When HO goes to college...

If HO is about to enter a college, I would recommend a following article. This article may read dull as a textbook and HO may not be moved by first reading. But remember, HO,  that twenty years after entering college, your father thinks that it would have been great if whoever had recommended this article to me that day. You may think that you can reason and decide well enough by yourself. But even if you're right, taking advice can help you more.

Listen. There is a well-known proverb, "Practice makes perfect." Basically practicing means  doing the same thing over and over again (to excel). But there is another famous quote of Albert Einstein, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Contradiction? No. To expect better results, to excel in doing something, we should not only do something over and over again but also consider changing our approach if not successful. Deciding whether to go on or not and change approach is THE key, which is not an easy stuff. Wisdom is needed here, and usually wisdom seldom found its position in youth. Trust me, HO.

And you should exert yourself to get a good grade, for getting good grade will give you a habit of excelling. The habit of excelling, it's one of the most important thing you should get in your college life. Stanley J. Idzerdia said that "The habit of excelling is more important than the specific major field one takes in college."

What You Can Get from a College Education

by Roger W. Holmes

Now that you are in college and going to classes, pause long enough to ask yourself why we are teaching and you are learning. In spite of what you may have heard from us, your high school teachers, or your parents, the answer is not that we know the final answers to the problems we are discussing. We are teaching because we have carefully studied subjects in which you are a beginner, and because we have had more worldly experience than you. But neither of these facts makes us omniscient. If the truth be known, there are those of you in our classes who are more intelligent than we are--who will outstrip us in our chosen fields. Question us. Doubt us. Raise objections. Make us think! Avoid us when we measure your achievement in terms of the proximity of your thinking to our own. Welcome us when we admit that we do not know the answers to your questions, when we help you to find your own answers, when we encourage you to consider views with which we do not agree.

Why are you going to college? Not to enhance your parents' social position, not to get high marks; not to get the ultimate answers, which not even we can furnish. To use our own professional jargon, you come to college to get a liberal education. We must admit we do not altogether know what a liberal education is, but we have some fairly good ideas on the subject. We do not entirely follow these ideas. None of us, for example, believes that there is a magic in piling up a certain number of hour-credits. Yet, sixty credits and you get your diploma. And that diploma is supposed to admit you to the company of educated men and women. Why not fifty-five, or sixty-five? We do not know. Indeed if you pressed us, we should have to admit that some students are liberally educated with thirty credits while others will not belong to the educated company if they take sixty times sixty hours of credit. Do not measure your education by simple arithmetic.

Elect your courses with care. If you go to a college which requires that you juggle five courses at once, you will do well to find on easy berth and sleep in it; otherwise you cannot do justice to the other four. This is a secret practice accepted by all. But, in general, easy courses should be avoided simply because they are easy and do not give you your father's money's worth.

Do not select your courses with an eye for a specific job or type of occupation. More of you will make this mistake than not, and it is one of the most serious you can make. In the first place, we know at least that a liberal education involves a balance and harmony of interests. Secondly, your interests and talents are by no means fully appreciated or explored when you come to us. You do not want to wake up in your senior year and wish that you had not missed many important and interesting things. Thousands of seniors do.

When you come to college you are intellectually very young and have not yet learned to proceed safely or efficiently under your own intellectual power. You are what your environment and your elders have made you. Your ideas are not your own. The first thing you must learn is to stand on your ideas. This is why you should not take us and our ideas too seriously. Broaden your horizon so that as 'you become more and more able to take care of yourself you will move intelligently. Try to encounter the major point of view represented by the faculty and among the students. Entertain them the more seriously, the more they differ from your own. You may return to your own, but if you do it will be with greater tolerance and a broader understanding.

You come to college to gain a liberal perspective. In gaining this perspective, you must come to know the nature which surrounds and compels you, the society with witch you must live and cooperate, the creative spirit which is your heritage, and the tools of language and of thought. To express it in this specific manner is helpful. It suggests certain intellectual virtues which you must possess before you can be considered an educated man or woman. This does not mean that there are particular course solely for its specific content.

