My high school physics class was led by a cranky teacher. As much time as I spent in that class haphazardly drawing out proofs or frantically glancing at the equations my classmates were balancing, the majority of time was devoted to my teacher’s obsession with the futility of studying the liberal arts. We had begun looking at potential paths for college, and he was committed to making his voice heard. Sitting in the back of the classroom, subjected to his lectures alongside my slack-jawed peers, his message felt like more of the same of what it means to grow up in the suburbs: follow the straight and narrow path, get good grades, do only what is most reliable and pragmatic, and believe in the ineffable truth of meritocracy. Most of all and most importantly, he, and the other authority figures in my life at the time, routinely drove into us that it is what you do professionally that will secure this future as a way of life, so that you too may pass down this wisdom to your own nuclear offspring. So it goes. In other words: we were to be subjects, never agents. I wanted something different, though. I desired an experience and an education that went against that grain, even as I recognized how risky that might be.
His physics class was also, strangely, where I first readThe Catcher in the Rye, that seminal text of potentially misplaced teen angst. In an ironic twist that in some ways betrayed his sentimentality, he actually assigned the book as an assignment, offering us the option to analyze the influence of technology on the novel’s narrative. Did I too think that my teacher was one of the protagonist’s infamous “phonies”? I didn’t necessarily identify with the stubborn protagonist that is Holden Caulfield, but it would be a lie to say that I didn’t feel something real and useful in the character’s perpetual disaffection. For better or worse, the promise of a different kind of education was always the answer I came up with to my own disaffection.
I also took a creative writing class that year— the only class I took in high school that even marginally lived up to the horrors that one local mom expressed to me after accompanying her daughter on a college visit. The admissions counselor suggested the curriculum was designed to “explore the world, and help students understand themselves.” That’s not what school is about. School is rarely about education, but is almost always about schooling: internalizing authority, discipline, and the work ethic that will make us all indispensable to the forces of capital. Anything that isn’t instrumental is grotesque; it can hardly even be comprehended by those who believe so strongly in preparation for the mythical “real world.”
I understood my former teacher’s paranoia, even if in a different way. I am not Holden Caulfield. I did not grow up among the aristocracy of Manhattan socialites. I never got kicked out of a series of private schools. Inspired by the films and books I encountered by accident, rarely within the confines of a classroom, I was envious of the education that characters like Holden received, or the education that people I knew who attended private school received. While I filled out worksheets from outdated textbooks on colonial history, I dreamt of being able to make art and talk about it, and snuck in rushed readings of political theory while taking notes. Perhaps naively, I romanticized moments and movements of amateur artistic expression. I wanted to play guitar with others and make abstract video art just as much as I wanted to find a community who I could talk to about matters of academic philosophy. It felt dangerous and shameful to admit these obsessions to myself, much less to others. Yet, they also helped me keep stable ground in an environment that left me feeling alienated almost constantly. These interests promised intellectual development, but they also felt like a dead end for me socially.
Why should that be the case? We live with some obligation to others, but in the final instance, for ourselves. Thinking about the prevailing common-sense around me—that we shouldn’t dawdle in the things that interest us if they aren’t practical— invoked in me a mix of sadness and anger. Maybe that’s the lesson of Holden Caulfield: rejecting what’s been forced on you is one way of making a life in your own name.
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I major in Media Studies at Purchase, which you can pretend is practical, as I often do, but which still makes me very anxious as someone who is worried about the precariousness of our economy, and whose brief life has been punctuated by the 2008 financial crisis. Still, I don’t think the purpose of life is to accept the terms which are set forth by physics teachers or by a society where some people are implicitly told to labor interminably and miserably, reserving the world of letters and culture only for a lucky, privileged few.
