I have seen two grandchildren head off to college, and it is a very different world they enter than in my day more than half a century ago. As a female, my family’s goals for me then were very different from what they would be today. It was understood by society that we girls went to college so that we could be in the mix with a suitable group of male college goers who were to be our potential husbands. The phrase was often heard in an attempt to keep us in college, ‘No MRS until a BS.’ The word career was never uttered. If we had one while waiting around to get married there were three standard paths open to us: nursing, teaching, or secretarial.
But that situation was not all bad. There was a very definite upside I now realize. In that long gone time college, or at least my college, took the education of women very seriously. We were expected to learn, and learn we did, without the pressure of constantly thinking ‘Will this class add to my ability to get a job.’ The standards were exacting and the exams were demanding. We learned about art, politics, music, and literature from professors who were advocates for their specialties, and demanded from us our undivided attention. I had the best writing class of my life there; I was forced into the world of art which has turned into a lifelong appreciation; I learned the importance of discriminatory thinking in my philosophy classes; and the repeating vagaries of humankind in history classes. I emerged at the end of four years with an education to which I have spent a life time adding. I also emerged with no job, however, with the expected husband, who is still here 54 years later.
I had the luxury of being steeped in the humanities in which the discourse was held under the conceptual triad of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In those days I rarely, if ever, heard reference to the current triad of class, race, and gender, which is today’s constant, overtaking all other considerations. The first triad, I think, consists of those things after which we quest, and the second, those things which we absolutely are. The second certainly does need to be discussed more than it ever was in my day, but does it have to be at the expense of the other? Can we not fight for minority rights while listening to the glories of Mozart, can we not help the down trodden of the world while reading The Federalist Papers, and can we not be helped to see beyond national boundaries while looking at Monet’s lilies?
While I rejoice in the many changes in the world since my college days, there is a twinge of sadness as I watch my grandchildren sail off into academia. I hope college is as rewarding for them as it was for me, but not for one moment would I trade my four years for theirs. The privilege of learning for learning’s sake is one of the treasures of the past, whose gold remains undimmed by the years.