Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
We live in a really strangely remarkable time
where everything is possible, right?
Everything is possible.
Stuff is possible
that when I was growing up was utterly unimaginable.
And I can't tell you how grateful I am
to not have had to grow up with social media.
Just think about that for a second.
Elon Musk is developing private space travel,
and they're landing rockets on barges out at sea.
Like, that's happening.
On the other hand,
there's a website called Twitch that you might know about.
Do you all know Twitch?
Do you know what happens there?
Kids stay in their room;
they are not out landing rockets on barges.
They live in completely imaginary worlds of video games -
completely virtual worlds -
and they watch one another play live,
and some of them are so successful at this they never have to leave their room.
They stay there, and they get paid because people pay to watch them -
it's so fascinating and amazing to watch them play these video games.
So we live in a totally different world,
and everything tells you that absolutely anything is possible.
Anything is possible.
You can become anything; you can do anything.
And at the same moment, we're seeing transformations in education.
We're seeing transformations in the university and with education.
And while we have these bold, broad visions,
What are our visions like in education?
What are our visions like for K through 12?
What are our visions of education like for the university,
for community colleges,
for places like Western?
Is everything possible?
I wonder.
And in fact, I was sitting home,
watching the circus that is our current presidential campaigns
and just the insanity of the whole thing.
But here are the candidates trotting around on the right, on the left,
laying out their visions of education.
I think I'm going to pick on John Kasich
because he had a town hall just a couple of days ago.
Couldn't believe it -
I was sitting there, and John Kasich laid out his vision of education.
and it begins well.
Kasich comes out, and he says,
"Here's my vision of education.
You will go to your community college or to your four-year school or university,
and the incoming student will meet a guide."
He had to use the word "guide" -
"You'll meet a guide."
I thought, "Wow, man, that's awesome."
You know, some guides. That's a good thing.
Education means "to lead out."
We need some guides.
All right. I'm with you.
He said, "Your guide will help you find your purpose."
Man, like that's what education is supposed to do in a way, right?
Like this is the whole thing.
This is John Kasich, the Republican Governor of Ohio;
he sounds like some hippie from the '60s,
talking about like finding your purpose and stuff.
And I thought, "All right."
And then he gives a vision of what that guide would do
and what that purpose would be.
And he says, "The purpose of that guide will be to say to the incoming student,
'What do you want to be?'
And the student will tell, presumably, the guide what they want to be.
And then the guide will present the student
with a list of the jobs that correspond with that desire,
the salaries of those jobs
and your chances of getting that job.
And if the student keeps their choice of their purpose,
they will be handed a curriculum
to qualify with the credentials to get that job.
And that is the vision of the university that John Kasich is putting forward.
And I was a little disappointed.
In this world where everything is possible,
where everything is being revolutionized,
where we could do anything -
that vision of education is so narrow that it is breathtaking, all right?
And I'm picking on John Kasich,
but we could equally pick on the Obama administration
and their notion of community college
and its connection to these very narrow notions of vocation.
Right now, in this world where everything is possible,
where everything's being transformed,
we're having a historical disinvestment in education
at the K through 12 level and at the university level.
We're going through it here in Illinois right now,
but it's happening all over, everywhere in the country.
We're taking money out, we're taking money out,
and the vision becomes more and more narrow.
And the idea is, well, education is just to get you a job.
It's just this utilitarian thing.
It's this small thing, and we can't spend all this money
just, you know, teaching you how to read novels
or to be a philosopher thinking about the meaning of art
or whatever it might be.
And I think this is a really dangerous time for us in education
and to be a student, quite frankly.
It's a very dangerous time
because we had much bigger dreams in the mid-20th century.
We've had people tonight talk about things like the GI Bill.
When you look around a campus like this,
you see a university
where a nation and a state
were pouring money into dreams where anything would be possible
in higher education and in K through 12.
And we're looking at something much, much different now,
and we should think about that.
And we should think about these narrow ideas of vocation,
this idea of purpose and this idea of utility -
that your education should be useful.
