By: Adrian Smith
Having recently graduated, I often wonder about the real value of my education. Sure, I’ve some valuable learned lessons, both inside the lecture hall and out, which I’ll likely carry forward with me—but what is the real value of all that stuff we’ve learned in day-to-day life? What aspects of higher education can I implement into the mundane, tedious and routine moments in adult life?
“There are two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish who nods at them and says, ‘how’s the water?’” David Foster Wallace says to open his commencement speech at Kenyon College. The author was asked to speak to the school’s graduating class of 2005, and took the opportunity to deliver a speech that isn’t exactly inspirational or necessarily motivational but one that is very real. “The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”
The most obvious and important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about, this metaphor asserts. After graduating, we go through the banality of routine, isolated, adult life in what he calls our ‘natural default setting,’ the unconscious way in which we experience the boring, frustrating, crowded moments of life, which hinder us from considering possibilities that aren’t so mundane, annoying and miserable. Each of us operates under the belief that we are the centre of the world and that our immediate needs, problems and feelings should determine the world’s priority.
What Wallace so plainly articulated to those graduating students is that the true freedom of education is that we get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t—we get to choose how we interpret and interact with the world around us. It has nothing to do with knowledge and everything to do with simple awareness that is so real and essential, so plain and obvious. We have to remind ourselves this is life, “this is water.” The Glossary published a cinematic video adaption of Wallace’s eye-opening speech. It is maybe the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.
