Student as Machine, Student as a Person

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . .” So begins one of Charles Dickens’ most famous novels, “A Tale of Two Cities.” But while many who may have never actually read the novel will probably recognize these lines, what follows is less well known and constitutes the whole point of the quotation. For after listing a whole paragraph of ways in which the times were both bad and good, Dickens concludes that they were, in the end, just like the present, which is always filled with the bad and the good, happiness and sorrow.

And so I won’t insist, as I reflect here upon the current state of higher education in California, that these are the worst of times. They aren’t. Indeed, in comparison to the way things were just a few years ago, these are the best of times. The state budget for higher education is stabilizing; my own campus is rebuilding and is well on the way to recovery from the Northridge earthquake; student enrollments are healthy and increasing. All in all, the scenario is not too bad.

But then, the best, as Dickens reminds us, is always balanced by the worst. So let us say that these are neither the best nor the worst of times for California’s higher education system; rather, let’s just say that the times have turned tricky.

Tricky because the place of higher education in California society, and American society as a whole, is undergoing a profound change. More and more, those of us in higher education, especially if we teach in the humanities, find that we have to justify what we are doing to a political establishment that is shifting the focus of higher education from educating students to training them. The difference between training and educating is that the one, training, simply prepares someone to perform a task, while the other, educating, shapes a whole human being who in turn will be able to choose which tasks he or she wishes to perform. It’s the difference between treating a student as a machine and as a person.

Much of what we hear today in the Cal State University system as we plan for the future tends to imply that the machine view is in the ascendancy. We are asked to justify our courses on the basis of what the business world wants and how our students can translate their classwork into paying careers. Now, I have nothing against my students finding satisfying work in which they can make use of their educations; quite the contrary. I am happy to discuss career options with them and to show them how they can use what they have learned. I am happy to train my students--especially if they are destined for careers in teaching literature. But I don’t want them to lose sight of the fact that they are also being educated, and that education goes beyond training.

To better explain the difference between training and educating, I’d like to make use of an ancient philosophical distinction between matter and spirit. The material realm is the place where we make a living, create wealth, in short, where we pursue our physical comfort and survival. It is essential and cannot be neglected--indeed, as George Bernard Shaw made clear in his play “Major Barbara,” we must first solve the problems of material survival before we can tackle the spiritual problems.

But somehow, and this is what makes us human, solving material problems isn’t enough. Just to give one, admittedly personal, example, having resolved my basic economic needs does not help me this season as I contemplate the sudden deaths of several family members dear to me and my wife. But when I open the pages of an epic poem called “Gilgamesh”--indeed, the oldest poem known to the world--I find a strange consolation. For “Gilgamesh” is the story of a man who, having lost his dearest friend to death, goes on a quest for immortality and rages against the mortality that has robbed him once and will rob him again. The story was written down, on clay tablets, some four thousand years ago, but its emotions could have been written today.

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Knowing the story of “Gilgamesh” is part of being an educated person. It won’t help balance anyone’s accounts in the material realm, but it is an entry in the spiritual history of the race. And that’s something I want my students to know, not as a piece of information that they can make use of on the job but as something deeper, something that is a part of their being human. And so, the next time a student asks me, as I was asked last term, what good the course he had just taken would do him, I’ll lay out the career possibilities, and then I’ll tell him about Gilgamesh, about a man who knew nothing about computers or the stock exchange, but who could wrestle with death and lose, with dignity.