The New Yorker has an interesting selection of the diaries of the novelist Patricia Highsmith between 1948 and 1950, around when she published her first book Strangers on a Train and wrote a lesbian-themed novel titled The Price of Salt that was published pseudonymously.
There’s one entry on education, from January 25, 1950:
“Education. How we should love those years of formal education, especially in the university. To the reflective person, it is the last time he will remember that the world made sense, the world promised to continue to make sense. It is the only time when all he is filled and concerned with really concerns life. No wonder he is happy! No wonder each day is heroic adventure! No wonder he doesn’t want to go to bed at night!”
I may circle back to the sentiments she expresses here in a few weeks, because they represent a heroic narrative of education as liberating, revelatory, and happy that I think about a lot. But here I just want to note that I’m always searching in memoirs, autobiographies and biographies for what notable people have to say about their own educational experiences.
It’s relatively rare for people to dwell at length on their educational experiences in university or college unless those experiences are a source of enormous trauma or are in some unusual respect a keystone of their adult character. Talking about the courses you took, the experiences you had, and the friends you made otherwise feels rather as if you are a 60s dad getting out the slide carousel and making the people who came over to dinner watch fifty pictures from your last vacation. University or college education lives in a complicated part of a public life: it doesn’t have the commonly understood developmental gravity of family life or childhood (we expect to hear the details of childhoods in a biographical narrative) and it has a sort of odd privacy or inaccessibility about it even pre-FERPA. I can tell colleagues that my best experience as a student was in a class on the methodological and epistemological problems involved in studying the history of colonized or subject peoples—I even have two colleagues in my own field of specialization who were also in that class and I think had similarly good experiences—but going further into the details (despite the fact that I remember them with great specificity) seems excessive. Nor could anyone else besides those of us who were in it examine those details: the professor who taught it died recently, and I doubt there are any papers or materials that document the course.
Biographical accounts of higher education tend to loom larger in the lives of famous scholars (though there their graduate training usually is far more narrated or examined) and to a lesser extent intellectuals and artists. That’s not surprising, given that those experiences almost have to be determinative to their later lives. (Even the scholar who describes a bad experience as an undergraduate is interesting in this respect.)
What interests me in a wider range of biographies and memoirs is that experiences of higher education, when described, tends to fall into one of five categories:
Treasured or celebrated in warmly celebratory terms, as with Highsmith above, as the person’s individual experience of something they regard as an unqualified civilizational good.
Nostalgically positive but largely because of friendships, emotional experiences, mentors encountered, maybe influential ideas discovered for the first time—less a general kind of praise and more ‘this was a good time for me personally and I remember it fondly’. Essentially the kind of sentiment that contemporary colleges and universities are eager to stimulate when they ask for donations from alumni.
Polite diffidence. This is the category that really interests me, because it pops up in a very broad range of recollections about and by accomplished and famous public individuals, including many who are celebrated for their artistic, literary, intellectual or professional accomplishments. In this category, when undergraduate experiences are remembered or described, it’s in a lightly confessional tone: “I wasn’t a very good student”. Maybe someday I’ll really bear down on my collecting of these recollections so I can say this more confidently, but I think? this is by far the most common category of educational memory. That could mean a lot of things—a critic of higher education might take it as a diffuse indicator that college isn’t as important as we think—but I suspect most prominently it just means that a lot of what people learn and do while they’re in college has a delayed effect, and that for some people, 18-22 is the wrong time anyway to be studying academic subjects (if not the wrong time to be in the presence of peers and obtaining a credential that improves future working opportunities).
Bemused disinterest. Often appears in memoirs or biographies about famous individuals who dropped out of college or university but went on to success anyway. Frequently this isn’t more than a few sentences that just indicate that college didn’t matter in this life, whether it led to a degree or not.
Righteous anger, rejection, disgust. When folks have something strong to say about their memories of higher education, that often isn’t just a paragraph or a few pages, it becomes a major subject or theme. I think this is something that everyone who studies education at every level knows, which is that a bad experience with a teacher, a professor or an institution stays very intensely with people and includes deeply granular narrative detail. Almost everybody can tell a very specific story about the worst experience they had as a student (almost all of which involve an emotionally lethal combination of fury at injustice and deep humiliation or shame), whereas our best experiences of education are often hazy, general, spread out over time. So I think in many cases people skip telling a story of a bad experience because it then takes hold of the entirety of a person’s past; it becomes the main story because of its intensity and specificity. (Say, Walter Kirn’s memoir of being at Princeton, Lost in the Meritocracy.) When public individuals put this kind of bad experience into a memoir or have it crop up in a biography, it is because they think of it as a lifelong trauma—or because they’re articulating a comprehensive disdain for formal education as it is typically practiced (rather the opposite of Highsmith’s sentiments).
Image credit: "Athena" by Brian Glanz is licensed under CC BY 2.0