The Path Next Taken

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” ~ Aristotle

I have a son graduating from high school this year, negotiating the path from secondary education to college and an independent life. Not without moments of hilarity and drama, it is unnerving and slightly surreal to have a child come of age during such uncertain times. I take the view that he is following that hero’s path made popular by Joseph Campbell. This allows a conceit to look at events in this country in mythic terms – putting things at a remove and in a much broader context.

These are the days when the bright young hopes of our collective future have become commodities. Higher education has become a damned if you do and damned if you don’t scenario of debt vs. future prospects. Yes, there is a pool of grants and scholarships available to offset the bottomless pit of educational debt that has collected in this country. But it all begins to feel like a strategy board-game called Human Capital. Playing this game can be a full time job, an end in itself before the first classroom door is even opened. Human capital is a precious thing and going forward in life it is vital to be aware of how it is invested and spent.

In considering the monetary investment of a college education, we talk of selecting the course of study that best prepares our children for a sound choice of career. Yet at least half of the jobs that will be available in their future world don’t currently exist. A.I., coding, cyber security, robotics, algorithms, bio-tech, virtual reality, anything engineering, anything cyber in the coming quantum revolution…all these disciplines beckon our youth to the doorway of a new world where the definition of what it means to be human begins to dissipate. This path leads to a post mythical world if you will, where the signposts of moral action are missing. I don’t speak of myth as a fiction but as the universal collected stories of our species that tell of our human patterns of right and wrong (morality).

As a parent watching a child begin their journey, and as a citizen watching a generation step forward, I would hope that the concept and realization of a liberal education awaits. The origin of the liberal arts is the exploration of first principals of being. This will never go out of fashion or need. It is a form of education that is flexible to the times yet timeless. It facilitates the development of the autonomous free-thinking individual who can make the whole around them stronger. To understand our present and secure our future we need to have a fluid knowledge of our history, philosophy, ethics, arts and social sciences in concert
with technical and STEM curricula. It overstates the obvious but a stem needs roots and leaves to flourish.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, the government took a hand in democratizing higher education. In creating over 70 public colleges, the Act paved the way for increased access to education for all economic classes, not just the very rich. Colleges were required to provide vocational and agricultural based training for a better skilled worker class but this also laid the foundation for the tradition of the liberal arts education in this country. Some opposed the Act on the notion that the country had no need for educated farmers. In simplistic terms, such voices were predicated on the belief that learning and the enrichment of the individual should never be an end in itself. The deeper roots of this anti-intellectualism in America casts a long shadow over our state of affairs today.

As to spending human capital, I would hope my son and his peers could be guided not merely by the dictates of fitting oneself into the needs of a job, but by the aspiration to develop into rounded, versatile and innately moral human beings, suited to multiple endeavors in life. Taking the adage that the unexamined life is not worth living one step further, consider that it is also subject to manipulation and abuse. The Liberal Arts (Liberalis Ars – Latin) are the hallmark of a free society. Liberalis is freedom. Ars is arts or principled practice. It is the result of a true democracy and it is the means to perpetuate the same. That our youth must incur serious financial debt to take their place in this continuum is proof enough that we have stepped away from a democratic path. It is up to all of us to take up the challenge of this hero’s journey – an investment that will pay untold dividends to the future.