The Head and the Heart:
What truly is the Purpose of Higher Education?
By: Frances Ritchie
Written September 20, 2012 for the course Writing in the Arts and Humanities
As an art education major, sitting across the table from a science major, listening to them discuss the benefits of engineering and the job markets available, my pulse quickens, and my face flushes when the question of what are I AM going to do eventually comes up. And as I try to prove my true sentiments, the age old battle between heart and head plays out. My heart cries to respond with an exultation of: art in the classroom, my love! Inspire! Teach! Art! However, I am torn between what I find to be passion and what society deems professionally risky. And a small voice in the back of my head murmurs with every good intention, saying: Yes, what are we going to do and how are we going to find it?
For me, I found true peace with this question, where it starts, education. A place where the head and the heart, both reason
and passion, meet at a crossroads and continue in the same direction. Think about it: the process of learning in is dynamic. Every learner has different strengths and weakness and learns how to successful cope with those. As Howard Gardner’s research on Multiple Intelligence shows, every learner has different intelligences and maybe even more than one; these
range from Spatial/Kinesthetic, to Visual Spatial or Naturalistic. An article by PBS describes this theory:“According to Howard Gardner, human beings have nine different kinds of intelligence that reflect different ways of interacting with the world. Each person has a unique combination, or profile. Although we each have all nine intelligences, no two have them in the same exact configuration -- similar to our fingerprints.” Reflecting on my own intelligences made me wonder: if we learn through different avenues, what if we find jobs through different avenues? Perhaps as humanities students, we do don’t have to be torn between the benefits of “sensible, stable” majors (like economics, accounting or medicine) but can pursue those in which we have skill and passion, although they may be deemed more risky.
We’ve grown up with the notion that college is the one-all, one-stop to getting a job in the imminent future. I’d like to challenge that. We learn so as to get a degree, thus perhaps our multiple styles of learning reflect our multiple ways of using our degree. Perhaps, finding a job--like learning--is a process of checks and balances and a spectrum where both job position and professional knowledge may continue to evolve and grow. Yes, maybe in the past having a degree guaranteed you a position that lasted until retirement but in that time, ultimately there were less people in college. Our current job market is evolving so rapidly we can’t even recognize what future needs may be. The viral video, “Did You Know” illuminates this noting,
"We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies we haven’t yet invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet”. The world is opening up thus how we think about the arts, humanities and all majors in terms of career needs to expand as well. Many times the conversation around the majors of arts and humanities versus science-based majors has strong friction. It has become a stigmatism that the sciences will guarantee a degree and are therefore more logical than their risker counterpart, the arts. The heart versus the head. This conversation assumes too much that the world exists by a canon. The world is more diverse than this narrow perspective. The world’s learners are diverse.
And the ability to find jobs is diverse.
Finding a job is not a question of logic versus passion. It is about using your head and your heart, together. The skills you
learn from the humanities may not always get you a set job, but they will help you in your search—just as a degree in economics will; finding a career is about what you choose to do beyond school, what sacrifices you are willing to make and
how hard you are willing to work. Both logic and passion are necessary to success—one cannot succeed without the other. Ultimately, I have shifted to thinking of life after college not so much as a job search but a continuation of education. I want to go into a job position not for the sole intent of the position, but what I can learn from it and take with me to my next career path.
Both my head and my heart can agree that every life opportunity I have, I take that education with me to the next.
Works Cited
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html
What truly is the Purpose of Higher Education?
By: Frances Ritchie
Written September 20, 2012 for the course Writing in the Arts and Humanities
As an art education major, sitting across the table from a science major, listening to them discuss the benefits of engineering and the job markets available, my pulse quickens, and my face flushes when the question of what are I AM going to do eventually comes up. And as I try to prove my true sentiments, the age old battle between heart and head plays out. My heart cries to respond with an exultation of: art in the classroom, my love! Inspire! Teach! Art! However, I am torn between what I find to be passion and what society deems professionally risky. And a small voice in the back of my head murmurs with every good intention, saying: Yes, what are we going to do and how are we going to find it?
For me, I found true peace with this question, where it starts, education. A place where the head and the heart, both reason
and passion, meet at a crossroads and continue in the same direction. Think about it: the process of learning in is dynamic. Every learner has different strengths and weakness and learns how to successful cope with those. As Howard Gardner’s research on Multiple Intelligence shows, every learner has different intelligences and maybe even more than one; these
range from Spatial/Kinesthetic, to Visual Spatial or Naturalistic. An article by PBS describes this theory:“According to Howard Gardner, human beings have nine different kinds of intelligence that reflect different ways of interacting with the world. Each person has a unique combination, or profile. Although we each have all nine intelligences, no two have them in the same exact configuration -- similar to our fingerprints.” Reflecting on my own intelligences made me wonder: if we learn through different avenues, what if we find jobs through different avenues? Perhaps as humanities students, we do don’t have to be torn between the benefits of “sensible, stable” majors (like economics, accounting or medicine) but can pursue those in which we have skill and passion, although they may be deemed more risky.
We’ve grown up with the notion that college is the one-all, one-stop to getting a job in the imminent future. I’d like to challenge that. We learn so as to get a degree, thus perhaps our multiple styles of learning reflect our multiple ways of using our degree. Perhaps, finding a job--like learning--is a process of checks and balances and a spectrum where both job position and professional knowledge may continue to evolve and grow. Yes, maybe in the past having a degree guaranteed you a position that lasted until retirement but in that time, ultimately there were less people in college. Our current job market is evolving so rapidly we can’t even recognize what future needs may be. The viral video, “Did You Know” illuminates this noting,
"We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies we haven’t yet invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet”. The world is opening up thus how we think about the arts, humanities and all majors in terms of career needs to expand as well. Many times the conversation around the majors of arts and humanities versus science-based majors has strong friction. It has become a stigmatism that the sciences will guarantee a degree and are therefore more logical than their risker counterpart, the arts. The heart versus the head. This conversation assumes too much that the world exists by a canon. The world is more diverse than this narrow perspective. The world’s learners are diverse.
And the ability to find jobs is diverse.
Finding a job is not a question of logic versus passion. It is about using your head and your heart, together. The skills you
learn from the humanities may not always get you a set job, but they will help you in your search—just as a degree in economics will; finding a career is about what you choose to do beyond school, what sacrifices you are willing to make and
how hard you are willing to work. Both logic and passion are necessary to success—one cannot succeed without the other. Ultimately, I have shifted to thinking of life after college not so much as a job search but a continuation of education. I want to go into a job position not for the sole intent of the position, but what I can learn from it and take with me to my next career path.
Both my head and my heart can agree that every life opportunity I have, I take that education with me to the next.
Works Cited
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html