How many of us still believe that?
Opinion | College Students: School Is Not Your Job - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Article is behind a paywall. Can you summarize? We told our D from day one that school was her job (in those exact words) so Iâm curious ; )
6 Likes
Oh, sure (sorry about that.) Hereâs the key paragraph, IMHO:
But the expectation that college will help them land a job has led too many students to approach college like a job in its own right: a series of grim tasks that, once completed, qualifies them to perform grimmer but better-paid tasks until retirement. Thatâs a shame, because this mentality leaves no room for what college should primarily be about: not work, but leisure.
College is a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do. Capacities like an ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry or a keen moral imagination may not âpay offâ financially (though you never know), but they are part of who you are. That makes them worth cultivating. Doing so requires a community of teachers and fellow learners. Above all, it requires time: time to allow your mind to branch out, grow and blossom.
And,
Itâs not easy to make space for leisure within universities that look increasingly like corporations. Itâs not easy to fit open-ended contemplation into a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. Still, at their best, colleges and universities offer an alternative to the culture that values people solely for their labor.
2 Likes
It focuses on exploring many academic pursuits :
Tidbits:
âCollege should primarily be about: not work, but leisure.
College is a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do. Capacities like an ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry or a keen moral imagination may not âpay offâ financially (though you never know), but they are part of who you are. That makes them worth cultivating. Doing so requires a community of teachers and fellow learners. Above all, it requires time: time to allow your mind to branch out, grow and blossom.â
It doesnât seem to advocate for anything novel , just the typical liberal-arts approach to education and learning for learningâs sake, and learning outside of the classroom which were mentioned in one form or another at most every school we toured (uni and LAC) and are central themes at both schools where my Dâs attend
EDIT oops crossposted the same quote!
1 Like
That doesnât sound like âleisureâ to me. That sounds like fitting in time to take humanities courses, attending interesting lecture series, seeing speakers, etc⊠Broadening horizons, learning about different perspectives, and growing as a person is college (in addition to preparing to be a productive, self supporting member of society).
When I hear âleisure timeâ I think of floating in the pool, blowing off classes, and playing games.
20 Likes
Interesting. The author goes into a very short survey of the roots of the word, âleisureâ according to both Greek philosophy and a modern German writer, Josef Pieper, and itâs sort of hard after reading what you just wrote and not think âthis is workâ. 
Thanks for that article. I couldnât agree with the author more. I have always believed that college is a unique and precious time of life that should be carefree, exploratory, and focused on enriching the tape that plays in oneâs head. The life of the wallet should be a byproduct of the life of the mind, not the other way around. Otherwise, as the article states, colleges should focus primarily on vocational training.
College was transformative for me in the way the article describes. I made my way in the world later based more on how I viewed and thought about what crossed my path or my desk than on any particular skill I acquired. We raised our son to view his education this way, too.
These threads usually devolve into versions of the argument that only the rich have the luxury of attending college to feed the mind because âthings are different today.â I donât think so and have posted my differing view many times, but always in the minority. It does my heart good to read an article such as this and know that there are academics out there still fighting this good fight. May they never give up.
19 Likes
I havenât read Pieperâs book, but my understanding is a major part of his point is we should not be dividing up all of our time into âworkâ and âtime preparing to work againâ. He sees that as the âtotal workâ mindset, one in which we live to work, rather than work to live.
Intellectually, I understand he basically blames Kant for creating the modern mindset that the acquisition of understanding is a process of incessant hard work. While he thinks work can sometimes be involved, he thinks being calm, contemplative, receptive, and so on are also often critical. So more difficult does not simply equate to more virtuous, since effortlessness can be a virtue in the right context.
Unfortunately, those who have absorbed the total work mindset see leisure as equated with laziness and sloth. And if it isnât that, it must be work, or preparation for work. They have no mental category for periods which are not defined by effort and yet which are nonetheless virtuous.
So I donât know if it is possible to save the word âleisureâ in light of its modern connotations. But I do agree we should work to live and not live to work. I also believe every year of your life counts as much as any others, and therefore actually living in college is important. And finally, I very much agree virtuous uses of time need not all involve a lot of effort, and that includes during college.
8 Likes
High school has become a pressure cooker résumé incubator, but college should be about leisure?
