To learn is to live is to love

For most people, 2020 was a year of survival. We were focused on the finish line and whatever got us there the fastest would have to do. This was especially true in schools, where the goal was to stay open despite rising case numbers and the tedious task of enforcing protocols. In the end, we were successful. We proved that universities can survive during a pandemic and higher education can continue through it all. It is an accomplishment that should not be downplayed.

However, surviving is not thriving. The purpose of university is to cultivate knowledge and promote a community of scholars. This goal gets lost in the shadows when the focus of the institution is on staying open and staying safe. We have proven in 2020 that live can go on even with shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, and the ever-present fear of COVID-19. Now, our task is to prove that we can live lives worth living as we navigate this new normal.

This year, especially, has taught me the importance of liberal arts education. These disciplines are at the heart of university, not because they are steppingstones to six figure salaries but because they are the cornerstones of higher education. Movies like "The Dead Poets’ Society" are reminiscent of a time where learning was a passion, literature was praised for its beauty, and philosophy was discussed outside of the classroom. You can study biology and research chemistry, but it cannot be done separately from the humanities. This is the age-old debate of science versus religion and philosophy, but it is one that needs to be settled by both disciplines being included in higher education.

Despite the changing tides of higher education, the Mount has stayed true to its belief in higher education. Every student, no matter what diploma they are chasing, is required to study philosophy, theology, history, and the like. Not because it will land them a job in a research lab, but because it creates a well-rounded student as well as a well-rounded individual. While we could be goal-oriented and fill our course schedules with only classes for our major, the Mount makes sure we are grounded in history, knowledge, art, and beauty.

This does not mean that the debate of liberal arts education is over. Far from it. Because secondary education has become increasingly focused on test scores and college acceptances, there is a loss of the love of learning early in adolescents. It is now the job of universities and colleges to reignite this passion, which is an uphill battle that will be hard to conquer. In my core classes at the Mount, I notice the students around me are disengaged because they do not see the point of what we’re doing. We read Nietzsche, Merton, and Homer but we do not internalize the information we are given. Once the final grades are posted, we forget all about philosophy and the virtues we can cultivate. How are these century old poems and doctrines relevant to modern society, as we face unprecedented events that are vastly different than what these authors knew? Students find themselves asking questions like this frequently, and even I am not innocent of this. In our success driven society, we always want to know what the point is. What do I get out of it? What’s in it for me? How will this help me? It’s the end goal, not the process. The destination, not the journey.

COVID-19 shook up our world. It changed how we view the family, community, health, education, religion, and everything that life touches. For many students and faculty, it has changed the way we view our roles in university. Around midterms, I found myself and other students discussing how we felt like we weren’t retaining any of what we learned. Before our worlds were flipped upside down by the virus, I would fill pages and pages of philosophical thoughts and ideas to ask professors over coffee and debate with friends late at night in the dorms. This semester, the margins of my notebooks were blank, filled with only the notes I needed for tests and papers. After all, how can you retain information or think about the big picture when you’re merely trying to survive and stay on campus? No one could love learning because learning wasn’t our goal. We had to survive before we could thrive.

Students looked forward to the start of the fall semester because it was a marked end of quarantine and a sign that life was continuing outside of the homes in which we’d been sheltering. Now, we can look forward to the spring semester as a chance to learn and to love what we’re learning. The liberal arts are where passion lives and it is this drive that keeps universities open, despite the ‘wasteland’ language used by the media. When I was in high school, the counselors always pushed STEM and technical degrees. For a teenager who chose to take Creative Writing instead of Physics and Calculus, these were not viable options for me. When I declared a major in English, I was prepared for the judgmental looks and the jokes about my future salary (or lack thereof). But you can’t live a life that is solely based on science and math. Literature, art, and philosophy are the things that make life worth living. They are what makes the human experience beautiful, money is not.

Yes, we need scientists. This is clear more than ever, as we look to doctors and researchers to provide us with vaccines and cures. But science will only get us so far. The humanities continue because they are human. It is where we feel connected, whole, and understood. It is where we feel emotion and passion. It is where love lives.