Graduation

"Higher education serves a crucial common good in fostering breadth, depth, complexity, and richness in all dimensions of social, cultural, political, and economic life.  What is ultimately the most important question about college education is, therefore, not what students can 'do with it,' in immediate and practical terms, but rather what college education does to its students deeply and broadly.  It is about expanding people's horizons and depths of understanding, engaging students with the big questions that matter most in life, giving them tools to think and learn and communicate well, and passing on the richness of scientific and humanistic inquiry and understanding.

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The most important payoffs of college education do not concern career promotions and higher salaries.  They have to do with forming thoughtful, critical, appreciative, careful, capable, and interesting family members, neighbors, citizens, workers, leaders, teachers, artists, researches, and friends.  In short, the truly important product of higher education is better people not bigger promotions and paychecks. " - Christian Smith, Lost in Transition

Sunday's graduation marked the end of a significant stage of life for me.  The above quotation from Christian Smith's book about the lack of vision for education that has been past down to the generation he calls "emerging adults" has stuck with me since I read it last fall for an anthropology course.

When I announced the completion of my final paper on Facebook, someone congratulated me, saying that "my hard work had paid off."  My first thought was, "How has it paid off?"  I don't have a job in my field or otherwise.  I am struggling to find ways to participate in my church.  My education makes me overly critical of what happens but has not opened any doors to participation beyond the same opportunities available to someone who has been attending for a few months.  I am now among the increasingly bitter, over-educated, under-employed young adults.

However, Christian Smith's conviction that education is about more than a job, about more than what it can do for me has challenged my tendency toward bitterness.  Education is a gift.  The ability to think critically, to understand complex ideas, to experience the world through the lens of others as I read--these things have the potential to bring forth joy as I experience the world.  And, as Christian Smith said, they make me a better wife and mother, neighbor and congregant.

I am looking forward to what opportunities may come my way, some inevitably as a result of my education.  But for now, a few days out from graduation, I am looking forward to reading more fully some of the works I've come across during my time in seminary, to going to the zoo with the baby on sunny days, to connecting with friends and sharing what I have learned and am continuing to learn.  I am looking forward to enjoying the freedom that comes with Paul Ricoeur's "second naivete,"  which the graduation speaker encouraged us to embrace, moving beyond the "desert of criticism" to be "called again."