My grandfather died on Christmas Eve at the age of 87. He
never finished high school. Outside of his time in the Navy during World War
II, he worked as a farmer, carpenter, and manufacturer his entire life. For all
extents and purposes in today’s world, he would be considered practically
unemployable without a high school diploma or a college degree.
Yet, unlike most Americans, he balanced his check book. He
lived within his means. He stayed married 65 years, retired more than
comfortable, and died without lacking anything. He never stopped learning and even
learned to use an I-Pad to check pictures of his great-grandchildren, and
did so regularly up until time he passed. By every measurable means that
matters, he was a man who succeeded.
President Obama has just visited us, pleased to see Tennessee
offer our citizens what he believes every person should have in order to be
successful: a piece of paper representing an education that has been endorsed
by an institution of higher learning.
“Everyone understands that education is the key to success
for our kids in the 21st century…” the President says. Well, I am not sure I
completely agree, but supposing that I mostly agree with this statement, the
error I find comes in the belief that college is the best way to educate the
populace. Of this, I am not so convinced.
Among my grandfather’s many accomplishments was a dining
table he helped construct for the Governor’s mansion in the state of Alabama.
He told us a story once of someone who had seen this table’s complexity and the
way the sections had to fold up, or expand, to accommodate any number of dinner
guests. The man remarked at my grandfather’s ability to use algebra and
advanced math in building it. Of course he’d never been formally trained in
anything of the sort, which dumbfounded the admirer. How could he build
something like that without sitting for hours on end in a college Algebra
class?
What my grandfather never lost were three things that led to
his success:
#1 Life-long Love of Learning. He never grew tired of learning
something new and like most of us, he learned through trial and error. Error
was never slapped an “F” grade in his self-learning and therefore he never had grounds
for giving up. Failure was merely an opportunity to learn something and try again. As it happens for most college students -- even in the “free”
college program – a grade lower than “B” will cost the student his / her tax-payer ride, making
many students wonder if they shouldn’t pack it up and quit. In my grandfather’s
world, problems were solved because they had to be, not so that another could
evaluate and give it a letter grade.
#2 Curiosity. A life-long learner is naturally curious. He or she
is constantly looking for new ways of understanding the world and the way it
works. My grandfather was a “tinkerer,” meaning he was always busy trying to
find solutions to problems that didn’t even exist yet. To date, he is the only
person I ever sat across the table with at a Crackle Barrel restaurant solving
the “Triangle Peg” game by not only leaving one peg, but selecting which hole
he’d leave the peg in every time, long before he started moving the pieces. Always curious about problem
solving, he used to construct puzzles out of every day metal and wood for fun,
then give them to his grandkids and watch them attempt to work solutions.
#3 Work Ethic. There is absolutely nothing that a life-long, curious
learner cannot learn with a good work ethic. It’s easy to imagine that my
grandfather, with the proper education, could have been folding time and space
with Einstein, not just metal chains and notched boards for governors and grandkids to
marvel over. Rumors abound that Einstein himself was an average student.
Whether that is true or not, my grandfather was most certainly a man of
average, or slightly above average intelligence by today’s education standards.
The difference was he worked hard and didn’t give up.
A life-long love of learning... Curiosity... Work ethic. Three
keys to success, none of which are guaranteed by a piece of paper from a
community college. In fact, we are just as likely to find these attributes in
the man or woman who made the frames for our college degrees as we are in the
graduates themselves.
I have a Master’s degree and often contemplate getting a
doctorate. I love college and want more
of it. Still, despite my education, I am not much different than most American’s
with a college degree (two of them actually): I make less than the workers who
repair my sink, my car, or my air conditioner. Who would ever say workers like
these are unsuccessful?
And it’s not just blue collar workers. Abraham Lincoln, who
the President admires, didn’t have a college degree either. He taught himself
grammar at the age of 23. He succeeded in spite of the obvious disadvantages from
his lack of education. Why isn’t this the center-piece of our conversation?
I want to go on record as supporting the President’s
initiative for a free college education, but I don’t want that to be
accompanied by the big fat lie that a college degree is needed to be
successful. Our education systems should be not be focused on weighting
students down with the cancer of knowing too many things – free or not. Life is
not a game of “Trivial Pursuit.” Rather, we should be encouraging students toward
a life-long love of learning, cultivating in them an insatiable curiosity, and encouraging an uncompromised
work ethic. From the looks of things today, these are not what most college
students miraculously attain at graduation.
Learning to ask the right question is much more valuable in
the 21st Century than learning to answer fifty wrong ones on a tenth
grade TCAP scan sheet. How have we grown so confused as to mistake a regurgitated
fact for genuine intelligence?
Rhetoric like what we’ve heard this week is exactly how we’ve
made these mistakes. It only further feeds the despair to which non-college
bound students are prone and it widens the gap between what we believe an “educated”
person is truly worth to us. After all, how many of those responsible for our
most recent Recession in America were from prestigious Ivy League colleges? I
bet a lot of them.
And how many people educated in college math are armed
with the best calculators money can buy yet still can’t seem to balance their own
check book? Probably the same percentage of them that govern us in public
office.
I see no reason to perpetually fill the world with a group of
scholars that couldn’t build a sturdy frame for their diplomas even if my
grandfather wrote the instructions in plain English. Let's give our youth what they really need to succeed.
