How High is Higher Education?

I've been redefining my thoughts on higher education these past 24 hours.

A little background: The sad truth is that I never consciously choseto go to college. These days higher education is rarely selected; it is assumed. Consequentially, I never really designed goals for myself while here, because i have never asked myself why i was here.

But I am here. Whether I was congnizant of my decision to attend UNC or not, I am here and I choose to embrace higher education.

When asked "What is education" several hours ago, my first contrived definition was as follows: Higher education is specialization of a particular field in the context of integration of skills. The particular field is irrelevant: it can be chemistry, Arabic studies, or social work. All that matters is that critical skills are developed while discovering your field: verbal skills, quantitative skills, reading and writing skills, communication skills, analytic skills, and the like.

So the premise here is that higher education is not the regurgitation of facts regurgitated upon you by "higher" professors. It is not the content; it is the skills.

Then I realized how ridiculous this is.

First of all, college is definitely not the only place where skills are honed. There are so many things upon graduation that I could have done: worked at a restaurant, gone to culinary school, gone to beauty school, volunteered, joined the military, gotten married and birthed seven children, attended L'Abri, joined a convent. I could have sufficed just fine...what skills i needed would be developed there. Humans are like playdough: they adapt to whatever situation aquiring the bare essentials, the minimum skills (and then some) to survive. I could have aquired certain skills in a larger quanity or faster. For example, had i worked at Bread Co. I would have been forced to develop good communication skills, patience, sparse culinary skills, good listening skills, the ability to multi-task. Heck, I could learn photojournalism very quickly outside of college: buy a few books off of amazon and then drag Joe around with me across God's green earth taking pictures. getting experience. Yes, a personal tutor to show me those skills hands-on would be lovely.

Yet here I am at the University of North Carolina. I chose higher education.

So if education isn't facts and it isn't skills, what is left?

A very learned man named Abbott enlightens us on his theory of higher education in The Zen of Education. The aim of education is...education. We learn so that our enjoyment of reality is enlargened. Indeed, it is more pleasurable to have educated sex than monkey sex; it is more pleasurable to gaze at a painting knowing the historical, religious, and artistic context of that painting that to be ignorant. Which is not to say monkey sex of ignorant portrait-gazing is inherently evil; they aren't. It's just better to know. It's better for the individual. Experience is enhanced.l

Abbott is compelling:

There are no aims of education. The aim IS eduction. If--and only if---you seek it...education will find you. it will not be easy. We have only ehlpful exercises. We can't give you the thing itself. And there will be exraordinary temptaions--to spend whole months wallowing in a conentration that doesn't work for you because you have some myth about your future, to blow off intellectual effort in all but on earea because you are too lazy to hallenge yourself, to wander off to Europe for a year of enlightenment that rapidly turns into touristic self-indulgence. There will be the temptations of timidity, too, temtations to forgo all experimentation, to miss the glorious randomness of college, to give up the prodigal possibilites that--let me tell you---you will never find again; temptations to go rigidly through the motions and then wonder why education has eluded you."

I'd like to think of higher education in this manner: learning for learning's sake. The facts that I learn I will forget in one...two...five years. The skills I learn I will have to refine as the world changes. The reality that I define...even that will eventually change. Life is in flux.

I suddenly want to take advantage of every opportunity here at UNC. This is the only time in my life where i have seemingly unlimited resources at my fingertips (both academic and human!).

Carpe diem.