You may have sensed in my previous post a certain cynicism surrounding the merit of American higher education.

Granted, my acridity may have been recently exacerbated by a string of late nights (early mornings, really) writing critical essays on 17th century metaphysical poets and memorizing the rules of predicate logic. I have a week to go until finals, and I am ready to be done. This is not to say that I don't like school-- I do. Or learning-- I do. What I do not like, however, is school, or learning, solely in the hopes of some reward: a grade, a GPA, a job. That said, I don't want to seem young, or self-righteous, or stereotypically liberal, because I probably am all those things. So, I'm going to hand the reigns over to Wendell Berry, who you'd be hard pressed to call any one of them:

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”