A Jesuit educator wrote about the challenges of
designing a curriculum for the rapidly changing world: “Current problems will
in all probability no longer be current when the youth completes his [or her]
education, and so by attempting to fit him for the present the school may unfit
him for the future.” Now, Allan P. Farrell was writing about the 1930’s and it
would be easy for us to laugh--if he thought that was a rapidly changing
world, he should take a look at 2012.
But it’s not so simple as that: one of the
challenges of college education, whenever one embarks on it, is the
challenge of trying to learn what one might need for a future that one cannot
fully imagine. What I love about liberal arts education is that, in all its
wild impracticality, it refuses to try to predict. In fact, rather than narrowly
striving to guess about the thing that’s about to happen in a year or two, the
liberal arts education that you’re embarking on is designed to teach you about
the past, help you ask big questions, and to demand that you work to shape the
future--your own and that of your generation.
In order to get the most out of your education,
however, you are going to have to step away from the now for a moment.
This morning, Colum McCann said that some of what you’re facing will be very
hard. One challenge that you can be sure to face is the challenge of moving
being a consumer of information to being an active thinker, striving to educate
your mind. We live in a thrilling world, one full of evil and danger and also
full of great joy and we know this because every time we look down at our
devices, every time we pass a monitor, every time we turn on our tablets and
laptops, we can see what is happening anywhere in the world. But that glorious
instant access comes at a price. We skim and click, we text, forward, like, and
share, but rarely do we ask ourselves to pause and think. As one journalist
describes his own love/hate relationship to Google “Once I was a scuba diver in
the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (Carr
227).
I exhort you to dive. Dive as deeply as you can.
You are great Jet Skiers. But you didn’t come to Fordham to get better at
skimming the surface. That’s not what this four years of your life is for. Your
college education is the moment to learn how to dive, to dive deeply and
discover the treasures buried far beneath the surface. That means training and
practicing, remembering how to be still and just read--doing nothing other than
reading--for longer and longer stretches of time.
In her 1929 essay on women’s education, Virginia
Woolf writes about trying to follow an idea as it swims away from her--her
thought, she writes, “to call it by a prouder name than it deserved, hat let
its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and
thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink
it until--you know the little tug--the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the
end of one’s line…” Her thought swims away from her grasp when a guard shoos
her from the riverbank--she’s interrupted by another.
Now, it is we who interrupt ourselves. As you
embark on your college education, I wish you patience and I exhort you to
cultivate the strength to dive deeply into your studies. You can always go jet
skiing next summer.
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