5 Likes
Seems a highly romanticized vision of todayâs youth. Faced with lots of free time, most young ( and not so young) people spend it on social media, partying, or the like, not mastering the mystery of geometry for fun.
I support intellectual exploration in college but donât think most would consider that a leisure activity.
6 Likes
Iâve often agreed with your views on this subject, still do. At the same time - I do wonder how many college students (people in general) actually want to spend 4 years (or any years) living a life of the mind - exploring and learning more about themselves and the world around them.
Iâm serious with this question of mine. Over my life Iâve met more incurious people than curious ones on the whole - and whether or not theyâd attended college had nothing to do with their curiosity levels. Not to say I havenât met many, many curious lifelong learners, but I wouldnât call them the majority by any means.
I think for many students, college is vocational training. Whether it should be or not is a completely different question. But I also believe if vocational training and college were held up as equally valid methods of moving into adulthood and had equal status, there would be many more people choosing vocational training rather than the college experience.
5 Likes
If yhe aithor is equating intellectual pursuit with leisure, the authors has a view of the acadrmy that says it exists purely for vocational purposes.
And even at vocational schools, most student learn things they wonât need, even if some of their classes do.
I personally feel like the purpose of education is to help you understand the world and engage with it and to make your brain a more interesting place to be.
2 Likes
What the author doesnât seem to mention is that with the high cost of college many students do need to consider their professional career/post-college plans during the undergrad years.
IMO career considerations, pursuing intellectual interests, having fun, as well as pursuing any other things a student gravitates toward can all be accomplished during four years of college.
9 Likes
2 Likes
Yeah, I think Americans have a hard time not shoving anything that smacks of leisure into the work category. My generation was brought up on the proverb-like âIdle hands are the devilâs workshopâ from the time we were small. And speaking of Labor Day Weekend, even American vacations often feel like weâre about to invade the shores of Normandy on D-Day.
5 Likes
Why does the alternative to âworkâ have to be about the âlife of the mindâ? All my most enjoyable activities in college were nothing to do with intellectual pursuits: the subject I was studying (math) was mentally taxing enough, even to focus on intensely for just 5-6 hours per day (so I never found it possible to study in the evenings).
Instead I spent the rest of my time on physical activities: sports, climbing, caving, organizing clubs, planning expeditions to various remote places etc. just to let my mind relax. Similarly for my kids, particularly D18 who did far more skiing and climbing than I ever managed in college.
And actually a lot of those activities helped in getting my first couple of (consulting) jobs, where ability to organize others and self-reliance in foreign countries were both important.
1 Like
I think of this as a spectrum, from totally embracing the exploratory liberal arts tradition to totally embracing the pre-professional view, with lots of kids falling somewhere in between. Or indeed transitioning during collegeâwith four years to work with, it can make a lot of sense to start exploratory but then narrow into a more pre-professional track eventually before graduating.
And colleges, and sometimes subdivisions within colleges, also fall all over this spectrum, including as to whether they incorporate a longer or shorter exploratory period, or any at all.
So ideally, I think kids get matched reasonably well with colleges, and subdivisions within colleges. Not that there should be no variation, but I think if most of the kids trying to go to that college are within that collegeâs normal range of variation, that seems like a good thing to me.
As I recall, Pieper was a critic of what he called âhectic amusementsâ, which I thought was an insightful critique of the âwork hard, play hardâ mindset. Like, when are you not doing something hard? And again his point is it is not enough to just be resting sometimes in anticipating of the next hard period. The idea is to actually value being non-active so as to be more open to experience and contemplation.
6 Likes
Yeah, I think there is something to be said for allowing your body to be in an active effort state while your mind is in a more effortless contemplative state. Thatâs a common practice in many cultures, and I think a lot of it goes back to the fact we evolved to be active, and under certain circumstances we can end up with some suboptimal brain chemistry things going on without physical activity to help regulate that.
But that is all consistent with not needing everything to be work/effort in order to be valuable.
1 Like
I think one could reasonably turn the same question around and ask, âWhy does âthe life of the mindâ have to feel like work?â For some kids itâs just part of who they are and, back when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, they tended to get channeled into LACs or LAC-like universities (Chicago, Rice, Brown, etcâŠ) I was the type of kid who had to be introduced to it, like passing by the perfume case at Macyâs. It kind of caught my attention. And once it did, it no longer felt like work.
6 Likes