On wondering what education is for

An article that’s been floating around my head a lot over the past week is David Brooks’s recent cover story for The Atlantic—“How America Got Mean.”

The article covers a lot of ground, but there’s one thing that jumped out at me: the question of what education is for.

It got me wondering:

Why did I go to college?

Mostly, because the world around me insisted that it was the thing to do.

There was an inevitability to it—I’m not sure that in my childhood the premise of not going to college was ever even explored. There was simply never any question about it: I was college-bound for as long as I can remember.

But why?

I think it was about status, as much as anything else. It would have been unthinkable, for my parents, for their child not to be a college graduate.

If pressed, though, they would spin it as a concern for my job opportunities. And that’s a fair point! My job opportunities are indeed better for being a college graduate than they might otherwise have been.

But is that the only reason for going to college?

I’m not sure I could have articulated it at the time, as an insecure and bookish teenager—but I think the reason, retrospectively, was to help me start asking the question:

What makes a worthwhile life?