Asking a brave question

Below was my response to a colleague's blog post who was asked by her supervisor to reflect on why she took up the PhD study:

You asked a very important question. Why do we do the things we do? Why do we go to school, go to college, and even go to graduate school? We spend half of our lives time getting educated in various institutions and we never ask why we do that.

If we talk to today’s young college students in Hong Kong, they’d tell you very practical reasons. Have a better job, get a big fat salary, and have a well off life. I mean university education is so damn expensive, and getting more so each year. You can’t blame people to invest their precious money for very practical reasons. But if material comfort is all there is to it, then it’s very sad, indeed.

We just don’t hear young people talk about their dreams, their sense of belonging, or calls from life anymore. Have our society lost the most precious human values & qualities which unfortunately cannot be achieved or measured by material means?

What good is education, if we can only teach our students to be smarter and more skillful workers, but left them without any dreams, any aspirations to go beyond the mundane pursuit of happiness for himself and herself?

And I quote a passage from one physics professor who taught about the value of compassion in a first year general education course:

“Several students told us that they had given up on education. becoming cynical about it in high school. They learned to perform whatever was asked, even if it failed to connect to their lives, their deepest questions and most intense longings. Big jobs with big salaries were the material carrots for high performance…it took time to win them over, to reawaken in them the root of aspiration that they all have, which is not primarily about education as an instrument for wealth acquisition. Instead, it is about transformation, development, and becoming all they can be.”

-Arthur Zajonc in ‘Love and Knowledge”