I shudder to think what my life would have become had I not gone to college.
What I learned there, and what amplified my thinking, was not what I learned in class. The academic atmosphere was life-changing. I matured during those years in other ways, despite myself.
I’m struggling with the author’s same disillusions at the moment, because I have a son who recently finished a disastrous first year at a state university. If we decide to send him back for another go, he will be entering his second freshman year on double-secret probation.
Sure, you don’t have to go to college to learn how to roll a joint with one hand, or chug a 16-ounce beer in 5 seconds, but what are the other options today? Enter the workforce at 19 as a pizza delivery boy?
Except for college, where else do you meet like-minded individuals, willing to discuss literature or philosophy until 3 o’clock in the morning — as opposed to how to handle that roofing job on Maple Street? The free-form community of thought and ideas which you pass through in academia does not exist in the real world.
I haven’t made up my mind yet . . . to toss the kid to the curb or give him another one-semester chance. Either could be the right decision.
This is my dilemma, and I have no clear answer.
I have not found the college-educated who have crossed my path to be particularly more successful in their lives, but I have found them to be incredibly more interesting on the whole.
