Despite the obligatory pledges to myself that precede every semester, promising that this time will be different, I always end up choosing one or two classes to prioritize over the others. I track down interesting texts mentioned off-handedly by the professor. I start researching the day an assignment is announced. I brainstorm term paper topics in the margins of my notebook on the first day of class, already distracted. My other courses necessarily suffer.
It was for the sake of an upcoming exam in one of these latter courses—on moral philosophy—that I recently found myself speed-reading through the used textbook I’d only just bought on Amazon, trying to cram at least some of its contents into my sleep-deprived, coffee-inflated brain as efficiently as possible. While skimming the readings for what I could only guess the professor might want me to be skimming for, I happened to stumble upon to the following passage by John Stuart Mill:
“Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance … Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes … and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.”
Of course, this had nothing to do with the exam. If I were a better student, I would have used my time wisely and just kept skimming. But I found myself drawn into the passage and had to lift my eyes from the textbook for a few seconds to let it sink in.
I realized that McGill is precisely one of these hostile environments, the life of the student today is precisely one of these positions in life mentioned by Mill. Instead of reading his essay for such thought-provoking, timeless truths as the one above, I had only been looking for little nuggets of information that would help me place Mill correctly in whatever theoretical schema the prof had devised for himself and for us, and thus hopefully to do well on the exam.
But good grades are just an updated version of the gold stickers we accumulated in elementary school as a physical embodiment of our precious self-worth: they’re an easy way to mark easy achievements, but fail to capture the difference between an hour spent meditating on Mill’s actual wisdom and an hour spent mindlessly compressing his whole philosophy into a few sentences of uninspiring dogma. Thus, an addiction to “inferior pleasures,” the petty Pavlovian morale boost of getting good grades, replaces our “capacity for nobler feelings” and “intellectual tastes,” which we can now neither enjoy nor pursue.
William Butler Yeats once said, “Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.” I’ve thought a lot about that quote since I saw it on the Cyberthèque walls in first year, mostly not straying far from my original astonishment that people can manage to study down there, what with the ever-present stench of such incomparable hypocrisy. Perhaps, deeply focused on their studies, they’ve failed to notice a glaring truth: the university is where Yeats’ type of education now goes to die.
