Lunch with Leo - and a conversation about Learning

On Monday last week, I had lunch with Leonardo Villegas, in his third year at Coker and on his way to law school with (since this fall) a History major. (He used to be in English, but he just did not really enjoy literature that much.) We talked about learning, how we decide what we want to learn about, and how students' progress through the required course lists of majors and minors does not always connect with students' interests, passions, quests. (We did not use the word "quest.")

Leo's comment on the typical student experience: "Many students blindly take courses without knowing how they will apply to their future careers. They are not to blame completely, as only a few of them receive the insight and resources to guide them to a career path truly meant for them." 

This is a tricky one, right? We expect students to somehow make their ways, to chat with advisors, to check in with Career Services, to plan for a professional future - but students are still unsure. How do you know what you love? How can you tell what you are suited for? How do you, in the words of Joseph Campbell, follow your bliss if, enmeshed and working hard in all your classes, you can't even quite figure out what your bliss might be?

Part of the problem seems to be the compartmentalization academia is so keen on. With one foot in whatever class (biology lab, European history, the Long 18th Century of British Lit, Lifetime Fitness, Chinese language - all the directions students pursue in a given week - and that's just inside the classroom!) and another in the daily challenges of youth, it's tricky to identify an actual path or evaluate that path in relationship to bliss. Advisors want to make sure students make "progress toward degree" - this in turn requires taking lots of (seemingly) unrelated courses. But why are they unrelated?

It's a little like a dip into 19th century brain science, when phrenology imagined the brain to be divided into little areas responsible for specific pursuits: Acquisitiveness, Politeness, Combativeness, Conjugal Love. One might think that there might have been some overlap (accounting for marital fights, for example), but for the most part these were fairly discreet zones. I am a great fan of phrenology, let me be clear! As a guide to how the brain actually works, we have moved on.

So many classes, so much study time - but is anything actually learned? Why are we teaching and learning as if we were trying to cultivate many individual little islands of knowledge, when in fact we are hoping that students identify relationships between ideas, overlaps and contradictions, perhaps learn to marvel at the variety of perceptions that underpin our understanding of any given problem? To identify a path (whether toward a career choice or bliss), we need to create some sort of order in the material - but the artificial boundaries of fields of study and department divisions don't seem to be particularly helpful.

It seems that the (non-19th century) brain actually depends on making connections (there are lots of images of neurons and synapses, if you ever look up "how the brain works"), over and over again - that we need to go back and forth between ideas and approaches and processes so that learned material is connected, retained, put into relation to each other. I despair, regularly, over the fact that students have trouble relating history facts and dates (the end of slavery, the Great Migration, Jim Crow laws, etc.) to the literature they are reading (Jazz by Toni Morrison) - it's difficult to understand the significance of material presented under one name (HIS) if it seems to exist in a separate universe from another (ENG). So, dates come and dates go; books are endlessly confusing. How, in that morass of seemingly disconnected factlets, can one forge a road to bliss? If we are lucky, sometime in the third year, a student will have a moment of "aha!" - the quintessential light bulb - "I learned this in history class last semester!" And, if several aha-moments collide, we may have a bridge, the beginning of a road to bliss, or the beginning of a map that might reveal a road. It seems chancy. We could do better.

(I think Leo will be ok, though. He now has history and literature.)