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by Richard Nilsen
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Many years ago, when I was a teacher, I told my students on the first day of class that I considered it my goal to make them unemployable. I was quite serious about it. I wasn’t trying to ruin their lives; I was trying to enrich them.
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There is an almost universal canard these days that education is supposed to prepare you for a job. That a university education should, in effect, be vocational training. This is an idea which horrifies me.
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Nobody should ever be condemned to a job. A career? Yes. A vocation? Yes. A calling? Especially yes. But a job? Never.
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If there is a “job” we are put on the earth for, it is to become as fully human as possible, to learn all we are capable of, to discover our full selves. A process that Carl Jung would have called “individuation.” Certainly, we need to put food on the table and we need to face the quotidian demands on our time. But underneath all that, there is a self that needs to grow and develop, if for no other reason than to better fulfill the demands made on us by other people — both those with power over us and those we love.
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An education is one of the ways we do this. And no better education serves this function than what has been called a “liberal education.” It was the purpose of Aristotle’s peripatetic lectures, the purpose of the trivium and quadrivium, the purpose of a college core curriculum. One should be exposed to a wide variety of thought and disciplines. Avoiding ignorance and self-satisfaction and instead questioning everything.
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I remember a conversation with an editor looking to hire another reporter for the paper. “I don’t want a J-school grad,” he said. J-school is journalism school, where you learn all the ins and outs of interviewing, Associated Press style, and work flow. “I don’t want a J-school grad,” he said. “I want someone with wide experience and a general education. We can teach him (or her) everything else needed in a couple of weeks on the job.” To be trained to any single discipline is to be too easily left ignorant of everything else.
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It is much more important to have some sense of the world and how the news you are reporting fits into the bigger picture. What journalists call “context.”
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Our primary job in life is to become ourselves. This is a life-long process; we are always “becoming.” A formal education should put us on a path in which we become competent to build our selves. If all it does is train us to be a cog in a business, it has stifled us and preempted the growth process.
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A large portion of the political thought on education these days centers on jobs and job training. “Jobs” is a buzzword, meant to influence elections. Especially among Republicans, life is seen to be economic life. Oddly, this is something they share with Communists — the Marxian view of life is one of workers and production. There is little concern for family, love, empathy, spiritual concerns, hobbies, altruism or simply wondering at the night sky.
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But what turns out to be important — and this becomes clearer and clearer the older one gets, and the closer to the final curtain — are these very issues. No one, as they say, faces death wishing they had spent more time at the office. More often, they will have wished to have told more people that they loved them and told them more often.
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And so, my lessons in class were meant to tempt my students to think differently, to see what had been invisible to them before, to recognize the infinite complexity of their lives and the universe they inhabit.
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I taught photography and taught it as an art. That is, to use the camera as a method of self discovery. One regular assignment was to photograph something so that I could not tell what it was. I did not mean to make a badly focused photo, or a bad print, but to see something in a way it had not usually been seen. Often that meant extreme close-ups and lack of context, to bring out patterns rather than nameable objects. That way, you could actually see the details — the patterns — an not just a subject you could name (a “house,” or a “car”).
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Another assignment, even harder, was when I asked them to make a bad photograph. Again, I did not mean one badly processed, out of focus or chemically incompetent (this was in the days before digital), but one that was poorly designed or composed, or poorly thought through. You know, as when someone photographs a child with a tree growing out of their head, because the did not notice the tree in the viewfinder.
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The problem was that if the student was trying to make something poorly thought through, they had to think carefully about it. And so, if they were intelligent or talented, the mere fact of paying attention to what they were doing made it nearly impossible to make their photograph bad. You could break all the so-called “rules” of art and design, but if you did it on purpose, it would work.
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For them, I defined design itself as “your awareness of what is in the frame.” Awareness is what counts. If you are aware of what you are doing, there are no false steps.
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If I had been teaching them to become professional photographers, I would have given them the “rule of thirds,” or the use of long-focus lenses for portraits. But I was not doing that; I was trying to make them deeper, more aware human beings. And hence, “unemployable.”
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They would be more interesting people, more aware of others and the variety of ideas, beliefs and customs. More comfortable in the world, less likely to judge immediately and indiscriminately.
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This is what my college education provided for me. Certainly I came into it with a raging curiosity, but taking a full range of courses, both scientific and humanistic — history, literature, philosophy — cracked me open. For that I am forever grateful. I did not learn any job skills, but I did discover a great deal about myself. I found both that the world was much bigger and more varied than I had known, and that I was, too.
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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic. A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina. We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal. We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.