They See Only Their Shadows

Over at The Atlantic, Julia Ryan complains about the challenging nature of college admissions. Regarding the commonly used question “What makes you happy?” she admits that her honest response involving “Ben and Jerry’s and a new episode of Gossip Girl” would have been insufficient to gain admission.  

Unfortunately, Ms. Ryan’s university never taught her the Aristotelian distinction between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is something fleeting – like Ben and Jerry’s and Gossip Girl. Once you consume it, it is gone, and it can therefore never bring happiness.

Ryan’s solution to this “problem” is that it is the universities who must change. She reasons that we must do away with the notion that college is “the prestigious capstone to all the growing and learning they did in high school… college can and should be the opposite. It’s a place to not take yourself so seriously and to challenge beliefs and assumptions about yourself and the world.”

Apparently the world is best challenged from a couch watching Gossip Girl, armed with Ben and Jerry’s.

Ms. Ryan does have a point in noting that the average teenager leads a hum-drum life and actually is unprepared for the rigor of academia. However, rather than have that hum-drum way of life challenged, Ms. Ryan wants to continue in it. “College is about the journey” she says, yet she does not want to journey anywhere. She does not want to face the world armed with some earth shattering truth that will bring down empires and challenge the mighty and the proud. She wants to watch Gossip Girl and eat Ben and Jerry’s.

This is the consequence of a seemingly minute change in wording that has wrought disastrous consequences. Our culture has taught people that the highest good is to be yourself rather than to know thyself. If an individual’s highest good is to be whatever she has conceived she is, then how dare anyone, including universities, try to lift her out of the cave?