For example, we have said that you must come to know the natural world. This does not mean that you must study physics and chemistry and geology. It means that you must acquire the scientific attitude, understand the atmosphere and significance of the exact sciences, know their fundamental assumptions, their key concepts, their major contributions. And the same is true of the biological sciences. A course in botany or zoology or physiology or psychology is enough to give you an understanding of the important aspects of biology. You should get into the laboratory while you are in college, and you should work in both the exact and the biological sciences.

You want also to know the society with which you must live and cooperate. One of the ways in which you want to know it is the historical. You must be historically minded. You must recognize the importance of the past for the present. Man learns by experience, and history is social experience. Greek, Roman, European, American history--you cannot study them all, but you can become historically minded. And you can become socially minded in your view of the present world. Economic, social and political force have your world in their grips. You must study these forces, measure them, evaluate them.

Our heritage in the field of the arts has always been recognized as liberal. Not so much need to urge you here. Most of the greatest interpretation of human living is to be found in painting, sculpture, music and literature. What are some of the things which the great creative geniuses have told us about ourselves? What are modern artists trying to do? You must find our these things, not just that you may go to museums and concerts, but that you may want to go to museums and concerts. Elect some art or music, for pleasure, but also to increase your knowledge. Also, get a full and enthusiastic knowledge of the literature of your mother tongue. You will have discovered a source of wisdom, good taste and pleasure. Such studies need no recommendation.

Finally, you must come to understand the tools of language and of thought. And here urging is necessary. You ought to know another language, ancient or modern, inflected or non-inflected, so well that you dream in it. Such knowledge gives a far better understanding of your own tongue, both as a tool and as an art, than you could otherwise obtain. And you will have open to you another literature. Furthermore, you should be conversant with the structures and power of thought as an intellectual tool, and you should be willing to examine fundamental assumptions. Mathematics, logic and philosophy are helpful here. You may think them difficult, but do not avoid them altogether.

If you will examine this program for the enlargement of your intellectual horizon, you will see that it involves some eight subjects spread throughout the departments of your college. It is a program which you can complete in your freshman and sophomore years and one which you should carry through in order that you may be equipped intellectually to proceed to the second part of your college education. It will give you necessary breadth.

But you must also specialize, when the foundation has been laid. You must do this not because specialization will prepare you for a specific job, but because a certain degree of specialization is the second essential of a true intellectual endeavor. Without specialization your college work is in danger of becoming that thin veneer of "culture" which we all recognize as superficial. And now you will find the faculty more cooperative. We are specialists and we like to encourage specialization. But still be on your guard, for we shall mislead you by overemphasizing the importance of our particular little corners of learning. The important matter is not what you specialize in, but that you specialize. Specialize in anything but your subject of graduate study. If you are going into medicine, you might major in history. If you will be a lawyer, major in art or music.

Even your specialization should be carefully planned. In the first place, it will probably be advisable for you to do advanced work in each of the four major fields of study: natural science, social science, art and literature, and language, mathematics or philosophy. If you studied chemistry as a freshman, you might go on to more advanced chemistry and take elementary astronomy or geology as complementary work. In short, in each major field in which you took two elementary courses as an underclassman, you should follow one elementary course into advanced work and at the same time gain some knowledge in a complementary field.

But this will take only half of your time as an undergraduate. You should devote the other half of your last two years to intensive specialization in one subject in which you have the greatest interest and for which you have shown marked talent. Perhaps you have found history the most absorbing of subjects. Good! Go on it. Devote half of your junior and senior years to history. Show that you can work intensively on the details of your chosen major, manipulate these details correctly, and fit them into a comprehensive picture of the whole. But remember--though your teachers will work against you here--you are studying primarily for the sake of the intensive specialization and not of the history. Your roommate is getting the same thing from majoring in mathematics or English literature.

When you have avoided the Scylla of heterogeneous meanderings among elementary facts and concepts and the Charybdis of a study so narrow that you are ignorant of what is going on outside your own little corner of interest, you will have intellectual balance and perspective. Do not take us as your models. We represent a special world and we are an academic people. You are going into a broader world and a non-academic environment. Make us realize that our interests and understanding should spread into every field. Make us see that our students are at least as important as the subjects we teach. Make us understand that marks and examinations are more administrative conveniences to be taken far less seriously than we take them. In short, insist that we get together as a unified organization and provide you with a liberal education. Strength to you! If you will do these things you will be performing a service to us and to yourselves.