Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 15, 1994 TAG: 9406270142
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BOBBYE G. AU
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Get a job.
Develop character.
Insist on quality of life.
Liberal-arts colleges sometimes get a bad rap because they don't put enough emphasis on the training necessary to get a job. If a college doesn't give its students the skill development necessary to get a job, it hasn't done its job. Jobs aren't easy to get these days, and without one, graduates will have a hard time making a difference in the world. It's hard to make a difference to anybody when you can't pay the rent.
It's important for graduates to get a job for other reasons, too. Earning one's own way in the world gives a person a sense of independence and responsibility that can come from nowhere else. Therefore, colleges need to train students for a job that pays the rent, but they also need to help students understand the difference between a job and a vocation. Ultimately, colleges are training students for a vocation - and the difference between the two is important.
The American poet Wallace Stevens said: ``The way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.'' To find one's way through the world is to develop one's character.
Character is the stance a person takes toward the world. The position one takes when taking a position is not easy. Character is the ability to care about someone else more than ourselves, the ability to put our own desires aside for the sake of the greater good. Character is caring about people we don't know.
People of character, in John Donne's phrase, know ``for whom the bell tolls.'' People of character care that the bell must be tolled at all. People aren't born with that sense of caring. Character is - must be - developed. Development of character is as much the task of education as anything else.
More than anything else, education gives students the standards to judge that which is quality from that which is not.
Quality is not a ``beamer'' or a shirt with a little polo pony on the lefthand breast pocket. It becomes too easy to lose sight of what quality really means if people get caught up in the acquiring of materialistic things, which they assume will make them happy and provide quality in their lives. That's not the way it works.
As a society, we are surrounded by a lot of shoddy things with a lot of glitz and no substance. Shoddy things are mindless things that require nothing in terms of thought, work or commitment. And they give nothing in return. The key to separating the genuine from the shoddy is education and awareness.
Further, to insist on quality in life is to make judgments about those things that will stand up under pressure. When people talk about quality workmanship, for example, what they are talking about are things that are constructed to last and that are worth lasting. Insisting on that quality is important, but more important is to remember that what makes it in life over the long haul may not be things at all. Intangibles like people, relationships, ideas and commitments are ultimately at the core of all life. If those intangibles have real quality, then life's physical surroundings won't matter.
Thoreau says in ``Walden'': ``I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.''
If graduating students can learn from their ``experiment'' in college - by preparing themselves for a true vocation, developing character in the fundamental sense of that term, and maturing to the point where they insist on quality in their lives - then they will ``endeavor to live the life which [they have] imagined'' and ``will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.''
Then they will make a difference in the world.
Bobbye G. Au is professor of English and director of the honors program at Roanoke College in Salem.
by CNB