About a month ago, a professor asked me: why is it important that students develop and cultivate internal realms? He meant to get me to reflect on my belief that fostering earnest, including critical, self-reflection in all students should be a paramount aim of a Stanford education. Here goes.
To put his worry in more concrete terms, imagine the Wall Street Journal headline: “Stanford Says Students Must Challenge Their Values.” A skeptic might legitimately wonder: “If a student does not want to soul-search during her time in college, isn’t that her prerogative?”
In the simplest sense, of course it is: no soul searching happens unless we get the soul on board. But I want to discuss why the University should even aim to help students develop and cultivate internal realms.
Perhaps I should start by acknowledging the dangerous ground I stand on in talking about “internal realms” and “souls.” What does that even mean? The internal realm I am referring to is our conception of self, the realm full of feelings, reflections, hopes and values that form our deeper identity. This deeper identity is the springboard for all our “Whys?” in life, the world we venture into when we ask questions that are only for our ears.
From a student’s perspective, involving this personal realm in our education may seem like a scary proposition. It means acknowledging that we are all fallible creatures with things to learn and room to grow. It means putting our most precious convictions and values–precious because they are part of our identity–on the line. That is no easy prospect.
And yet, becoming vulnerable enough to engage what we learn with who we are offers so many rich possibilities that a reserved education forecloses. It frees us from being shackled to views we have, at best, only privately scrutinized. It retrieves from the sidelines those central questions–questions about what we think and stand for–that are at the heart of directing our own life paths.
For good reason, a liberal education is about engaging those personal questions with a much wider world. As W.E.B. Du Bois describes (and a kind professor pointed out to me), a university is, above all, the organ of “that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life.” A university education is about bringing ourselves to a much wider table. It is not merely about memorizing facts or regurgitating a professor’s arguments; it is about putting our beliefs and values in dialogue with what our fellow beings have to say. That is why an education needs to involve developing and cultivating internal realms. Deep convictions stem only from those depths.
And aiming to develop and cultivate internal realms also means, importantly, responding to the fact that students have them! I was struck this past summer by a passage in Fernando Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet” in which the narrator learns that an employee at his regular tobacco shop in Lisbon committed suicide. With surprise, the narrator reflects on how this man, too, was “truly a soul capable of suffering.”
Like the tobacco shop employee, students have depths beneath the veneer. As a 2008 University Mental Health Report, the Wellness Room and the Bystander Campaign all suggest, many students deal with serious mental health issues. In the dorms, identity and existential questions are still part of the college experience. The biggest problem with leaving souls on the sidelines is that we are leaving souls on the sidelines. Students still possess the root aspiration for a holistic education, one involved in deeper desires to flourish as individuals. The University should respond to these desires.
So much for why I think it is important to engage internal realms in a Stanford education. Here is why I think it is imperative: Stanford students will one day be leaders in places all over the world. Many will be in positions of power and responsibility, as they were on Wall Street in 2007. The University, as it well knows, has its own responsibility to educate students to seriously reflect on our impact on the world.
The major hiccup is that true ethical reasoning and responsibility are not facts that can be memorized in a textbook; no class on ethics or race history, no section discussion on global warming or war or evolution can touch my beliefs when the point, to me, is only about getting the grade and getting ahead. Learning involves soul-searching, maturing in simultaneously intellectual and personal ways. If we do not assimilate what we learn into who we are, the deepest learning–that true adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life–will never have happened. In fundamental ways, our University education will have failed.
Doing some soul-searching? Send Aysha your thoughts at [email protected].