When I was in seventh grade at Midvale Middle School, my literature teacher, Mrs. Harper, talked a lot. She talked about how she came from Michigan and what she thought of Utah. She talked about books, politics, sports and hormonal changes.
She was stern. When we tried to talk her into letting us out of homework or if we tried to pass notes or shoot spit wads through dissected Bic rollerballs, she was always unforgiving. But I liked Mrs. Harper. I didn’t realize it then, but I liked her because she understood the terror that came with leaving the comforting routine of elementary school for the enormity of middle school.
In class one day she talked about math, of all things. She asked us: Why do you guys take math?
Nobody said anything. We didn’t know. We just hated it.
“Because you want to expand your mind. You want to learn,” she said.
What a nice thing to say, I thought. We want to learn. Simple though it was, it struck my seventh-grade mind as a rather sophisticated insight, as did everything Mrs. Harper said. But I was too stunned and worried by the giantness and impersonality of middle school to think about it much. I liked Mrs. Harper, but she made me do homework problems and there were too many video games I wanted to play.
That time passed. It was 2000 and I returned home from a mission in Korea to start my degree at the U. I realized then, after two years’ absence from school, that it was my fate to continue studying.
My fate. It sounds strange to put it that way. Perhaps even a little sentimental. Doesn’t everyone go to college, nowadays? What’s noble and tragic about that? Why use a word like fate to talk about getting a bachelor’s degree?
But fate seems like the best word to describe it, because I didn’t feel as though I had a choice in the matter. It wasn’t the pressure of a middle-class culture of higher education, or even the realization that I didn’t have anything better to do that made me go to college. That couldn’t have been it, because most of my friends from my parents’ working class neighborhood ended up taking jobs right after their missions and buying nice cars. But I knew I had to keep going in school.
During my time in college, I studied hard. I loaded up on courses, joined the Honors Program and started writing for The Chronicle. Sometimes the stress and pressure of getting good grades was difficult, but I kept studying anyway. On the weekends, I thought about deadlines, about when the next paper was due, how I was going to get my research done and still study for the midterm. I thought a lot about getting into law school. Perhaps too much. Maybe that was the reason I was in school: to make something of myself, make my family proud. Or maybe it was to do service, to make a difference in the community. Maybe I was trying to become educated so I could turn around and help the poor and needy.
I kept going to class, kept reaching for grades. And when I became a senior, tired and a little burned out and with the beginnings of cynicism whispering somewhere in my head, I realized that Mrs. Harper had it right all along. To learn. That was the reason. I wasn’t getting a degree for glory or for a better salary or even to make the world a better place. I was doing it to learn.
Perhaps that’s why most of us go to school. For those of us who get C’s and those who get A’s and those who graduate and those who don’t, the purpose, though obscured by deadlines and employment prospects and dating, is the same. We often justify it in other terms-in terms of changing the world or getting a better salary-but in the end, a university degree is about learning. Because whatever we end up becoming as a result of our experience at the university, we will become it because of the experience, insight and knowledge we took from our education.
Maybe I’m guilty of sentimentality. That’s a frightening thought, since in the academy, sentimentality is one of the most dreaded accusations we can make. But if I have one defense, it’s that there’s really nothing noble or tragic or self-sacrificing about learning, because learning is a selfish act. In gaining new knowledge, in criticizing what we know or looking into the problems of what we already know, we gain the possibility of continually recreating ourselves. We can become something different and, I hope, better than what we were before.
Education offers us the possibility that four years from now, when we graduate, we will have progressed, as engineers and doctors and entrepreneurs. And we will also have progressed as individuals and citizens, because we will have been made more confident and insightful.
When I finished my first large research paper at the U-an analysis of federal sentencing laws for crack cocaine-I knew that I had not done as well as I could have. I saw typos, an insufficiently specific thesis statement and poor organization. But I lacked the power to change it, because I didn’t know how to make it better.
When I handed the paper in to Joel Mullen, my freshman writing professor, I felt that in the future, when I made those same mistakes, it would be different. It would be different, because by then I would know how to think more clearly. I would know what I did wrong. I would be better.
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