On Academic Misery
No matter where you go, there you are...
Way back in the penultimate decade of the 20th Century, some years after the invention of “Tag”1 but well before smartphones, I was an 11th-grader in the 12th-grade Honors English class at my high school. (I skipped a year of English entirely; my senior year, I was the lone student in AP English.) We read some stuff that I liked (A Canticle for Leibowitz, “Hamlet”) but also the single book I loathed more than any other I read before college, Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse.
This is a book about a German schoolboy from a rural area who wins a prestigious place at a seminary by dint of hard work and sacrifice and focus on his schoolwork, only to have his spirit crushed by the stiff and formal education system. He ends up having a breakdown, flunking out and returning to his hometown in disgrace, and possibly drowning himself at the end of the book.
I can not for the life of me understand why our teacher— who I otherwise liked quite a bit— thought this was a good book for a class of honor students. I found it crushingly depressing, in a way that seemed to run directly counter to the intended purpose of that sort of class. The logic of selecting a group of high-performing students and putting them in a separate class to allow deeper exploration of a subject they excel in and then hitting them with “All your educational struggle is ultimately soul-destroying” just escapes me. And that’s even without the class/ setting element that comes with doing this in a rural high school.
That said, while it’s very alien to me, the general message is not all that uncommon. There’s a very deep vein of miserabilism in modern intellectual culture, with some of the most highly educated and accomplished people in the world presenting school and schooling as an utterly pointless grind. I really don’t get this worldview— there were individual classes that I hated, but school per se was never a grind— but I recognize it as a thing that comes around periodically, like Halley’s Comet2.
I was thinking about this because we’re in the season of the year when “Early Decision”/”Early Action” college admissions decisions go out. Every year, this triggers two big streams of miserabilist #discourse— there were two really spectacular examples of this in the last week or so, neither of which I’m going to link to because I don’t really want to direct additional vitriol at either of them. One stream is by and about students who didn’t get accepted to one elite college or another despite good grades and a long list of activities, and are upset about the result. The other is by and about about students (and adults who remember being students) who just resent the process. Some of the latter even got in to the schools they were striving to reach, but are still bitter about how they did it.
The students upset about results are actually relatively easy to address, in some respects, because the core message is the same as the one I repeat all the time: you’re going to be fine. Exactly which college you end up going to doesn’t matter nearly as much as the industry builds you up to think— what matters is what you bring to the table. Education isn’t a thing that faculty at a college do to you, it’s a thing that the institution provides you resources to do for yourself. Take an active interest in your education, engage deeply with the material, and make sure to maximize the opportunities available to you (educational, cultural, and social), and you can end up with a great education and a fulfilling life no matter what school’s name is atop your diploma.
It’s fine to be bummed about being rejected, but it’s nowhere close to the end of the world. Do whatever you do to blow off some steam, then get back to living your life.
I have a harder time knowing what to say to the students and adults who look back on the process with regret, lamenting time spent doing “bullshit” activities that they hated to pad out their applications. It’s just so alien to my own experience that I can’t really get my head around it. That’s not to say that I didn’t do a lot of activities when I was in high school— I maxed out the available academic classwork, played three sports, and was in the band, so my college application was as lengthy as any. I wasn’t doing any of those things just for application-padding, though— they were all things that I enjoyed, and wanted to be doing. And, honestly, I can’t really imagine keeping up anything requiring that level of effort unless I was getting something immediate out of it.
Though, maybe, on some level, the message for these people is the same as for the other, namely that what matters is what you bring to the table. If you’re slogging through activities that you hate just because you think you’re gaining some incremental advantage in the admissions process, you’re making yourself miserable for basically nothing. The marginal benefit of tacking another extra-curricular activity on the end of a long list is pretty small, even assuming that you can trick people into thinking that it’s actually meaningful. Which, spoiler alert, you probably can’t— not many writers are good enough to craft compelling essays about doing things they resent feeling obliged to do3.
If you’re doing things that you like and enjoy, you’re going to be in a good position to learn from the experience, and become both better at those things and a more interesting person. That bodes well for your potential to succeed in college and truly benefit from the opportunities offered by higher education. And, as a bonus, you’ll likely be generally happy while going through the process.
If you’re doing things that you neither like nor enjoy solely because you think somebody in a college admissions office will be impressed by that, you’re not going to learn much by the experience. Which does not bode all that well for your potential to enjoy and benefit from higher education, either, making it something of an argument against giving you one of the tiny number of coveted slots. And even if you do get there, you’ll likely be a miserable pain in the ass, and, honestly, deservedly so.
Which, as with a lot of other takes on the general situation of higher education, circles back around to “An awful lot of people are going to college who probably shouldn’t actually be going to college.” We need to think more about how to provide appealing alternative paths to those who don’t particularly enjoy the educational process, rather than forcing them all to grind through stuff they don’t enjoy in high school so they can earn the right to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year to grind through stuff they don’t enjoy at the college level.
That’s a bit of a rant, I guess, but a couple of recent essays and social-media threads about them rubbed me the wrong way. If you either enjoyed this or want to see if I have to walk this back, here’s a button:
And if you want to yell at me to walk it back, the comments will be open:
This is a running family joke, after The Pip asked me whether I played “Tag” when I was a kid, and I explained that “Tag” is, in fact, older than even I am.
(Hat-tip to the late, great Donald Westlake, whose joke I’m paraphrasing here.)
(And if you’re in that elite cohort, you could almost certainly succeed without engaging in resume-padding bullshit…)
I'm so glad I went to college before extracurricular activities were important for getting in (or at least as far as I knew).
That sounds like a terrible book to study, but I would have loved reading A Canticle for Liebowitz in high school! Rarely was our required reading was ever something I enjoyed, and I was a bookworm.
Speaking of Halley's comet, it is halfway around (at the aphelion), which is kind of mind-blowing to me, as I recall thinking how incredibly long it was between appearances.