Elegance, Endeavors and Education

A swirl of knots leads the eye from border to center and back several times in this Celtic knotwork design. Can you find the way through? Other decorative pillows are available in the same department, to fit many styles and ambiences.

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A dear friend of mine is wrapped in the shrouds of permanent academia, while he awaits word back from his advisor on the first draft of his doctoral thesis on international economic law or international legal economics or some such. He's been working on this project steadily for several years, placing many other aspects of life on hold to focus his energies, eye on the goal. I'm proud of him, this dear friend of mine, though as I watch him struggle with this, I find my mind returning to a single rude question of "Why?!"

Not why get a doctorate in the field he has chosen. I'm sure it will be of great value to someone, someday for some reason. Not why pick that particular field. I can see international law and international economics remaining vastly important topics in the coming century.

No. My 'Why' is aimed at the method of starving portions of life in order to feed another. Why do people choose to cut themselves off from the vast rich dessert that is living, ignoring the banquet of possibilities, for indeterminate lengths of time. What does this achieve for them, aside from escalating misery?

I'm no hedonist - I do not exist for joy, nor have I studied enough philosophy or Greek masters of thought to have a clue what I'm talking about. I'm just talking from my own point of view (as opposed to someone else's - like his) and stating what seems obvious to me.

What happens if he gets all done with this degree, gets out into the working world and discovers he detests the field he's just spent this many years preparing to work within? What happens to the stacks of sheepskin that never get hung on walls because by the time a degree is completed, the rest of the world has saturated the field or made the need obsolete? What happens if Sue Somebody gets all these degrees finished, then discovers nobody needs a person with a PhD in Buttonhook Construction?

Education is critical. Don't get me wrong. I wish I had a lot more than I have, and I wish I could have afforded to go back several times over the last 35 years and get more! But, face it, folks - the path of education does not branch and break with ease, nor does it necessarily prepare people to walk it. I know I certainly wasn't prepared, when it came my time to move from high school to college. Nothing prepared me for the radical switch in mentalities, schedules, focal points, demands.

Not only was I not prepared to make the change into a self-disciplined educational environment, I wasn't prepared to make the choices which would lead to a successful degree in anything. Liberal Arts would have been the most logical (and to my thinking, least useful) at the time, and eventually I would have graduated with a broad education but an extremely shallow one.

So here's what I think. We should encourage folks to get to the end of high school, or whatever they're calling in these days. Then they should take the summer off, play by the pool, go camping until Labor Day. Then when it comes time to go to college, get a job in the field that interests them, spend some time seeing if it is indeed a field that interests them. Grow within the field for four years. Then go to college, knowing that they have a grounding in the field, a grounding in life, a better grasp of what they want to do.

This four-year period, for many from 18 to 22, is a bridge between the lands of academia and the churning waters of life. Once they have crossed the bridge, they are better prepared to tackle the rigors of a degree, and people who hire them later on will know that they have an applicant who has an awareness of life, not just 16 years of classrooms and homework.

Corporations could support this bridge period, by granting subsidized leave to employees to take a four-year degree. My company paid for me to take an intensely focused program, and for about six months I spent eight hours each Saturday in classes, and came out with an incredibly rich education as a result. They paid the tuition; I kept my full time job and spent my evenings (and some lunch hours) beating my head against a stack of homework that was daunting at times. But we both gained. Seriously, if I had attempted that rigorous of a training period before having ten years in corporate life, I would have failed quickly.

So that's my plan. It's too late to get my friend of the perpetual doctoral thesis shroud to higher ground and prepare him for the time when academia ceases to take up 99% of his life. It's not too late for many others to come.