“Wisdom begins when you realize you don’t know what you think you know.” (Socrates)
Or...
“Youth is wasted on the young.” (George Bernard Shaw)
On the flight back from an open-house weekend at California University (aka Berkeley) my mind is flooded with new vignettes juxtaposed upon old memories that I thought might make a good topic for this week’s blog. Or at least, by writing it all down, I hoped to make sense of the jumble of emotions and impressions for which I have very little context.
First off, let it be said that Canadian universities are much more reserved than America’s. Of course I can’t make such a sweeping statement as that! Better I limit this impression to my own experience, a small sample that consists of three years at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, where I grew up. And where I lived at home until the third year, when I married, at age 21, to my childhood sweetheart. And where I continued with my relatively sheltered life into my mid-30s, at such time as we lost “everything” to the recession in the ‘80s, moved to Toronto, and then on to Vancouver, where I’ve spent an equal number of years gaining sufficient wisdom to realize that I didn’t know what I thought I knew! Still don’t.
One thing I did learn, during our short stint in Toronto, came from the Dean of Admissions at Western University, whom I interviewed while creating content for a community TV channel. The Dean explained that (at the time) the difference between a university degree and one from a technical institute was that the former offered a liberal education aimed at teaching students to think, to broaden their horizons and expand their general knowledge. But not particularly to get a job. Technical institutes, on the other hand, were created to provide students with specific skills that would help them gain fruitful, and imminent employment. In my case, I followed my virtually unemployable English degree with courses in Radio and Television Arts from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. And got a job as a copywriter at an ad agency shortly thereafter. Writing speeches for dubious politicians or hawking products that nobody needed.
Now, some 53 years since completing my first university degree, I reflect on how that education served me — or not — in tackling the life challenges that arose in the intervening five decades. It wasn’t until I returned to university for a Masters in Transpersonal Studies at Sophia University (class of 2000) that I understood the difference between knowledge and wisdom. And thereafter applied myself, through leading an examined life, to accumulating more of the latter.
Now I try to imagine how a university degree might serve our freshman grand-daughter in her quest for meaning and purpose, for a viable way to navigate the future. But perhaps even that expectation is a bit grand. Life skills come in so many different packages. And different skills are required at different times of life. Certainly, learning to navigate a new school, in an unfamiliar city, in a different country has to be ‘educational’. And character-building. Leaving the comforts and security of home, having the power to make independent choices can be a heady feeling. Exciting and/or terrifying. I know I experienced those and several other emotions as I registered the sheer size of Berkeley (aka Cal, to those in the know, which apparently includes everybody but me) and the kaleidoscopic student body. Seeing students falling down drunk at 2:00 in the afternoon reminds me just how unprepared many youth can be for the myriad options/distractions on offer at university. (This I know from experience. My own post secondary persona could have served as the poster child for youth being wasted on the young.)
Asking myself what wisdom I might now offer to our grandchild, I draw the conclusion that I am so far removed from the world she is entering, and from the eyes and mind through which she is seeing it, that my best answer is simply this: Just be true to yourself.
And hope to gather enough dirt on your fellow students to keep them from outing you to your children and grandchildren in some unspecified future.