"Do We Know Our Souls and the World We Live In?" On Graduating from College

Do We Know Our Souls and the World We Live In? On Graduating from College | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | May 21, 2011

On Graduation Day, reflecting on their collegiate four years, seniors can hardly believe it is over. They are both nostalgic and glad. They wonder about the friends they have made. Will they see many or any of them again? Will what they learned in college be "useful." The more reflective wonder about what was, to recall Plato, useless and unserious, about the "things that cannot be otherwise." Did they really reflect on the higher things? Did they fritter away their time on current events? Were their parties more memorable than their minds?

A student sent me an article about a study published by the University of Chicago Press, one of those statistical studies that pass for information, but still worth considering. In American universities, most students average about twelve hours a week study outside of class. This may be due to "boring" classes or little professorial demand. Courses known to have a lot of writing were shunned. Courses that required reading more than forty pages a week avoided. Surely, this did not apply to me!

The short sub-title to my book, Another Sort of Learning—it has a much longer one—is "How to Get an Education Even While Still in College." It is, I think, quite easy to graduate from college and remain, though literate, quite uneducated. With regard to "boring" classes, I am fond of Chesterton's remark that there is "no such thing as a boring subject, only bored people." But I am aware that hapless professors can conduct lethally dull classes. I may have produced a few myself.

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