I’ve taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, and every time I do, I encounter students bemoaning their classes. “What’s the point of this?” they say “When am I ever gonna use this?” they whine. “Is this gonna help me get a job?” they moan (I hear this last one a lot from their parents as well, for what that’s worth).
When they bring these complaints to me, I tell them about the 1946 movie, “The Best Years of Our Lives”.
Largely forgotten today, in 1947, it swept the Oscars – best actor, best motion picture, best director, best supporting actor, best screenplay... and on and on. And it did boffo box office – bringing in more money than any movie before it since “Gone With the Wind”. It tells the story of GIs returning home after WW2, and amazingly started filming just seven months after the war ended. Personally, I had avoided it for a long time, expecting it to be two hours of “Rah rah! We won the war! Hail the conquering heroes - now let’s whip the Commies and build the suburbs!”
Indeed, the only thing that gave me pause was the fact that one of the lead characters was played by an actor who was an actual World War 2 vet who’d lost his hands during the war. Though I was entirely prepared for Hollywood to somehow turn that into treacly tinsel.
But “The Best Years of Our Lives” is surprisingly not rah-rah at all. For example, it has “stay-at-homes” lording their wartime ascendency over the veterans who are returning; it has members of the public telling those same vets that they were saps to fight at all; it’s got war heroes discovering that back home, they’re still the kid from the wrong side of the tracks no matter how many medals they won; it’s got impulsive marriages coming apart almost instantly. It’s got alcoholism. And, of course, it’s got the guy with no hands trying to figure out how to deal with life after the war – and his fellow Americans. There are a lot of reasons to watch it.
And it’s got one scene that I can’t get out of my head.
Near the end, Fred Derry, a decorated Captain who flew combat missions in Europe, finds, as I mentioned above, that as far as his hometown is concerned, he’s still just the kid from the wrong side of the tracks who’s good for nothing more than his old job as a soda jerk. After getting fired from that job he decides to leave town. As he’s waiting for his flight, he finds himself wandering through an old airplane “boneyard”, where bombers like the ones he flew in the war await demolition to be reused in the building of prefab housing. He has a sort of a PTSD episode, and then one of the workers sees him and tells him he can’t stick around unless he’s an employee. So the recently unemployed Fred asks for a job. The worker asks him if he has any experience. Fred says no, and the worker is about to give him the brush off, when Fred says the thing that makes this ancient movie relevant to those kids I was teaching and their parents and frankly everyone with ears to hear.
He tells him that he didn’t know anything about flying bombers, but he knows how to learn. And that makes sense to the worker, so he gives him a job turning these flying swords into prefab ploughshares, as it were.
And it occurred to me that that, that right there, that’s the point of education.
It’s not to learn dates and names of battles and prime ministers. I mean, sure, those things are important to give you some understanding of the world you live in and how we got here and why things are the way they are, so you can make intelligent decisions and not turn the planet into a firey hellscape. But it’s not the point of education. Not really.
Education teaches you to think about things in ways you don’t think about them. It teaches you to learn not just things, but to learn different ways to think. Look, the way you solve an algebra problem is not the way you solve a physics problem. For one, the answer is actually embedded in the problem. The other requires observation and trial and repetition. One’s not wrong, one’s not right. They’re just different ways of solving problems. Same is true of accounting or literature or history or flying bombers or demolishing junk metal. Different ways of thinking.
So it’s not so much that you need to understand calculus because it’s going to come in handy at the grocery store, or that knowing who wrote Ulysses is going to help you fix a fuse in your basement. It’s because calculus is a different way of thinking and Ulysses is a different way of thinking and the more ways of thinking you have – and the better able you are to use them and adapt them and adapt to them - the better equipped you are to deal with the changes that life throws at you. Which it will. Because it does.
The other thing may be even more important.
Education signals to the world that you can learn.
Most people can’t. Most people stop learning once they have one way, one system, one process, and then spend the rest of their lives applying that to everything they encounter. And that’s fine until it isn’t. Until their way, that has served them well (or more likely, adequately) their whole lives, suddenly isn’t working in this new situation they find themselves in. So what do they do? They try it again. And again. And they keep trying it, keep jamming that same key into that same lock over and over again because that’s the only key they have, so what the hell else are they gonna do? And they do it until they die.
Education indicates that you have been exposed to a variety of ways of thinking, that you have learned them (to some extent), that you can apply them in the future and that you can learn new ones as necessary. Want to signal to an employer that you can help his company be successful not just tomorrow but for the next five years? That you can help them adapt to the future? That they’re not hiring a buggywhip when they hire you, they’re hiring a car? That whatever the future throws at you both, you can learn it and understand it and help his company be more successful? Because you have? You want to tell an employer all that? Show them that you have an education. Because an education says you’ve done it. That you learned how to fly bombers so maybe you can learn what problem he’s facing.
Oh, and employers, this applies to you too. Focus only on the skills of the present, build algorithms that use them as qualifiers for employment and the only employees you will get are those good at the now. which is fleeting, but not the next, which is eternal.
And those who are good at the next?
They may just make the future the best years of your business’s life.