have agreed with me on this point. To me, education in this society is industrial; a sort of support infrastructure for the greater consumeristic industry that drives the capitalist cycle that this culture has become imbued in. Every problem set that I struggle through, it seems as if my mind is being pounded and molded into yet another fine piece of machinery that will take its place in the industry, but I'm still left thinking that being educated should not feel like being caught in some kind of giant factory. I don't know when I became so obsessed with the material that I'm learning that I lost track of why I'm learning it in the first place, to a point where sometimes I'm not sure where the factory ends and I begin. It seems like the way that my classes here are taught and the way that my classmates react to it tends to perpetuate this kind of an attitude; the lectures uninspiring and the problem sets long and difficult.
So it seems that to my ever-distant professors, it is not the learning that counts, but rather the results. It is not as important to think about and appreciate the implications of the problem that I just solved, as it is to finish it and turn it in; there is another problem that must be moved on to, after all. It is an overwhelmingly consequentialist kind of attitude, as that is the trend in this society, but as Drew points out, it is also only the most immediate consequences that matter. I take classes with students that are being that are being trained to become the best scientists they can be, yet never have we been challenged to consider how our work affects the world and those around us... the challenge has always been "how much work can you get done?" It's as if we've become so obsessed with maximizing the efficiency of our factory that we've forgotten it was never supposed to be a factory in the first place. I, at least, came here hoping to be inspired, and to grow.
So, the corporate attitude that I see even the dining service of this Ivy League institution take has been something of a final insult. The cherry on top, as it were. Well, at least it was a delicious cherry... I do have to applaud them on the curried veggies.
