As I write this I have three weeks left of college. This essay is a reflection of what I think is its single biggest value. Yes, college did help me put a few shiny things on my resume, but at the end of the day, the most long-lasting impact is what happened inside my mind. This writing, in a way, is a graduation speech to myself. It is because the message is simply the most important one I’ve learned out of these past four years.
I am taking four philosophy classes this semester, so bear with me on the “dryness” of this piece. What I come to realize is that knowledge has two types of values: one is the instrumental value, the other intrinsic. The instrumental value of knowledge is the utility of knowledge, what knowledge can do for us once we obtain it. The intrinsic value of knowledge is the value simply from having knowledge. Knowledge is valuable for what it is. I want to argue that learning to embrace the intrinsic value of knowledge is what we go to college for.
As higher education becomes more accessible, what I have been seeing is the rise of “knowledge consumerism”. 10 years ago, one could get a pretty good job as a high school graduate. There was no need to go to college if someone wanted to get a job. 10 years later, the minimum requirement for a similar job becomes a university degree. As a result, universities become a means to an end when it comes to getting a job. Families pay big bucks to send their kids to brand name schools. Students become consumers of knowledge. They have tremendous influence over how professors teach and grade, and where the university invests its money. Some students simply take easy classes to feel smart and get a high GPA, yet they never truly challenge themselves. In a way, these people bought their degree. I don’t think the vast majority of my peers are like this. Yet there is something else all of us do. We take classes for the skillset: we take Computer Science to learn to program; Economics to become “quantitative”. I have been seeing students choosing a certain class or major solely based on the skillset, tossing their interest out of the window. This is especially common among the Asian student body, pushed by their Asian parents with their “knowledge utility” argument. After four years, some students realized they built some skillsets that might be useful for the next 10 years, but missed out on the important transformation college can do to one’s mind.
What’s wrong with that? Nothing. Skill building is important. It ensures we can still support ourselves when 16 years of the controlled environment of schools is long gone. But the skillset required in the next 10 years is going to be vastly different from these 10 years, especially when artificial intelligence starts replacing our work. I wonder if there is something more to knowledge than a tool for skill building.
Let’s dwell on the example of programming vs. computer science for a short moment. Being able to program in Java is a skill. All it takes is an intro to programming or a boot camp to be able to do that. It can get you a job as a 21st-century tech worker with high paying salary. But what if now you need to code in C or do something completely different? Some people struggle with the switch. Computer Science, on the other hand, is about how computers fundamentally work. The goal is not to learn how to program in Java or get a job, it’s about acquiring computational thinking. Once you gain that, you have the ability to learn beyond a language because you fundamentally understand how computer systems work. Hopefully, it’s so illuminating that one continues the pursuit post-graduation. Similarly, economics is mostly concerned with how economic systems fundamentally work. It only might have the side effect of teaching students how to crunch numbers.
So how does this tie into the intrinsic value of knowledge? I think it’s this: what higher education sets out to do is to make life-long learners out of everyone. I think it takes two things to be a life-long learner. 1) appropriate foundations. By this, I mean general cognitive abilities and sometimes background knowledge. It’s genuinely hard to do Machine Learning without an appropriate calculus background. It’s harder to learn calculus on your own if you never learned it in school. Computational thinking possibly falls under this category, but it hopefully blows a few people’s minds that it helps with the second one, which is 2) motivation for the continued pursuit of knowledge. I think this is the best thing one can get out of university: becoming a lover of knowledge. According to Aristotle, a true lover of knowledge is someone who finds pleasure in knowledge itself. Knowledge is intrinsically valuable. When that’s the case, one is motivated to pursue knowledge for the sake of it. I think this is the crux of a college education.
In four years, students should go through this “habituation” process of deep thinking. In the beginning, it’s not natural to them because deep thinking is strenuous. They require some external push to keep them going. Yet, after a period of time, if the student is willing to put in a tremendous amount of effort, critical thinking becomes a habit and the student learns to internalize the value of knowledge. Once that’s done, arguably education has reached its goal. Note that this habitual process happens to people in varying degree. The effect depends on how much one is willing to put herself in intellectually challenging situations. Passing a hard class with an A isn’t enough. The dedication to carefully understand the contents of the class might be. At the end of the day, to become a lover of knowledge requires an intellectual paradigm shift. It requires one to see beyond the instrumental value of knowledge and appreciate knowledge for what it is.
Ok… you might say… but this is not actionable. Can I take a few pills or do something right now to get there? No. An intellectual paradigm shift doesn’t happen overnight It happens in a long period of time in which one continues to rigorously pursue knowledge. It happens in different ways to different people. I can’t tell you how it will happen to you, but I can tell you how it happened to me. I started college thinking it could get me a job. After failing at building a startup, I realized I needed to build real skills so I picked up computer science. Along the way, I let my genuine curiosity flourish and I found philosophy while studying abroad at Oxford. After 8 philosophy classes, here I am. I don’t think any of it is the sole cause of my transformation. The journey of reinventing oneself and challenging oneself to the extreme is.
Mojia Shen was interviewed in One in a Billion Season 1 of “Made in China Robot Turned Creative Human.”
This post is published with permission from Mojia Shen.