 |
Mental Gym Essay by Valerie V. Peterson |
YOU KNOW THOSE PEOPLE WHO PAY FOR AN expensive gym membership? With the best intentions they think, “Because I’m paying a lot of money for this I’ll go to the gym every day and get my money’s worth.” They start off with great enthusiasm, but somewhere along the way the fire goes out. Maybe it’s because they already paid for the membership. Or they forget how much they paid for the membership because it comes directly out of their paycheck, or maybe because someone else is helping to pay. Or maybe they get lazy. The gym is boring, it’s hard, it’s a hassle, and there are never any good parking places close to the front door. Or maybe they were lazy all along. They just signed up for the gym because everybody else was doing it and now they don’t know why they did, or why they should go.
Now imagine that these people are going to college or going back to college. Maybe they should think again. Paying for college is like paying for an expensive gym membership — most people don’t get their money’s worth. This is because an education, like physical fitness, is not a product that you can just buy off of a shelf. Mental fitness is something that has to be cultivated by the person interested in improvement. The problem with colleges isn’t the lack of quality of education that could be achieved at those colleges; most colleges have plenty of valuable resources available to students, and lively professors who are still interested in ideas and teaching. The problem is the learning students would need to do in order to achieve that education — learning which requires both student initiative and effort and a system that supports these students.
The main reason colleges fail students isn’t the college itself, it’s the entire culture: a system that turns a blind eye to bad, low-expectation teaching and students with bad attitudes who aren’t dedicated to learning and who “bring down” the faculty and other students around them. Yes, most gyms have some pieces of broken equipment and bad fitness instructors, but attentive exercisers can learn to avoid these. Likewise, exposure to lame teachers and weak academic programs can be reduced and sometimes avoided by the savvy student. What is harder to avoid is a whole gym full of broken equipment, spineless aerobics instructors, indulgent personal trainers, and reluctant exercisers — people pretending to lift weights and do sit-ups who are really more focused on their athletic outfits/gear and scoping potential dates.
A college diploma is a hollow document if you haven’t learned anything, just like a gym membership is largely a waste if you don’t first evaluate the “fitness” of the gym itself, go regularly to the gym, use the best equipment there (even on the muscle groups that you don’t favor), deal with the growing pains, and transform.
When we see someone walking down the street all buff and cut with washboard abs and a tight butt (or at least healthy looking with a flat stomach and a spring to the step), we think “hey, that person is in good shape.” The person may have gone to a gym to get that way, or even exercised at home (the over 90-year old “juice man,” Jack LaLanne, may be instructive here). But we aren’t impressed by someone saying “I have a membership to an expensive/fancy/popular gym” if there’s no physical or physiological evidence to show for it. In the same way, nobody cares if you have a piece of paper that says you’ve graduated from college. Tons of people have that. (We may make an exception here for some Ivy League schools which function more as social clubs than they do as educational institutions, or when a diploma is used simply as a means of discrimination in the way race or sex used to be, but these are different matters and deserve their own treatment).
Cheating, grade-inflating instructors, popularity-contest teacher evaluation processes, lack of student dedication, and the department heads, deans, administrations, and families that support these enemies of intellectual rigor have made it possible for some of the most unlikely of people to get a diploma. When people who have degrees act in undisciplined, lame, or stupid ways, their actions only devalue the accomplishment of those students who really did “work out” their intellects while in school. No, a diploma, or at least a bachelor’s degree, is no longer, by itself, impressive. What is impressive, however, is when a person speaks or writes or does something and others see or hear that person and think “this strikes me as a well-educated person” (an effect that may be achieved even without going to college).
So, save yourself the money and spare the serious students and teachers your presence in college unless and until you’re ready to go — with a positive attitude toward mental cultivation and a willingness to submit to high standards. Seek out good schools and challenging programs and teachers, and be willing to accept occasional or even frequent failures as part of the price of admission. And if you are one of those serious students just mentioned, or the rare but no less impressive self-made mind, set a good example in mental gymnastics. Help keep the intellectual bar high by tastefully showcasing your well sculpted brain, both at institutions of higher learning and across the broader community.
