In favor of a new undergraduate major: the examined life

The degree would not require writing, though it would encourage it. It would involve reading about deep, far-reaching subjects, and discussing them.

Over the years, this is exactly what I have been gravitating towards, though I do require a great deal of writing in my classes.  Any course that I teach is less about the content itself and more about examining life, with the course and its contents as merely contexts within which we engage in discussions.

Increasingly, I am a lot more honest about it in the classroom: I tell students that none of my courses will immediately translate to employment and earnings.  "This is more than a letter grade, a diploma, and a job" I often remind them.  I add that I, too, am preparing them for a rich and rewarding career, but that the benefits I talk about accrue over time. Over years. Over decades.

I would think that such an approach upsets a few students who are convinced, or have been convinced by others, that a college course ought to be about preparing students for careers as if the university is a professional guild.  Every once in a while I do hear from such a student. Sometimes it is directly.  But, if that disagreement is after understanding my perspective, then that means that the student has examined life and has interpreted it differently, which then is a measure of success, too?

That opening excerpt is from this essay, in which the author writes (in a context different from mine here):

College is supposed to offer this, of course. Unfortunately, given the economy and changes in the college curriculum, it doesn’t. College rarely leaves room for serious contemplation of the meaning of life and one’s place in it. Students struggle to be admitted, then struggle to fulfill the requirements of a major and establish a profile that will lead to a career. As undergraduates, they work for grades, court professors for recommendations, compete in networking and extracurricular activities, and, in order to relax, throw themselves into partying.
These activities can have merit—even wild partying can teach lessons about social engagement and the pros and cons of sobriety. But they are not conducive to deep thought; they do not illuminate the path one should follow for a meaningful life. 

Of course,  such a long-term perspective doesn't resonate well with the urgency of students' immediate economic calculations, nor with the university's transformation into a profit-generating enterprise.

I doubt that I can sell the notion that higher education is about deep thought to more than a handful of students, faculty, administrators, and politicians, when the overwhelming approach is one of "show me the money."

It is not that I ever suggest to students that there is only one way to think about all these.  I do not ever minimize the importance of the trades and the professions.  I have always recognized the fact that the pursuit of deep thought cannot be possible without it being underwritten by those who go about creating wealth.  Plato went fundraising for his Academy because he understood that philosophers and teachers can't live on words and thoughts.  But, Plato did not advertise his academy as some kind of a job training scheme either.

In yesterday's class, I spent two minutes reminding them how the course fits into preparing them for productive and constructive lives in a democracy, in an attempt to further clarify the idea that the quality of democracy depends on the manner in which citizens approach it.  I then played this clip from NPR (I couldn't avoid the initial lead in, and was not not being political by any means) which features E.B. White's editorial commentary on what democracy means.

President Obama's thoughts last night on the messy, noisy, essential nature of our democracy, which brought to mind a lovely piece of writing from E.B. White, an editorial published in The New Yorker in July of 1943. White was responding to a letter from the Writer's War Board, a domestic propaganda machine during World War II. The board had written asking for a statement on the meaning of democracy.
Here's the response from E.B. White: It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely, the board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; the dent in the high hat.
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
(italics mine)

Oh well.  I shall continue on with my Quixotic tilting at windmills, even when talking shit!