High-schoolers face many difficult decisions on their way to becoming graduates. Whether to enter the work force, attend university or college, or even travel, are among the most significant of these decisions. The guidance counselors and teachers at my high school, Sudbury Secondary School, pounded one fact inside of our heads; UNiversity was the place to go if you wanted to be successful. We were too young to notice their bias at the time, but it is fairly easy to guess they would give that advice considering every single one of them had attended university themselves. Granted, not everyone has a positive opinion of university education, but these individuals were all working fairly nice jobs after graduation, which naturally creates a bias.
I have a vastly different view of university education, when compared with that of the teachers and guidance counselors. I learned more from my own personal reading, than I did from my university courses over the span of the four years I roamed the campus in search of knowledge. When I say roamed, I mean it. I took a wide variety of courses in search of something special. My topics of studied ranged from my major, in history, to philosophy, religious studies, human geography, psychology, physical geography, and even six credits of biology.
In my first year philosophy course, which I took during my second year of university, I learned more philosophy from the books I read on my own time that were unassigned in class, such as Mill’s On Liberty, Camus’ The Fall, and Sartre’s Human Emotions and Existentialism, then I did from the lectures and assigned readings. The course was subtitled “The Study of Human Nature,” but there was very little about it that seemed human, or natural for that matter. My professor would stand up in front of us, and speak for well over an hour. He would occasionally try to ramp up participation by asking “what do you think of that?” as if that were a stimulating way to draw us out of our half-awake, half-asleep states, which he induced with his yawn-inspiring lectures.
Dry lectures are not the place to learn about human nature.
It would be unfair for me to claim this course was the perfect model to explain my in-class university experience. It was the norm however. I do recall fonder moments, such as delivering a seminar to my fellow students of Kuhlberg’s History of Northern Ontario in the pub. I sipped on beer in between pauses, rather than the more-oft used water, and some of my class-mates did more than just sip on their beverages. I also recall Hobb, his beard swinging as he shouted with his Crime and Punishment class, “hard economic times!!” in the middle of one of his lectures. He explained how he was sick of hearing about the recession in the news, and in his dealings with higher-ups at Laurentian.
These fun, and human stories, were few and far between. Their courses represented about 10% of my entire university degree. These two professors showcased what a solid university education could have been, but wasn’t.