[00:00.00]Text Another School Year--What For?
[00:06.79]Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher.
[00:12.12]It was January of 1940
[00:15.96]and I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at a university
[00:21.92]A tall boy came into my class,sat down,
[00:26.07]folded his arms,and looked at me as if to say:
[00:30.43]"All right,damn you,teach me something."
[00:34.80]Two weeks later we started Hamlet.
[00:38.74]Three weeks later he came into my office with his hands on his hips.
[00:43.89]"Look,"he said,"I came here to be a pharmacist.Why do I have to read this stuf?"
[00:51.46]He pointed to the book which was lying on the desk.
[00:55.59]New as I was to the faculty,
[00:59.12]I could have told this boy that he had enrolled,
[01:03.48]not in a technical training school,but in a university,
[01:08.52]and that in a university students enroll for both training and education.
[01:14.68]I tried to put it this way.
[01:17.92]"For the rest of your life,"I said,
[01:21.37]"your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours.
[01:26.23]For eight of these hours,more or less,you will be asleep,
[01:30.91]and I suppose you need neither education nor training to get you through that third of your life.
[01:37.15]"Then for about eight hours of each working day you will,I hope,
[01:42.11]be usefully employed.
[01:45.35]Suppose you have gone through pharmacy school
[01:49.40]--or engineering,or law school,or whatever
[01:53.84]--during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills.
[01:58.70]You will see to it during this third of your life
[02:02.85]that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin,
[02:07.01]that the bull doesn't jump the fence,
[02:10.66]or that your client doesn't go to the electric chair
[02:15.03]as a result of your incompetence.
[02:18.79]These involve skills every must respect,
[02:22.94]and they can all bring you good basic satisfactions.
[02:27.70]Along with everything else,
[02:31.04]they will probably be what provides food for your table,
[02:35.51]supports your wife,and rears your children.
[02:39.76]They will be your income,and may it always be sufficient.
[02:44.81]"But having finished the day's work,
[02:48.46]what do you do with those other eight hours-
[02:52.02]-with the other third of your life?
[02:55.49]Let's say you go home to your family.
[02:58.94]What sort of family are you raising?
[03:02.60]Will the children ever be exposed to a profound idea at home?
[03:07.77]We all think of ourselves as citizens of a great civilization.
[03:12.73]Civilizations can exist,however,
[03:16.70]only as long as they remain intellectually alive.
[03:21.06]Will you be head of a family that maintains some basic contact with the great continuity of civilized intellect?
[03:28.51]Or is your family life going to be merely beer on ice?
[03:32.98]Will there be a book in the house?Will there be a painting?
[03:37.94]Will your family be able to speak English and to talk about an idea?
[03:43.19]Will the kids ever get to hear Bach?"
[03:46.82]That is about what I said,but this boy was not interested."
[03:52.07]Look,"he said,"you professors raise your kids your way;
[03:57.53]I'll take care of my own.Me,I'm out to make money."
[04:02.81]"I hope you make a lot of it,"I told him,
[04:06.47]"because you're going to be badly in need of something to do when you're not signing checks."
[04:11.92]Fourteen years later,I am still teaching,
[04:16.00]and I am here to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you
[04:21.56]but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have thought.
[04:26.32]If you have no time for Shakespeare,for a basic look at philosophy,
[04:30.08]for the fine arts,for that lesson of man's development we call history-
[04:37.73]-then you have no business being in college.
[04:41.57]You are on your way to being the mechanized savage,the push-button savage.
[04:47.82]No one becomes a human being unaided.
[04:51.58]There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself
[04:57.14]everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human.
[05:02.39]Any of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics
[05:08.24]knows more about physics than did many of the great scientists of the past.
[05:13.60]You know more because they left you what they knew.
[05:17.75]The first course in any science is essentially a history course.
[05:22.80]You have to begin learning what the past learned for you.
[05:27.18]This is true of the techniques of mankind.
[05:31.23]It is also true of mankind's spiritual resources.
[05:35.80]Most of these resources,both technical and spiritual,are stored in books.
[05:42.05]When you have read a book,you have added to your human experience.
[05:47.40]Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer's mind.
[05:52.57]Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil,Dante,Shake-speare
[05:59.52]--the list is endless.
[06:02.68]For a great book is necessarily a gift;
[06:06.84]it offers you a life you have not time to live yourself,
[06:11.51]and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time
[06:16.79]A civilized mind is one that contains many such lives and many such worlds
[06:22.85]If you are too much in a hurry,or too proud of your own limitations,
[06:28.41]to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle or Einstein,
[06:35.18]then you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a civilization.
[06:41.24]I say that a university has no real existence
[06:45.68]and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch,
[06:51.53]both as specialists and as humans,
[06:55.79]with those human minds your human mind needs to include. |