That education, and experience, of erudition and community came to coalesce for me in the ideal form of the liberal arts education. Studying the liberal arts at college is a risk in some ways, while it isn’t in many others. Primarily, the liberal arts college degree is not a pre-professional one. In this way it differs from the study of engineering, business, or even medicine, and I believe this is why it terrifies so many people who have surrendered themselves to the unquestionable authority of think-pieces or self-assured newspaper columnists.But it isn’t a risk insofar as it propels you into the next stage of life, whatever that may be.
In another class in high school, Journalism, an English elective for juniors and seniors, we discussed our post-graduation plans. My teacher was a muscular and well-meaning man from Virginia with a closely shaved head, possibly one of the youngest teachers I had during my high school years. He had a sardonic way of addressing the classroom, approximating performance with the timbre of his voice and his irreverence. We sat in groups of three, staring dumbfounded at him in a drafty classroom as he questioned us on what we wanted to do with our lives.
“College?” he posed to us.
This was unequivocally met with neutral nods, and so one by one he began to interrogate individual students. Again, a pattern emerged. One boy, John, wanted to go to school for business, “anywhere,” he said. My teacher focused on a boy sitting near me named Timmy, a lanky individual who was constantly scheming. When asked what he wanted to do with his life, he answered, “Marketing,” with his usual grin fading.
“Why?” my teacher pushed.
Timmy took off his hat and combed it over with his thumb, looking toward his lap momentarily.
“I dunno,” he answered, sheepishly and directly.
Who does?
Obviously, college is a risk purely by virtue of its price tag. Hundreds of thousands of students, if not more, go into debt just to try to acquire jobs that will allow them to cling to the idea of the “good life.” Meanwhile those debts get channelled into the market, turned into a series of seemingly mystical securitized assets and derivatives that will some day coalesce into a speculative bubble primed to burst and create crisis, the same market we will find our adult, post-graduate selves working within and for. This is all to say, I don’t think that the focus on pragmatism is illogical, even if it’s over-stated. You can’t put a price on education or knowledge; regretfully, the same cannot be said for schooling. This weighed on me heavily as I made my decision to attend college, and to attend SUNY Purchase. My mother, who is a college professor, is still paying off debt from her education some twenty years later.
A liberal arts education also entails another and final, perhaps more deadly risk, the one I sit with constantly, whether or not I wish to: the risk ofknowing. It is one reason, among many others, that I ultimately elected to spend four years and a ridiculous amount of money and emotional energy to study film and media in a liberal arts context. Making a decision left me feeling constantly confused, emotionally and rationally. I knew the kind of education I wanted, but I was never sure if it made sense, and found myself wavering when questioned by adults who wanted to know why I would choose something without any guarantee of a payoff. My decision was simply based off of a feeling, a hunch that formed from the arguments that I processed back and forth in my head as I walked through the blighted and dimly lit halls of my highschool. There was never any resolution; as a matter of fact, I’m not so sure that I’ve reached any today. The risk is to spend time dwelling in the notion that knowledge and human life are infinitely messy, that we live in a world that is deeply and fundamentally unrighteous and that there might not be easy answers, that even free and open inquiry will likely never get us towards the world we want to live. It is a sense that there are different ways to orient ourselves, to organize ourselves socially, to think but most essentially, to live. It also means realizing that none of these things are likely to help any of us get jobs more immediately, but also that that isn’t really the point. As much as this is a blessing, it is also a curse; it is sometimes uncomfortable, and frequently quite sad. It is the risk of living speculatively, contingently, in the ways that we desire so profoundly. While it’s beyond anything that can be fully described in concrete terms, it does mean that I’m surrounded by more people interested in making music than ever before, that the option of making video art in a class for my degree exists, that new horizons open up regularly.
More than anything, whether I knew it or not at the time, this is what I wanted to scream at everybody around me just a year ago, which now seems an almost uncannily distant period of time. Teachers and other authority figures always distinguished between “risk-taking” (good) and “risky behavior” (bad), and it seems to me that my liberal arts education is a synthesis of the two. It means a desperate attempt to escape the subjectivity imposed on me, to realize my own agency. Despite whatever apprehension I may have, it is the risk of a life worth living.
