Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Week 14: Carrying on a Conversation



An educated populace finds common ground and moves forward; an uneducated populace, paralyzed by divisions, stagnates and dies. Our nation’s founders knew this.
Citizen: What kind of a government have you given us?
Benjamin Franklin: A Republic, madam, if you can hold on to it!
James Howard Kunstler, in his book “The Geography of Nowhere” noted:
"For [Thomas Jefferson], the temple represented the culture that had first conceived of democracy (Greece), and that which had first devised a republican form of government (Rome), and it carried for Jefferson deep associations with his own classical education and his feeling that a democratic republic could only flourish if its citizens were educated.”
My heat transfer professor, Ralph Greif, once said to me:
Don’t worry that you’re not learning how to do or build anything. You’ll have plenty of time for that later. That’s what graduate school is for. That’s the easy stuff. Right now, focus on your literature classes, your social sciences. Relish your humanities—that’s what an education is about. 
Which reminded me of a soul-tingling dialogue between Captain Jean-Luc Picard and Ensign Wesley Crusher in the Star Trek episode Samaritan Snare (TNG 2x17):
Picard: Did you read that book I gave you?
Crusher: Some of it

Picard: That's reassuring.


Crusher: I just don’t have much time.


Picard: There's no greater challenge than the study of philosophy.


Crusher: Well, William James won't be on my Starfleet exam.


Picard: Important things never will be. Anyone can be trained in the mechanics and the piloting of a starship—


Crusher: but Starfleet Academy—


Picard: —takes more. Open your mind to the past—art, history, philosophy—and all this may mean something. 

In the midst of lectures, midterms, finals and projects—it is easy for the goal of education to get lost in the process of education: it is easy to mistake going to school with getting an education.

When we condition ourselves to think that learning only happens in school, we close our minds to so much more.

For me, once I realized that it was education for the sake of education, and not education for the sake of a job; once I realized to look beyond the specialized knowledge of an engineering education to see the universal truths driving all interaction—I was able to recognize my true, limitless potential.

No comments:

Post a Comment