[Joe] Does education produce peace of mind, or does it add to angst? Are students more high strung than employees learning a new job? They certainly seem to be more out of control! Youth! Lack of experience!
[Arlo] Hi, Joe. I'll give you my take on this, mostly from personal conversations with students over the past decade and seeing where has been slowly drifting. First, I don't think students are more "out of control" than their non-student peers. I think there are age-related 'rites of passage' in most cultures, some more rigorous, some lacking definition, but this teen-to-adult transition is fairly profound. I think as we get older, the behavior looks more outrageous, but as definitions of normal evolve, rebellion has to adapt. So, I'd day there is a lot of angst surrounding this age/social-role transition. That said, I think any angst you see among the student population is not associated with Education (the "real university", or The Church of Reason), but with the shifting cultural and economic contexts and demands being placed on them by the social institutions, the "second university" in Pirsig's lecture, inhabiting The Academy. This uncertainty in economic climate, and the increasingly (or media-heightened) sense of danger in the world, all leads, I think, to a greater amount of angst throughout the population. The biggest source of angst, as I hear it, among students is "will I get a job? will I be able to pay for this? will the career path I am following even exist five or ten years from now?" Okay, maybe "will I meet someone or spend my life alone?" is up there too, but that's tapping back into the common coming-of-age angst. In other words, its not intellectual level that's generating angst among students, its the social/cultural/economic foundations to intellectual level that are generating the angst. But you know, I almost would relish a world where the challenges of philosophy and art where the things generating anxiety among the population. Imagine our entire student population expressing genuine angst over a 'crisis' in philosophy! Imagine coffee shops full of students in animated and heated discussions over a recent philosophy that reorders the world in terms of value! Imagine walking into a student union and asking what all the commotion was and being told "everyone has angst over the this latest non-Euclidian model and what it means for whether they exist or not!"... Ah, yes, that would be education driven angst, and it would be something to behold... Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
