What Is College For?

Of course money matters: jobs matter, financial security matters, national prosperity matters. The question is, are they the only things that matter? Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for.

You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. That’s a cliché, but it does actually mean something, and a great deal more than what is usually intended. It doesn’t simply mean developing the mental skills particular to individual disciplines—how to solve an equation or construct a study or analyze a text—or even acquiring the ability to work across the disciplines. It means developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.

大学的使命？

    金钱是我们生活保障的基础，支撑着职业的发展。但是我们大学生需要关心的仅仅是金钱吗？生活不仅是财富，教育也是不能仅限于职业技能的培训。大学的使命是什么？无异于去追求生命的意义，社会的价值与个人的意义。

    每个人都需要一份工作，每个人都需要生活，但是我们不能从实用主义去衡量大学的回报。任何值得做的事情，都有其本身的意义。之所有要追求大学的意义，是因为我们要保证自己还是一个完整的人。

    大学首先交给你的如何思考，思考并不是简单的为了某个领域，例如如何解方程，如何读文献，甚至不是跨学科的工作能力。思考是培养辩证的的习惯，用批判的眼光去审视这个世界。

    永远想改造世界，也永远拥抱世界的美好！

Excerpted from the book Excellent Sheep, chapter 5.