The great learning

It’s a funny thing we do at college.

Too eager to flee the lowly naiveté of home, but too scared to knock on the lofty door of the real world, we choose to live in purgatory, suspended precariously in a liminal world of awkward impermanence.

But what are we doing here—reading and writing and computing and solving—for four bewildering years?

The tempting answer, one at which I have arrived time and time again, is that we are here just for our intellectual training. For four years, we put our personal and professional and moral and emotional lives—our entire lives—on hold as we study at college, a place where society stores and programs young people until they are ready to function according to the manual of life. For four years, we become ascetics—sacrificing real life for intellectual withdrawal in an ivory tower, a halcyon haven from the grim realities of the real world. For four years, anything goes and nothing comes around in a life of freedom and bliss. College is like an international plane ride—for a limited period, the duties of neither the origin nor the destination apply.

Sometimes, I have been tempted to adopt this perspective on college. Yet the moments when I have reduced college to a transitory anomaly in the rest of my life’s course have been my unhappiest—the times when the rigmarole of reading and writing and reading some more has suddenly felt like a stifling pursuit of meaningless knowledge. And I have wondered, is our perspective on college too disjointed? And have we thereby lost sight of what education means?

“The Great Learning,” a classical Confucian text, claims, “It is only when things are investigated that knowledge can be extended; when knowledge is extended that thoughts become sincere; when thoughts become sincere that the mind is rectified; when the mind is rectified that the person is cultivated; when the person is cultivated that order is brought to the family; when order is brought to the family that the state is well governed; when the state is well governed that peace is brought to the world.”

Twelfth-century Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi canonized “The Great Learning” as one of the four core texts of Confucianism, and he advocated the “investigation of things” as a means not only of self-cultivation, but also of social transformation. When placed in a Morningside Heights context, then Zhu Xi’s reaffirmation of this Confucian philosophy—that of personal education having exponentially greater positive ramifications as the scale of the social unit grows larger—challenges the disjointed view of college as a fleeting period of little real responsibility before so-called “adulthood.” Instead, it endows education with greater meaning and places greater responsibility on the learner to “investigate things” with a responsibility to family, society, and world in mind.

A good friend of mine at the University of Georgia told me a story this summer of how he wound up at college. He was born in Iran and raised in its public school system until he was 10, when his family packed up and immigrated to America. But it wasn’t for a nicer house or a better job that his family left home. Had he remained in Iran, my friend explained, high school would have been the end for him—he would have been barred from higher education on the basis of his religious affiliation. So his family, which led an otherwise stable life in Tehran, came to America so he could go to college.

His is one of so many stories that repudiate the stereotype of college as a time of careless frivolity or shortsighted indulgence. College matters. Each of us made it to Columbia because we believed in the value of education—of course, in its ability to get us a job and some money, but also, I am certain, in its ability to transform us as individuals.

Unless there is a purpose at college, some sort of counterpoint to the popular perception of our time here as one of triviality and inconsequence with academic work tacked on, these four years can be difficult. But with Zhu Xi’s more holistic vision transplanted to the 21st-century urban campus, Columbia can truly feel like a “daxue”—a university of “great learning” for real-world personal and social transformation.

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures. He is a former Spectator editorial page editor, a former senior editor of Columbia East Asia Review and served as secretary of the the Bahá'í Club of Columbia University. He is studying abroad at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Tuesdays.