Not Everything Has to Have a Point

As many of you probably know my real job is in the world of education, but I believe I would have this same concern for how things are going even if I made a living trimming poodle fur or running Apple computers. Also, I would like to point out many people in the field of education disagree with me. What am I worried about? Well, I’ll tell you. I am concerned too many people believe everything done by a student in school should be useful.
First I guess I need to define “useful”. To most people useful is something which makes it possible to accomplish a particular task. Useful like being able to balance a checkbook. Useful like being able to change the oil in your car. Useful like being able to identify which kinds of mushrooms you can eat without poisoning yourself which is only slightly more useful than being able to identify which peanut butter has peanuts, dextrose, hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt and salmonella.
Don’t get me wrong I approve of useful. I want my children to know how to balance a checkbook. Unfortunately there have been times in my life I decided it was just easier to open a whole new account than try to figure out the Gordian Knot which until recently had been an orderly list of debits and credits. I would like it if they can change their own oil. I am a car ignoramus but I am not as bad as a co-worker who once told me they added oil to their car because it was squeaking. (I did not make that up.) Also, if I am ever hopelessly lost in a forest I want someone who can say helpful things like, “Don’t eat that mushroom” and “You know what bears do in the woods? You’re standing in it.”
The point I am trying to make is the reason for education should not just be the achievement of utilitarian goals. Schools should not be creating worker drones. Schools should give students useful tools and make it possible for people to do all those useful things, but that is not where it should end.
Too often educators fall into the trap of thinking we are making the next generation of employees. Actually, we are making the next generation of employees and participants in the electoral process and handlers of our environment and choosers of our nursing homes. I like to think being all of that requires an understanding beyond the times tables, the four-step problem solving method and the parts of speech. An understanding of things not testable with multiple choice questions.
I was reading a column in The New York Times by Stanley Fish. He quoted the philosopher Michael Oakeshott saying, “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and the learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.” To me what this is all about is we need to expand our definition of what is useful.
I happen to think the ability to make others laugh is very useful, but you will never see an ad in the yellow pages for a joke repairman. In regards to humor the usefulness is less hammer and chisel useful and more temporal lobe useful.
Sir Jonathan Miller, who graduated from Cambridge, became a medical doctor, directed many productions of Shakespeare’s plays, became a research fellow in neuropsychology at Sussex University and wrote comedy with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore is a genuinely smart fellow. He knows a thing or two about what is useful beyond nuts and bolts. I heard him on a panel discussing how humor makes us human. At this time he said, “One of the rewards which is contained in humor and the reason why we seek it, is because it mobilizes cognitive versatility and the evolutionary advantage of cognitive versatility is self-evident.” I can attest that he really said it because I rewound and played it over and over until I got it all written down properly.
I have to say even though that quote was hard to get right I like it much better than the quote attributed to Richard Teller Crane (a big time rich guy plumbing magnate): No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness…are those who are useful.” Oh, I hope not. I don’t fit that description unless there suddenly becomes a demand for joke repairmen.