What’s it for?
Originally published in the Scotsman 18th October due to technical difficulties.
The other day I was sitting on the train near a group of young women students. From their conversation, I could tell they were studying Human Resources, and their smart clothing identified them as postgrads.
Their stories made me think about the purpose of education. In their case, it’s very obvious. They are learning information related to a particular field, concrete skills for a particular kind of job. Even their gossip indicated preparation for an office environment. Postgraduate education will enable them to find a place in the business world and earn good wages.
Similarly, my friends in maths, the hard sciences, and engineering have trained for specific jobs. Their postgraduate work taught them how to do things – carry out experiments, operate special equipment, use particular kinds of software. These are tangible, testable skills that can be listed on a CV. Through their studies, they have gained detailed understanding of the issues and problems in their fields, and have positioned themselves to work in specific areas.
But what if it’s not so obvious? Regardless of discipline, all university students learn how to analyse, construct an argument, interpret data, find information, write an essay – in the particular ways required by their field. Where the hard sciences tend to be specific, the humanities and social sciences are much more general.
Students are encouraged to examine a range of topics to make connections and see the wider picture, because human societies do not exist in a vacuum. It’s impossible to understand a culture, for instance, without knowledge of its economics, geography, history, ecology, religion, and literature. Context is everything.
Broad understanding, flexibility of thought, the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas – these are the kinds of skills that can’t be listed on a CV. But if you look closely, they make valuable contributions to the world we live in, even if they’re not linked with obvious career training. On a wider social scale, building a well-informed and thoughtful base of citizens is essential to any democracy. In the economic rush of modern capitalism, it’s far too easy to lose sight of these important skills, favouring the quantifiable and concrete.
But all areas of higher education contain intangible elements. I remember when I first realised why fields of study are called ‘disciplines.’ My first year of uni, I had friends doing all different degrees. We lived together in halls, and often stayed up late talking about our studies. A few years later, I was having a similar late-night conversation. I had just completed my anthropology degree, and my friend was close to finishing in physics. As our conversation deepened, something strange happened. We found that neither of us could discuss our studies in a way that the other could really understand. It wasn’t just unfamiliar information – our ways of perceiving and communicating had shifted. In four years, our minds had been disciplined to think differently.
Perhaps that is the core purpose of higher education: teaching people to think in particular ways. For all the skills that can be listed on a CV, a person’s aptitude in their work ultimately resides in how well they understand and relate to it. For all the talk about job training and a ‘competitive’ workforce, it seems dangerous to gloss over the intellectual dimension of education – its most obvious and most subtle aspect.
The women on the train were learning how to think like Human Resource managers. My friend was learning how to think like a physicist. I am learning how to think like a sociologist.
At the end of the day, isn’t that what education’s all about?