Yes, VIRGINIA, I believe in college

Dear Editor:
I am 18 years old. Some of my friends say college is just a four-year hoop to jump through to get to the job I need. They say college has nothing to do with the real world. Papa says “If you see it on the web it must be true.” So tell me, Madame Blogger: should I believe in college?
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Well, VIRGINIA, I believe in college. The United States originally conceived of its system of education as a necessary foundation for democracy, and I believe that an educated citizenry is what makes democracy work. A person who learns mathematics and philosophy, for instance, can explain why a nation cannot survive if its population constantly wants both increasing benefits of government and reductions to the size of government. That’s the sort of person ready to pick and choose what government should do, and vote accordingly.

There has been a lot of research, VIRGINIA, that what you need to be good at a job is to be able to learn new things quickly and effectively (perhaps even correctly). That you need to be able to evaluate information and make your own decisions. And that you need to be able to work with other people. College education can prepare you to be good at a job in these ways, though the connection might not be obvious. A person who studies science can learn how to use experiments to find answers to questions that are right, or at least closer to right than they were before. A person who studies history knows how to find out what has already been done. And a person who studies reading and writing can communicate a plan, or a solution, with one person, or a million people. A person who studies languages - maybe even art - can communicate that same plan or solution all over the world.

It may seem in college that not everything you do, not everyone you meet, is directly connected to your dreams. There are failures and pitfalls and shortcomings in college. These too are part of the real world. You will need to learn how to deal with failures and pitfalls and shortcomings, VIRGINIA. College is a good place for this.

Life is big and the world is big. Sometimes, confronted with the vastness of human knowledge, people become frightened, or nervous, or overwhelmed, and they pretend that it is small. College is big because the real world is big. Grasp that, and you will grasp everything.

So I think your friends are wrong. But I think your papa is wrong too. I think college is where you will learn when and how to believe what you perceive. You will learn to understand where a person comes from, what that person knows, and how that person makes his or her case, and you will factor that in to your understanding of what that person says. You will learn who you are too, and what you know, and you will learn to make your own case. More importantly, you will learn what you don’t know. And if your college is what it should be, you will learn how to learn what you need to learn, every time you need to learn something, for the rest of your life. There is always so much more to know that knowing how to learn is more important than knowing anything else.

And because of that, the best answer I can give you is that only you, VIRGINIA, can say whether or not you should believe in college. As with everything else in life, you should learn that for yourself. But I believe in college, VIRGINIA, and you should know that I do. It is a place, and a process, and a philosophy that I highly recommend.