"College is the best four years of your life. You'll never have more fun than while you're there."
I can't begin to guess how many times I've heard this quote since senior year of high school. In fact, it got to the point where I was simultaneously preemptively distraught and enthused before I even set foot on campus. So what led to this fantastic over exaggeration of the college experience? Or is this adage even an over exaggeration? These are the questions I set out to answer before writing this article, or even researching it.
What I found was enormously disturbing. Turns out most of what we're doing in higher education is dead wrong. For information regarding the psychological impact of college, please check out some of my references in a previous article here. Beyond the psychological, arguments can be made that higher education is simply unnecessary, as it does not adequately prepare students for their careers, especially in technical fields such as software development and fringe science research opportunities. In fact, Peter Thiel, the first outside investor of Facebook and co-founder of PayPal, funds students to drop out and invent the future rather than deal with the monotony and bogged down bureaucracy of a university.
Why is this the case? My belief as to the causes of this phenomenon is extremely simple. We as the entire West, have deviated too far from what education was originally intended to be. The word "university" is derived from the Latin "universitas" meaning a whole. The question then is a whole what?
According to Plato, the man many accredit with creating the idea of institutionalized education, the entire point was to create a wholesome (with an undertone of personal happiness) citizen to populate the polis of Ancient Greece. If you look into his curriculum for optimal education, you'll actually see many things that correspond with research involved with the study of "flow" or optimal experience (further explanation here). Yet with the imposition of the Roman paterfamilias, education was regulated to a tuition-based system, which forced economics into the educational discussion, a ramification we're still dealing with, as shown by our increasing student debt.
Based on all of this, I would argue that education is the most valuable asset that we're exposed to in our lives, and it's something that we piss and puke away with binge-drinking. Instead, I believe we should attempt to achieve the Ancient Greek ideal of paideia in our own system of higher education. And while implementing it is a noble ideal, ultimately its achievement is an individual journey and struggle.
Worth a shot, in my opinion.
