Pinocchio Beware... or, why are you in school to begin with?
When I think about higher education in this country, especially of the 'liberal arts' variety, the first image that comes to mind is that of Disney's Pinocchio - more specifically, the Pleasure Island interlude. In this Land of Play, little boys are shuttled off to an idyllic land where everyone plays and nobody works. What a deal, no? All play, no work.. until one day the boys find themselves turning into donkeys. As one mouse aptly warns, "all boys who play and never work eventually turn into donkeys." What happens once they're donkeys? The evil overlord of the Land of Play checks their teeth, measures their strength and their ability to bear weight, then either ships them off to the salt mines or to circuses, profiting handsomely in the process.
We are all, in a sense, little children only too happy to go off to the Land of Play. We are shuttled off to a place that promises great fun and inspiring education and encouraged to abandon all thoughts of how our time and money investment in the adventure will play out after we leave. Little to no discerning advice guides us either to a long-term strategy of workplace success, or even a blueprint on how the studies we are pursuing contribute to the world at large. The school programs themselves, unstructured, free-form, and cursory as they are, offer no real possibility of mastery in any one direction.
I will momentarily digress here to illustrate this point. Among one of the lovely opportunities my wonderful "liberal arts education" afforded me was a chance to study theatre abroad (theatre!! of all things!) in a tidy, tiny private university in a backwater South American town. Now, I learned more about what it really takes to become SOMETHING, whatever it is, in these 6 months at Universidad del Desarrollo than I have learned anywhere else. The Theatre Major was, first of all, highly structured. When you signed up for the program, you signed up for a grueling, 4-year syllabus in which every class, every obligation, and every expectation was explicitly delineated from day one. Just in the first semester, the curriculum consisted of acute physical activity 4 days a week (with very much NOT OPTIONAL aerobics at 8am), because, as the program's designers put it, "an actor must have mastery over his or her body. Therefore he must be in SHAPE." In order to complement that, an acrobatics class was offered, when anything less than the ability to turn oneself into a pretzel merited only a C. That was not taking into account the voice lessons, the elocution classes, and the torturous acting classes themselves. How does that measure up to the 'liberal arts' education in this country, that will take most of us 10 years or more to pay off? Though I still hold the whole experience dear to my heart, I wish I could say I'd learned something about how to live my life from that experience. Alas, by then my donkey ears were far too large, and who knows - maybe I've just been a donkey all my life.
But back in College Play Land: after having spent four or more years thinking, living, breathing "our passions", hobnobbing with our friends, publishing poems in the school journal or hosting obscure music shows in the school radio station, getting half-fare on public transportation and all the sweet perks that a student status affords, we are whisked off to the Real World, where we find out we are little more than donkeys after all! And, as donkeys, all we're fit for are the salt mines and circuses of the world: retail jobs, entry-level sludge positions in random cubicles across America (whether of the non-profit or for-profit variety), lucky marriages for some of us, English teaching abroad as a last-resort, or, at times, we even decide to buy another 3-year ticket to the Land of Play, in the hopes that a Master's will either make us more useful, marketable, or at least buy us more time.
But eventually we must pay - and no matter what adventures or misadventures await us at the other end of the degree, no matter whether we ended up in a salt mine or a circus, a huge chunk of our income is deeded to retroactively foot the bill.
Some of us actually go to college with a specific vocation in mind (law school, medicine, business, what have you). Some of us have a bent for academia, for which a liberal arts education is a pretty obvious step. And some of us are naturally enterprising and able to make a good show of entrepeneurship or whatnot after graduation. But the rest of us? We gain nothing from it, save good memories, a big fat bill, and indentured servitude at whatever employment we're able to scare up post facto. Most of us are but children when we first go off to school, with no natural affinity for considering either our social responsibilities or the eventual repercussions of our actions. We are lured in by the notion of four or more years of studying whatever our hearts desire, and encouraged to remain thus deluded, long enough for the college and the loan company to profit.
Pleasure Island, indeed.