Education and Perseverance

I remember a poster in one of my middle school teacher’s classrooms that read “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”

How high we can go in life depends on our vision, our dreams, and our often-crazy willingness to put those ahead of the practicalities and traditional demands of life. Yes, being born with good looks and money, and perhaps white skin and a good head of hair, gives you a ‘one-up’ in today’s world, but it’s no guarantee. And perhaps what is so quintessentially ‘American’ about me is the motivation I draw from those who have overcome society’s obstacles to find joy in life and the ability to help others. People who start out ‘well-off’ in life and manage to stay well-off are fine – at least they haven’t squandered what has been given to them – but it is those who manage to rise just a little higher, to give just a little more, that inspire me.

Of course, being ‘American’ in that sense may be what has drawn me more to Europe in the current day, as discussed in a recent Slate article.

Turning to education more specifically, a few years ago, as I was just beginning to stumble into my PhD studies, I received a free copy of The Next Step in Studying Religion: A Graduate’s Guide. The very first words of that book are:

It has been rumored that about 50 per cent of those who enter a doctoral programme in the social sciences and the humanities never finish. It is common knowledge that it is not necessarily the brilliant who survive; it is the persistent.

So, while I have had my own trials and tribulations in academia, I have held strong to the idea that if I just persist, I will survive thrive. And so far so good. Thanks to the generosity and support of far too many people to name, I have made it this far.

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine shared a video with me. It is a very short monologue by Ira Glass (host of This American Life), discussing the importance of perseverance for creative people.

So true. And every bit as applicable to those struggling in academia.

And beyond ‘higher’ education there is this video with the ever-brilliant Noam Chomsky on the “Purpose of Education” more broadly:

The purpose of education… is just to help people to determine how to learn on their own.

There have been many measures taken to try to turn the educational system toward more control, more indoctrination, more vocational training. Imposing a dept which traps students into a life of conformity and so on. That’s the exact opposite of what I referred to as the tradition that comes out of the enlightenment. And there is a constant struggle between those.

And, quite contrary to the view of some of my teachers and friends, he states that:

We should bear in mind that the technological changes that are taking place now, while they are significant, probably come nowhere near having as much impact as technological advances of say, a century ago, plus or minus. Let’s take just communication. The shift from a typewriter to a computer or a telephone to the email is significant, but it doesn’t begin to compare with the shift from a sailing vessel to the telegraph. The time that that cut down in communication between, say England to the United States, was extraordinary compared with the changes taking place now.

The technology is basically neutral. It’s kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn’t care if you use it to build a house or a torturer uses it to smash a person’s skull.