Knowledge Is Worth Your Time
A few thoughts about why we must embrace the hard work of learning.
(This originally appeared at my BearDev blog, but I thought newsletter readers might also find it interesting.)
Folks who hang out on Bluesky/Twitter may have caught bits and pieces of the discussions amongst academics about what to do about today's university students -- both at the undergrad and grad level. Across disciplines, many of us are finding students who come into the classroom with a very transactional attitude toward education; with a sometimes very audibly expressed disinterest in actually learning anything; with a sometimes profound unwillingness to really engage with the details of the course.
There are a lot of obvious reasons for this situation. First of all: The cost of a college education is outrageous. It's obscene. I could go down a thesaurus entry and list all of the words that say how awful the current situation is. Public universities, which should be free, are inaccessible for large swathes of the population without enormous loans. And the economy is an overly competitive garbage can for lots of people, and students are deeply aware of the challenges they will face when they graduate -- even PhD students.
So yeah, it feels like a transaction.
We are also dealing with a generation of college students that was born after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Critics at the time -- myself included -- predicted that the reorientation toward test-taking would be an educational disaster. And we are now seeing the effects: students have spent their entire lives being trained to engage with education as if knowledge is about standardized testing.
Add into this that this generation of college students spent a lot of high school learning exclusively over zoom because in the early days of the still ongoing COVID19 pandemic, everything shut down. Because this was something that happened suddenly and haphazardly, there was no real opportunity to do "best pedagogy." Learning was probably more unpleasant than usual.
On top of that, we're living through a complete authoritarian meltdown of what elements of American society were democratic, and it can be extremely hard to focus in these conditions, even for the most privileged (but democratically committed) amongst us. And there are national leaders who are going out of their way to demonize education and knowledge, which adds to an environment where students may feel unsure about what the point of learning is.
If these are your associations with learning, that's not a good starting point. If you think going to college is about making enough money and nothing else, then you're going to have a transactional attitude about it. If you think getting a PhD is about getting a fancy title at the end (yes I've seen this) and an entitlement to a fancy job on the other end, then maybe you approach it transactionally. If you think the world is utterly fucked and there is no future, then being future-oriented may seem like a waste of your time.
The thing is, even if you're just thinking in terms of fiscal value, having gone through a degree program and being able to put it on your resumé/CV isn't the most significant return on your investment: the way you have further developed your mind is.
What matters in your courses, even in many cases within your major, isn't the topic. You'll probably forget most of what you learn, especially if you don't end up using it repeatedly in future. What you will always have, though, is the mind that taking the courses made. By that I mean, the mind that was shaped by working through Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina while trying to understand Maxwell's equations for the first time. I don't remember the sequence of events we discussed (repeatedly!!) in my French Revolution course, but I remember the importance of understanding that history is made through discourses. There is the way my writing skills were improved. There is the way that my courses helped make me into the human that I am today -- even the lazily taught ones.
And you might think that the situation is different for PhD students, who surely chose their program because they are actually really fascinated by astronomy/physics/whatever it is. I admit that I was initially surprised by how often I ran into the attitude from students in these programs that they don't actually need to be well-versed in anything besides the exact information they need to know to conduct research in their field.
I think the risk of not allowing your mind to be shaped by foundational coursework and engagement with foundational ideas in your field is especially risky for people who are trying to spend half a decade (minimum time to PhD) or more as professional researchers. Research is in part a practice of associations, using tools that you have picked up and refined through practice. More than anything else, your core courses teach you methods.
To pick a few examples from physics: You may not remember the details of how to calculate the delayed potential for an electron in motion, but your cognitive skillset will be shaped by going through the process of learning those details -- and you will always remember where to find that information if you need it again. Similarly, you might not remember much about quantum mechanics, but the perturbation techniques that come up in that course are broadly applicable to problems across the physical sciences. Learning general relativity will open a world of mathematical forms that you might not have known existed -- in my case they changed the way I literally look at the world with my eyes. And even if it doesn't do that for you, you will be intellectually transformed by the process of reckoning with the knowledge these courses are about.
Not to mention: knowledge is humanity's spiritual birthright. Making it, playing with it, revising it, sifting through it, making sense of it -- it is baked into who we are as a species. Every community has its own version of these processes. Every generation is responsible for protecting this legacy for the next generation. This is only possible if we all take responsibility for being knowledge keepers.
Knowledge is worth your time because of how it shapes your mind. And the authoritarians may take many things from us, but they cannot take our minds (unless you let them). So, I know it's very hard right now but that intellectual work is worth your time, even when it's not obvious how you will profit from it. You are more than a future source of profit, and humanity's survival depends on all of us understanding this.
(Also if you liked this piece, consider preordering my next book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.)
