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On second thoughts, the video clip of the gentleman I featured on Friday is not what I would have wanted to say exactly, because it had some flaws.  It probably resonated better with students and their parents than the stuff I usually lay on you, but I was intrigued by some of his opening remarks, namely that students have absolutely no idea that getting a job means working almost every single day for the rest of your life, except for weekends and perhaps two weeks a year, and a third week in the winter if you’re very, very lucky.

A minor point in his talk, a point he made in passing, was that we are soon tempted to think of everything from our point of view, and forget that everyone else is having as bad a day as we are.  This is the whole point of maturity.  Some people can only see the world through their own eyes.  This is the big problem with the present membership of the GOP.  They’re the only ones who pay taxes.  They’re the only ones who are concerned about government overspending.  They’re the only ones who are worried about their student loans.  They’re so worried about their fershlugginer student loans that they forget the enormous student loans that every single kid is taking on, just so that some banks can make a decent profit.  (And they’re the only ones who are concerned about the poor little banks.  Oh, please.)  Well, honestly, once we liberal bleeding hearts get going on our little hobby-horses, I suppose we do tend to forget about the National Ever-Loving Debt.

But putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes is the adult thing to do.  In a crowded world, that empathy is very, very important, and it is wrong to leave that part of a child’s education up to the schools, be it elementary school, high school or college.  At the individual level, a teacher or a professor can teach subtle lessons about empathy, and trying to see the other man's point of view, but they have to be subtle, and they cannot be part of the curriculum.  That lesson must really be taught at home.  We must do it; parents must do it, and by example.  This is why I keep saying that the number one job of any human being, whether or not he or she has children, is to be a sort of a parent.  Not so much to be the pater familias to everybody in your vicinity, but to be aware that there is a lot of parenting deficit in our environment, and we might have to take up some of the slack.  Some of the most admirable childless couples I have seen instinctively do this.  All good teachers instinctively do this: it’s called setting an example.  But of course anyone who tries to labor that point in a graduation speech is asking for trouble.

The second point, and quite an independent point actually, is that avoiding a mind-numbing boredom is a major part of what a working adult has to do.  The culture we live in has empowered employers to lay almost intolerable burdens on employees, to the end of making profits.  Everyone’s objective is to become an employer, so that they can destroy their employees’ lives, rather than be destroyed themselves.  It is a terrible world, and some employers don’t see themselves as destroyers of lives; they see themselves as providing a living wage to some undeserving rascals, who quite incidentally enable you to make a small profit, but force you to play unemployment insurance and provide health insurance, and all sorts of stupid insurance, all put in place by idiotic liberal governments.  (That’s right; it is liberals who put in place this whole curse of employer-provided health insurance, but it was because no one would have tolerated government health care in the first place.)  But part of a good education is to give everyone the means for making creative use of their leisure.

A businessman would probably rather not be reminded that his employees even have leisure time, and most college kids thinks that their destiny is to become a businessman, and work to deny his workers any leisure time at all.  (This will be easier if overtime pay becomes a thing of the past.  A new bill in Congress will take away mandatory overtime pay, all in the name of making things easier for small businesses.  Pretty soon there will be legislation to make all businesses small businesses.  Mark my words.)

That point was also downplayed (on Friday’s featured video).  Again, parents hardly want to hear in a graduation address that their kids have been trained to make their leisure time more rewarding, because that would indeed sound as if college was preparing them for endless unemployment, though that is the last thing on anyone’s mind!  Still, training a student to be a productive worker is most definitely less than half of what a college should be doing.  The skills a typical worker needs should have been learned in high school: reading, writing, arithmetic, basic account-keeping, basic law, basic social contract.  If the kid is to become an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or ... , well, there’s stuff that college has to teach you.  The rest of what a kid picks up is to understand what someone else is saying, which is not easy, and a lot of subtle things that makes it possible for an employer to send an employee out as a representative of the business with some confidence, knowing that he or she has a certain je ne sais quoi that will only come to a mere high school graduate after much experience.

Well, we know what college should be doing; whether a college or university today actually manages to do it is open to question.  Whether a college can deliver all this via MOOCs is very doubtful indeed.  The reason everyone is thinking seriously about online education is because colleges have started focusing on marketing themselves, rather than delivering education.  But that’s what we see all around us: businesses spend a lot more on advertising and a lot less on improving their product than they did fifty years ago.  As goes the world of business, so goes the world of education, to the deep regret of society watchers everywhere.  And the same goes with hospitals; they spend far too much on big billboards advertising themselves, and beautifying their campuses, than in improving health care.  And all the cost is piled onto the back of the consumer.

There are no big moves that we can make to reverse these trends, at least none that I can see.  All we can do is to influence those around us, especially the younger folks, to appreciate the better, more important things in life, and view the rest with a healthy degree of suspicion!  And there you have it.

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