Apple co-founder and all-around interesting guy Steve Jobs gave the Stanford commencement address this year, and in it he told stories from his life . The first was about how he dropped out of Reed College after six months. Steve told the graduates that he did not see the value of the education to his future, that the price of it was a strain on his working-class family. Specifically, he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, but he did know that he was not enjoying the classes he was required to take. Here is a transcript of his speech, if you’re interested.
Now, the Slashdot crowd was quick to seize on Steve’s message as a repudiation of the education system. Commenters began to divide into factions, those who believes degrees are stupid but you need to have them to advance in the business world, those who think degrees are valuable and you need knowledge to do well, and those who believe you can be just as good a person/employee/whatever without college, and dropping out is a perfectly acceptable course.
I agree with all of them, and none of them, because I think they are all dramatically oversimplifying.
Our liberal arts education system is in many ways constructed to encourage us to learn more about the world, society, and ourselves. We are forced to get a broader perspective, to try new things, to better understand this crazy place in which we live. At the same time, the education system can be stifling, controlling, boring, bothersome.
Everyone is different, and everyone has different motivations. I have plenty of friends who came to Brandeis with a course laid out, and pursued it. I have friends who came with no idea, and found a calling. I know people who went through the whole process and never really figured out what they wanted to do (in fact, I was one of those people). Yes, many people are there, in part, to get good grades, get their degree, impress their parents, &c. But other people get good grades, do well in classes, and spend a lot of time learning because they actually enjoy it. Maybe you find the human body amazing, the political process infinitely complex, the way humans communicate through language endlessly captivating, how 1s and 0s are transformed into complex systems by tiny silicon chips incredible, the vaccilations of our American social fabric beautiful. That’s allowed. That’s good.
On the other hand, maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re not going to find your calling in the academic side of things. But maybe you find you love organizing events, or teaching immigrants to read English, or digging for fossils, or designing buildings. Yeah, my examples are all over the place, but that is because these are all things that people I know are doing. That’s okay. In fact, that’s wonderful.
The people who are upset that so many businesses are requiring college degrees as prerequisites for employment seem perfectly content with the requirement that everyone finish high school. We’ve realized, as a society, that while education is not everything, is not what makes us who we are, it does, on balance, help most of us to become better, more thoughtful people. And that is something to be encouraged.
Don’t take the simple view. Sure, it may be annoying, even dumb, for companies to only hire people with MAs for a job that you may be perfectly able to do with a BA, sure, some of the graduates I know, and some of the masters students, and even some of the people with Ph.D.s don’t necessarily seem to be any better at their jobs, or at understanding the world, than I am. But, again, on balance, more education is good. And don’t knock it, and don’t knock people who enjoy it, until you’ve met some of them. And hey, maybe someone who really loves a particular field of inquiry just might be interesting to be around. The biggest worry I have is that starting with your Bachelors and moving on up, everything starts to get more specialized. And it is good to have specialized knowledge, but a person needs to balance their specialized learning with maintaining their general curiosity and general interest in the world. There is nothing more boring than someone who can talk only about their one specialty, and has no identity apart from their job.
Humans are meant to be curious. College should encourage curiosity, not stifle it. Education should make us more curious, not less.
And, to restate Steve Jobs’ original point with his whole story, we choose who we want to be. But to a large extent, the world chooses too. Sometimes you don’t know where you are going to end up until you get there. And in hindsight, you can look and see what aspects of your life brought you to this place, and which pieces of experience and education and development helped you to end up where you are. But as you move forward, you have no idea, and you never can know, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes things work out as you intend, sometimes they do not. So if the lesson is anything, it is this: savor your time, learn everything you can, do what strikes your fancy, choose classes or majors that interest you, no matter how practical they may seem, and one day, when you least expect it, something you learned long ago, just for the hell of it, will come in very handy.
Steve took a calligraphy class and learned about the beauty of letters, and when the original Macintosh came out, it had more than just one blocky font. Look at how far that has taken us.