One of my students took me on the other day. I was talking to the class about the ‘choice’ they had made for a college education and for its distinctive method and content. One of them objected that his choice was nothing to do with wanting any particular style of learning (or indeed any more learning at all). Rather, his decision to be investing in this was motivated purely by the fact that it would pay dividends later when, as a graduate, he could demand a higher wage packet.
I’ll confess I was a little sad. I’m idealistic enough to think that education should be its own reward. It should be a treasure to be prized for the vistas it opens, the growth it fosters, the ways it challenges and changes us, teaches us 
how to learn, and literally ‘leads us out’ of so much that limits and threatens us – ignorance, poverty, unwillingness to encounter difference, arrogance – and into a more fruitful life. I could see his point; I just thought he’d missed another one even more greatly to his profit.
The public conversation about education seems particularly sharp just now. In Illinois, higher education spending seems an easy target in the gubernatorial contest. In the UK, the coalition government is preparing to ratchet up tuition fees in order to balance the books, the Liberal Democrats gritting their teeth as they renege on a clear election promise not to do so. Listening to the politicians, you’d almost think they see higher education as a luxury, a privilege for those who receive it and for which they should pay, sometimes dearly.
I suppose I’m very fortunate, part of the last generation in Britain whose university education was almost fully government-funded, not just as an exercise benefitting me, but as a public good, an investment in society and a down payment on the better world I and my peers would sculpt after graduation. Widening access to higher education inevitably means some fees, without great rises in tax: but I hope we never lose that ideal about what university does and is for.
In Aurora last week, at convocation, we heard from Jack Frohn. He told a remarkable story of the transformative power of education: of a young man without a family, working hard as a short order cook to support himself, coming reluctantly to college. He was swept away, finding there his purpose and his life and choices he never dreamed of. He met a young woman the first day – and yes, reader, he married her –but he was met by so much more: new options, fresh hope, an unlooked-for family, a community of enrichment, a world of ideas, a universe of possibilities. There could have been no better testimony to what we’re still about, fifty years after he arrived.
All significant social reform, religious or secular, has centered on the transforming power of an education. Amidst the clash of economic pressures and political exigencies, I hope we’ll never lose that vision, nor the notion that truth really does make us free.
0 Responses to “to strive, to seek, to find…”