It's that time of year again. College and high school graduations come around and people start to wonder: "what use is all of this education?"  The question is especially piquant for the newly unemployed college graduates, the English majors who can't find a job, the Philosophy majors returning home to their parents, perhaps even the Political Science majors…

Rebecca Mead has a nice little piece in this week's "Talk of the Town" in The New Yorker, "Learning by Degrees," where she pushes back a bit against the pessimism surrounding liberal arts.  These paragraphs, in particular, caught my eye:

…Given the high cost of attending college in the United States,
the question of whether a student is getting his or her money’s worth
tends to loom large with whoever is paying the tuition fees and the
meal-plan bills. Even so, one needn’t necessarily be a liberal-arts
graduate to regard as distinctly and speciously utilitarian the idea
that higher education is, above all, a route to economic advancement.
Unaddressed in that calculus is any question of what else an education
might be for: to nurture critical thought; to expose individuals to the
signal accomplishments of humankind; to develop in them an ability not
just to listen actively but to respond intelligently.

All these
are habits of mind that are useful for an engaged citizenry, and from
which a letter carrier, no less than a college professor, might derive
a sense of self-worth. For who’s to say in what direction a letter
carrier’s thoughts might, or should, turn, regardless of the job’s
demands? Consider Stephen Law, a professor of philosophy at the
University of London, who started his working life delivering mail for
the British postal service, began reading works of philosophy in his
spare time, decided that he’d like to know more, and went on to study
the discipline at City University, in London, and at Oxford University.
(A philosophy graduate in the Class of 2010, by the way, stands to earn
an average starting salary of forty thousand dollars a year, rising to
a lifetime median of seventy-six thousand. Not exactly statistician
money, but something to think about.) Indeed, if even a professionally
oriented college degree is no longer a guarantee of easily found
employment, an argument might be made in favor of a student’s pursuing
an education that is less, rather than more, pragmatic. (More theology,
less accounting.) That way, regardless of each graduate’s ultimate
path, all might be qualified to be carriers of arts and letters, of
which the nation can never have too many.

Mead is, inadvertently I assume, invoking an argument from Zhuangzi: that which appears to be useless actually has a certain utility.  In a post last year, "Uselessness: Now more than ever!" I explicate this Zhuangzi argument, as well as two others in defense of uselessness.  Perhaps mail carriers now play the part of Cook Ting in Zhuangzi, doing a job that appears to be simple and undemanding but which proves to be a means of gaining a greater appreciation of Way (Tao). 

And while I'm at it: congratulations graduates!  Whether you have a job or not….