The Joy of Learning

 A friend of mine tells a story about speaking to a group of alumni of the college where he teaches about the virtues of the liberal education they had received. At the end of his talk, an elderly alumnus raised his hand to note that my friend had spoken very well but that he had missed the main point.

“What’s that?” my friend asked apprehensively.  

“My college education,” the alumnus said, “taught me how to enjoy life.”

Given both the cost of a college degree and the current climate for higher education, it’s hard to imagine the alumnus’s words as the tag line for a college advertising campaign: “The college of liberal arts: Where you learn how to enjoy life.” It’s even harder to imagine making the pitch to a state legislature: “We need more funding so we can better teach students the art of enjoying themselves.”

But anyone who has received an excellent liberal education knows that the description is true. When you experience real education, your human capacities are enlarged in such a way that everyday life becomes richer and acquires new depth. The day’s news, the gossip at the water cooler, the complexities of intimacy, the conversation with a taxi driver—they all become more interesting and reveal hidden dimensions that absorb and delight. So, yes, a college education, especially the kind that has traditionally been called a liberal education, will teach you how to enjoy life. This enlarged capacity for enjoyment of the twists and vagaries of ordinary life is one of the most rewarding aspects of a college education. 

Although a liberal education strengthens a students’ future career prospects, its essential value is not that it guarantees a particular job, salary, or credential. Rather, a liberal education helps us understand the world and our place in it. When we learn to read closely, question assumptions, and imagine perspectives beyond our own world view, we gain a richer inner life and a deeper sense of possibility. That transformation endures long after transcripts fade and grounds a way of living that is curious, thoughtful, and awake.

The ancient Greeks had an intuition about the value of an education, which they captured in the word scholē. That word is the root of the Latin word for school, schola, which vernacular languages, including English, later adopted to describe an institution of learning. But the Greek word scholē simply means “leisure.” The link between leisure and education comes from the idea that to fully engage in the learning process, we must free ourselves from other kinds of work; we need time and energy that’s not committed to production. Learning, even when it’s narrowly focused on acquiring skills, requires a degree of freedom from the immediacy of work—before practicing law, you study it, and before launching a business, you might attend business school. When learning is intentionally pursued for its own sake, without reference to its instrumental value, it is liberal learning—scholē in its purest form.  

To say that liberal learning is not pursued for its instrumental value is not the same thing as saying that liberal learning has no instrumental value. You cannot get a liberal education without acquiring a whole set of exceedingly useful skills and mastering significant bodies of knowledge. Students learn how to engage with perspectives other than their own, they learn to listen carefully and express themselves thoughtfully, they expand their tolerance for ambiguity, and they become critical thinkers. They will likely also gain a grounding in history, literature, and other humanistic disciplines as well as expand their scientific and numeric literacy. It is a mistake, however, to codify these results, call them “learning outcomes,” and then proclaim them as the goals of a liberal education. 

This error has a long history in the academy. Long before the recent enthusiasm for assessment and quantification of learning, liberal education courses used the same grading scales as applied fields. Yet grades are inimical to the liberal pursuit of knowledge because they inevitably become goals and subvert the entire notion of learning for its own sake. Studying for grades, like working for wages, involves a kind of subjugation and inner impoverishment. We can accept their practical necessity, but we can also recognize that these transactional investments of time and energy bind us to coercive regimes of productivity. 

When we conduct education for purely instrumental purposes, we neglect the capacity for free agency that is essential to our humanity. Education as a mere tool for manipulating our environment ultimately means education as a tool for manipulating others. Technological mastery lies behind the greatest atrocities we have committed and is currently threatening ecological collapse. It is simply not a sufficient goal for education. A complete education must recognize that human fulfilment requires the attainment of nonmaterial goods. 

The great nineteenth-century liberal John Stuart Mill put it elegantly: “Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once they are made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification” (my emphasis). The phrase “once they are made conscious of them” points to the role a liberal education plays in expanding our capacity to apprehend the meaning and depth of experience. Fundamentally, a liberal education concerns the cultivation, refinement, and realization of the highest capacities inherent in an individual. It is not about the acquisition of a body of knowledge but about the unfolding of a moral agent; the value and significance of a liberal education relate directly to what it means to be human.

A liberal education sets aside instrumental value in favor of inherent value—the kind of value that is fully contained in the experience of a thing itself. This idea of inherent value can be deeply counterintuitive. Take music as an example. Humans love music. Even babies, before they can meaningfully interact with much else, respond to music. We might sing lullabies to babies to soothe them, but babies don’t enjoy music because it soothes them; music soothes them because they enjoy it. 

As adults, we maintain a special relationship with music. Some of us might sit still, close our eyes, and immerse ourselves in the experience of listening. We might pay a handsome sum to sit in a corner and hear a philharmonic orchestra perform a musical score. Why would we do that? Just to listen. What do you do with that listening? Nothing. The experience is valuable in and of itself. You pay for the ticket because the concert hall must be maintained, and the musicians who dedicate their lives to making the music need to make a living. The price you pay sustains the material conditions under which the music is produced, but it is in no way the price of the music. The category of price does not apply. You simply value the private and quite inexpressible experience of listening to a beautiful work of art. The music can create the desire to dance. You move in a kind of conversation with it. You might break into a sweat. If you dance a lot, your muscles will become strong and your joints nimble—you will get fit. But you don’t dance to be fit. You dance to express inner states that have absolutely no use beyond their pure expression.

For us as educators to insist on liberal education is to insist on a sphere of human activity that does not need to be justified in terms of measurable outcomes. It is to insist on freedom from the indecency and brutality of only doing things for gain. We must place this form of nonutilitarian development at the center of the college experience. Something quite fundamental is at stake; something about our freedom to be fully human, to live lives of richness, clarity, and meaning. This is indispensable to us by virtue of our humanity. In another age, we might have said that it is indispensable to us by virtue of the fact that we have souls.

Illustration by Jon Han