Started: 10/17/2014
Completed: 11/20/2014
Recommendation: Must read for anyone interested in an Ivy League college
Recommended By: my wife
Words and Concepts for which I sought help:
Semiotics - The philosophical study of signs and symbols.
Review:
I found a couple of books while reading this book that I would like to read:
The Path to Purpose, William Damon
Being Wrong, Karen Schulz
Unto This Last, John Ruskin
This book helped me understand my path to education. I did not attend an Ivy League college, but I did attend a prestigious college within a State University. The college was focused on "weeding out" the unworthy and set up barriers to success that could only be overcome through constant hard work and a commitment to excellently parroting the material being provided. My education, while both comprehensive and useful, drove out of me a love of learning for a time. I recovered this after college, but I was fortunate. I came to espouse the concept that college was a factory through which one could get a "good" (read wealth building) job. It did not teach me who I was or what value I could bring to the world.
I now work in a job I dislike (some of the people with whom I work are well worth knowing) practicing a skill I have honed into excellence (but still dislike) and on a ladder climbing path I began before high school. I wanted to be an astronaut. In college I took philosophy courses to fill out my humanities electives and found I truly enjoyed them. I was, however, convinced that pursuing a degree in philosophy (or being an astronaut) was not a worthwhile use of my time in college (philosophers don't make any money) and was enjoined to become a programmer (I had taken over writing an accounting system for the computer science department for a friend of mine who needed some help whereupon I was noticed by the Dean of Computer Science) because I was good at it. In college I was handed a vocation rather than pursuing a better understanding of who I was. How many graduates of colleges in general have been so dis-serviced?
There are aspects of my life I would have sorely missed had I taken a different path. Meeting and marrying my wife would almost certainly have been missed had I pursued a different approach to life. That alone is reason to be grateful for the path I have taken, but is it a path on which I would put another? No. I have striven to encourage my children in their areas of interest, take joy in their successes (of whatever kind they deem successes) and find ways to help them be happier themselves. I'm not terribly good at any of this as I spent a long time measuring success by a different stick.
This book let me believe that excellence is conceptually overrated and that the goals toward which I willingly let myself be guided (and later espoused) were of marginal real value. Money and power are tools, not ends. It is true that life is easier with both wealth and power, but happiness is not easier to find in a gilded cage. How, in that space, does one learn the value of generousness (not charity which is a different thing) when that very act compromises one of the foundations of wealth and power? How does one learn to "open one's hand wide unto one's brother" (Deut. 15:11) while pursuing the "lifelong, perpetual and restless desire for power" (Hobbes, Leviathan)? How does one transition from Anavajjasukha (happiness derived from wealth earned in honorable work) to Bhogasukha (happiness derived from sharing one's wealth) while adhering to the guidance that "gold and silver [not] be accepted or sought for" (S.IV. 326)?
The education that students receive at elite colleges prepares them for a status and wealth seeking life-long vocation which is not healthy and not good for society at large. This book addresses some of what might be required to teach one to "be worthy of recognition rather than seeking recognition" (very loose translation of Confucius, Analects 1:1). This book has changed my perspective on life. Whether I manage to change my life remains to be seen.