And I will put it to you that the notion of use in education
is extraordinarily difficult to wrap our heads around.
And I want to take a famous example.
How many of you all know Steve Jobs and who Steve Jobs is?
I see a few hands going up.
If you've read the biographies and seen the films and all that?
Some of you may and some of you may not know,
and so I want to point out something about Steve Jobs' biography.
Steve Jobs was a college student in the early 1970s, sort of '72, '73,
and he went to a liberal arts school called Reed College,
which is up in Oregon.
Reed College is a very strange, wonderful little school,
and Steve Jobs showed up there,
and even for Reed, Jobs was a little weird.
Spent his time sort of like eating apples and wandering through orchards,
and not going to class is basically what he did.
Finally, Steve Jobs was sort of wandering in and out of classes
and thinking about stuff,
and he wandered into a calligraphy studio.
You all know what calligraphy is?
We can't even write in cursive anymore, and I'm talking about calligraphy.
But calligraphy is this extraordinarily ornate art of writing.
It has roots all the way back in the ancient world.
It's perfected in the Middle Ages.
If you've seen illuminated manuscripts
that were created by monks in the Catholic Church
with the very beautiful letter forms, etcetera - this is calligraphy -
often written on animal skins, etcetera.
So Steve Jobs
spent a year and a half basically living in a calligraphy studio
learning a medieval art.
He was basically learning how to take inks with very simple pens
and to draw letter forms on animal skins and paper.
For no apparent reason other than that he thought
it was beautiful and compelling and interesting.
And the man who taught him had been a monk
who simply did this to keep alive the traditions of the Catholic Church.
Now, imagine Steve Jobs
showing up at John Kasich University and meeting his guide.
(Laughter)
The guide says, "Well, what do you want to be?"
And Steve says, "I don't know.
I'm kind of interested in electrical engineering;
I've heard of these new, weird things called computing, and I don't know."
The guide says,
"Engineer! Here's what you need to do,"
gives him a list of courses, sends him off.
I guarantee you calligraphy is not on the list.
(Laughter)
It's not.
Because is it useful for an engineer to devote a year and a half of study
to an obscure medieval art practiced by monks or failing tradition?
Doesn't seem useful.
Doesn't seem like that is going to help your vocation
if you have a very narrow definition of vocation.
But it turned out to be the making of Steve Jobs.
And it turned out to be the making of the entire experience
that all of us sort of in the Apple universe are living.
If you've got an iPhone in your pocket or you work on a Mac,
the way that Father Palladino taught Steve Jobs to make letter forms,
taught him about the relation between serif fonts and non-serif fonts
and the relationship between letter forms
brought him the consciousness of design that is in everything you see on a Mac.
In fact, it was graduates of Reed College and Father Palladino's students
who were called into the first early Mac teams
in order to design the first proportional and scalable fonts on a personal computer.
It changed computers and how people interacted with them
and the way they used them.
And it's still changing it today.
And that's the echo of that thing
that no one, no guide who was coming in to set you up with a job,
could possibly imagine would be useful.
And this is what's useful about universities.
Universities are the sort of place
where someone like Father Palladino, practicing an ancient medieval art
that seems to have absolutely no relationship to the modern world,
that art can be kept alive.
And that art and that knowledge can be maintained and conserved,
even when it's not being immediately useful,
and it can be maintained and conserved
so that it can explode in significance that we can't possibly imagine.
One of the amazing things about universities like Western
and other land-grant universities in the U.S.
is that we poured money into building these kinds of institutions
all over the country
so that students, students like you guys here
and all the students who are on this campus today,
could have the kind of experience like Steve Jobs had.
Which is to say you could encounter people
that were doing things that you'd never expect,
that you wouldn't think about,
that were sometimes ancient,
that sometimes seemed
completely disconnected from the world you were living in,
and then they would explode in significance
in ways you couldn't possibly imagine.
And you certainly couldn't explain to your parents beforehand,
before it happened.
