Learn or earn, teach or torture

Despite taking an entirely Arts and Sciences class schedule, my most thought-provoking lessons this week came from the Business School.

Quite the coincidence that I referenced my B-School expedition last week, because an e-mail I received regarding my column was from the very professor whose accounting class I had visited last semester - professor Joe Hoyle. Or, as he inquired in his e-mail, "Were you one of the two students from the newspaper who visited my class last spring and dashed out after 15 minutes in what looked like panic?"

Yep, which is why I'm glad his e-mail subject line read "Beer and Education" instead of "Deferred Tax Assets." Responding to my phrase, "the unrelenting Sunday-to-Thursday work schedule," which I'd argued created prime conditions for a Thursday-to-Sunday binge drinking schedule, Hoyle wrote that characterizing our education that way would make him want to take up heavy drinking too. For students to require less drinking in their lives, they need to be getting more from their educational experience.

"It seems to me a combination of two things must occur before drinking becomes less prevalent," he wrote. "First, students have to decide that they want to learn rather than merely wanting a degree or a particular grade."

The idyllic concept of a gradeless existence sparkled like the "Titanic" heart of the ocean. But the sparkle quickly faded when I realized I couldn't answer his question: Why are we here? I understood the status quo explanation: Do well in grade school to place well in high school. Repeat to get into a good college. Repeat to get a good job. Repeat to make bank.

The process too closely resembled an assembly line to be satisfying, especially when coupled with a growing sentiment I've heard from professors during the past year: Your GPA doesn't matter in the real world.

Well that usually just about makes me want to pounce - then why have I been socialized since the first grade to believe otherwise? I could feel William Miller from "Almost Famous" sputtering in frustration in my mind: "When and where does this real world occur?"

If college isn't another step in the assembly line powered forward by the GPA, what is it for? I decided to look outside myself.

For Blair Waldorf of "Gossip Girl," it's "an opportunity to conquer a new territory."

For Tom Petty, "four years to be irresponsible."

For my dad, "the maturation of the teenager into a young adult."

For comedian/actor George Gobel, "a place to keep warm between high school and an early marriage."

For author Toni Morrison, "a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to ... unfit her for 80 percent of useful work of the world."

For crazy Uncle Ben from "Accepted," for "breeding a whole new generation of buyers and sellers."

For educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins, "A liberal education ... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation."

And the one most appealing to me, which I think nestles closest to Hoyle's learning-to-learn sentiment, from journalist Sydney J. Harris, "to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure."

New York Times editor and writer Linda Lee discerns similarly in the first chapter of her book, "Success Without College," but by tweaking the question. Not "what" is college for, but "whom" is college for?

"Here is who belongs in college: the high-achieving student who is interested in learning for learning's sake, those who intend to become schoolteachers and those young people who seem certain to go on to advanced degrees in law, medicine, architecture and the like.

"Here is who actually goes to college: everyone. That everyone includes the learning disabled and the fairly dumb, those who have trouble reading and writing and doing math, slackers who see college as an opportunity to major in Beers of the World, burned-out book jockeys and the just plain average student with not much interest in anything.

"... It could be that a college education is wasted on the young, but it is more likely that a college education is especially being wasted on today's youth."

This could be a tip to pass along to your younger siblings, but because we're already here, we'll proceed to the second half of Hoyle's equation.

"Second, the faculty (not the zillion administrators) need to make the educational process more interesting, relevant and (dare I say it) exciting. Learning should be exciting for both faculty and students. ... Putting down the beer doesn't do you any good if there is not something interesting to replace it with and, on a college campus, that something ought to be education."

To Richmond's credit, whenever I compare my academic experience with friends' from other, usually larger universities, I glow with gratitude for our advantage. For the most part, I've not had a bad class or professor. Although some friends will only ever hear their professors' voices through a microphone in a giant lecture hall, we study in a beautiful, brick bastion where we're called on by name, and occasionally on our cell phones when we're absent.

But then when I hear how unstressed those friends are, how they take two naps and watch two hours of TV a day, I wonder: How lucky are we really?

It's not that most of us don't enjoy learning - I'd rather be stimulated by a lecture than TV. But it's that change in nomenclature from "learning" to "working." It's not, "I'm learning from this challenging yet manageable assignment that reinforces the day's lecture, for which my effort will not be undercut by a big, fat C." It's three loathsome syllables: "I have work."

It could be that time heals all wounds, but my dad recalls having a lot less work in college than we have - "being given ample time to do reasonable work," maybe two hours of work per day outside the classroom.

Now, with technology enabling professors to add assignments in between classes and create more and more convoluted ways for us to present our knowledge, and administrators presenting higher and more intricate hurdles for professors to clear, are we any better off?

According to Derek Bok, past president of Harvard University, in his book "Our Underachieving Colleges," we can't be sure. But it's not because faculty members don't care, which justifies our simultaneous appreciation of them and not of the workload. In fact, the only reason I've heard of this book is that a professor e-mailed an extensive review of it to his colleagues and another professor printed it for me and let me borrow his copy of the book. No doubt they care.

"What is true, however, is that neither faculties nor their deans and presidents feel especially pressed to search continuously for new and better ways of educating their students," Bok wrote.

For example, this weekend I discovered two other students who had also learned the quadratic formula in high school by way of catchy jingles and, to the horror of everyone around us, we all remembered them. Now I'm not proposing a campus of carolers, but something catchier than a zillion pages of reading.

Something besides, as Bartleby Gaines from "Accepted" accuses: "rob(bing) these kids of their creativity and their passion ... putting so much pressure on kids they turn into these ... stress freaks and caffeine addicts." Add prescription and non-prescription drugs, and smoking is the least of our worries. And when it comes to packs-a-day problems, it's no longer just cigarettes - I'm part of a growing support group of compulsive gum-chewers.

But what if we're doing it to ourselves? Hoyle clarified that less work would not be in our best interest, and that it was instead the overscheduling of ourselves activities-wise that sucked up our downtime.

To that I am at a loss. We definitely can't do everything, as we did in high school, but we should be able to do at least one extracurricular activity so we're more than just our homework (I've tried that, and it was a miserable existence). If I remember correctly, the "well-rounded" student was the kind Richmond was looking for. The switch from credits to units has already sacrificed breadth for depth, another B-School professor said. Sometimes the extracurricular activities are even where we learn more, but does busy-ness beat boring-ness?

As my dad put it, "You can't have unhappy automatons as graduates." Nor as teachers or administrators. Bartleby again: "What is learning? It's paying attention." Now, are we paying attention?

Contact opinion editor Maura Bogue at maura.bogue@richmond.edu