To be human

This term I decided to take a philosophy class that was not in my prescribed flowchart. It was an advanced majors course, and my first day was full of anxious thoughts of how I might not be able cope with the pace and subject mastery of philosophy majors.

For two years now I have been facing the general grind that commerce majors have to contend with, which is a schedule full of subjects on the practical things – finance and accounting, economics, marketing, operations, organizational behavior and strategic planning.

The curriculum had programmed me to be able to work with the language of business, more than anything else. Whenever I talk or I think I find myself using a management-oriented framework. A friend from another university tells me that I had acquired a tendency to talk in terms of metrics, performance, productivity, returns, stakeholders and value.

While I find that a relative fluency in this language is the edge that makes business majors who they are, there remained that uncomfortable sediment at the back of my head convincing me that it was all so distanced from what students could instead be searching for: a deeper sense of meaning, a soulful undercurrent that sheds light on why people make profit or manage corporations in the first place.

My normal class in business would peg the average number of students at 40 per class, and the teacher would lecture about his or her experience in some company, an explanation that often falls on deaf ears not because the student remains uninterested but because the teacher’s story is not sufficiently fleshed out, and the student is given insufficient context to work with.

Because of basic flaws in the method of instruction, the student stops listening to the meaty chunks of the subject, and remembers only to take a picture of the homework on the blackboard or the lecture notes without actually remembering the edge behind Toyota’s manufacturing or why Iceland’s interest was so high back in 2006.

This point of comparison with the special course I am taking presents a stark, radical contrast from my regular majors course. The philosophy course I am in has less than 15 students. The professor speaks a novelist’s riveting language, and is capable of drawing insight from us without having to ram certain concepts or notions down our throats; it is not the professor’s experience but the student’s which serves as the case for discussion.

In that class, I saw that students actually own their ideas, and talk about philosophers and schools of thought as easily as one might talk about one’s lunch. They have strong opinions on many matters but temper these logically and substantiate arguments with actual proofs.

It was in this class that I saw students exercising a mastery over what they did, and a passion for what they were studying; a genuine passion that I did not see as often in the management classes I attended. People knew what they were studying and could communicate it effectively; the philosophy majors were being transformed by what they were studying, developing their own personal beliefs based on what they studied.

Back in high school, I wished to major in philosophy for college but had been warned by my elders that it would lead me to financial ruin, and so I opted for the more ‘stable’ choice. But my experience has made me envious of the philosophy majors, for the quality of casual discourse in their class and the fecundity of ideas that is present in their classes.

It is a mental stimulation that I think is brought about by a background in the humanities more than anything else, because the humanities exposes us to being human before being managers and engineers and IT professionals. It is a collective reality that anyone can have the passion for, something that is essential to gearing a student to think more deeply and analyze more critically rather than memorizing scrawls on the blackboard. The humanities redefines what learning should be like, if taught the way it should be.

We live in an age where flowcharts become more and more specific and ‘applied’, where learning is programmed to become more functional than holistic, where institutions of higher learning prioritize ‘depth’ over the breadth of one’s perspective. This kind of specialization is of course in line with what employers seek in fresh graduates: specialized professionals that a saturated labor market can accommodate, whose use and voice is exactly fitted according to a specific function, who are united by their knowledge of the language of business and organizations.

My two years taking up business majors has been so thoroughly deprived of exposure to the humanities. While my flowchart has subjects like introduction to philosophy, I have always found that the general humanities education that non-Liberal Arts students receive is always wanting, not succeeding in challenging students to bring out their soul and find themselves in terms of more human endeavors like language or literature or philosophy or religion.

In fields like business or engineering or computer science, the need to cultivate one’s soul becomes all the more apparent amidst the barrage of technical know-how that the University instills in students of these programs. The fact that such soul can be so easily neglected over the course of a student’s college life leads the University to continue producing effective, efficient factors of production, instead of genuinely reflective life-long learners. Faculty and administration should remember that despite all the positive feedback from employers, over the longer run, Lasallians should learn to be human first.