So what's missing from the world of "we can do anything,"
that anything is possible,
is this notion
that in the world of education, we need to also make everything possible.
We have a long tradition of doing that,
but it's not cheap, and it's difficult, and it's hard to see.
And if we reduce the idea of vocation to its narrowest form,
which is lining you up with an occupation
and choosing the kind of paycheck you want to get,
very few people are going to have that opportunity.
And nowhere are we going to talk about, actually,
why even if Steve Jobs hadn't gone on to Apple,
that calligraphy might have changed his life in good ways,
as it did for his teacher, Father Palladino,
because his teacher practiced that art for vocation
in its much older, much more Catholic,
much stranger sense of a way of being in the world
and relating and discovering a purpose and making a beautiful world.
And not for a paycheck, guaranteed.
In fact, as a monk, he had taken a vow of poverty.
It wasn't about a paycheck.
These experiences can still happen here,
and I don't want to make it
like I'm just talking about some crazy elite like Steve Jobs,
some world-historical genius,
because I see it all the time in students here at Western.
I want to talk about just one student, very quickly,
that I had back in 2005, 2006,
a young woman named Ayana.
Ayana had come,
and she had come with the idea of vocation,
and her family had definitely sent her here with the idea of vocation.
As she once said to me,
"The establishment has gotten behind the idea that I will be a teacher,
and that I will have this vocation
because this is a stable and a good thing to do."
And so she had sort of done the thing with the family and the parents,
got the whole thing lined up - "I'm going to teach."
And while she got into the English Education program
and was training to be a teacher,
and while she was doing that, though, she was at a remarkable university,
where in addition to those classes,
she was taking classes where people are practicing
very ancient and relatively, at least not narrowly, useful arts.
Reading Shakespeare, for instance.
Reading medieval novels, having writing workshops on essays.
Taking courses in women's studies and African American studies
and philosophy and history -
none of which immediately leads to anything.
And Ayana got interested in a lot of that stuff;
she got more interested in literature and the reading of it
and the writing workshops and creative nonfiction
than she was in the vocational path of teaching.
She didn't have that calling,
but she didn't know where the other stuff was leading.
She was also, at the same time,
developing a passion for the history of soul music,
and she was starting -
she had a small radio show, here, that she did,
where she would play these crazy records that she found,
and she was record collecting,
and then she was writing and doing all this.
And basically, What did her parents see or think was going on?
Or what did other people think?
What does it look like from the outside?
It looks like you're a crazy person
who basically wants to read about people who don't exist, doing imaginary things
and listen to music that no one listens to anymore.
And where's that on John Kasich's guide's chart?
And where's that going to lead?
Well, Ayana was doing exactly what a university is set up to have happen,
which is to discover your vocation
and to figure out what your vocation might be.
And in fact, she invented a life for herself
that had questions at the heart of it about, What was a good life?
How should you live in the world?
These very ancient questions that we keep alive and make available
in philosophy and literature and history and the liberal arts
so that you can invent yourself in different kinds of ways.
And she did exactly that.
And instead of becoming a teacher,
she went back to Chicago with her degree,
and with the experience she got here
and an education that wasn't immediately legible to anyone, even to her,
and she ended up at WBEZ,
where she now has a radio show called "Reclaimed Soul."
She's a radio producer; she is a writer.
She has an absolutely fantastic career.
Ayana Contreras at WBEZ -
I invite you to look her up and see the amazing work she's doing
and listen to what she's putting out on the radio,
particularly her show, Reclaimed Soul.
So what happened to Steve Jobs also happened to her in a very small way,
which is to say he invented a life that you could not anticipate
because he devoted himself
to things that didn't have their use labeled to a paycheck immediately.
But if we're going to have that experience available not just to the elite,
not just to the children of the wealthiest,
we're going to have to reimagine
what's possible at universities like Western.
And as we turn more to the community college model,
we're going to have to ask what's possible there as well.
I hope we can have a world
where we commit to a world of possibility in education.
Remarkable things happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)