Learning and Living

Learning is experience.  It is most useful when it relates to us personally.  It arrives whether uninvited or sought.  Learning that seems best to us is that which is invited when needed.  Experience and daily life include some invitation, but may be guided by numerous factors over which we may have little or no control. We do not choose our parents who may or may not favor our self-vision.  In America at this writing there are innumerable voices deploring the paucity of numbers of students seeking education in mathematics and science, especially as that education relates to society’s life of commerce and social requirements.  It provides greater opportunity for employment, and at higher salary than liberal arts students and social studies may anticipate in following and applying their educational/professional interests.   Various reasons are offered for the alleged imbalances from inadequate education in childhood years, to poor parental involvement, to difficulty in the academic fields, to lack of information about the secular and technical fields offering opportunity for discovery and creativity.  Not enough students seem interested in needy fields.  We are sometimes stalled, even angry, about self-interests and society’s needs.

I have seen little in common literature that addresses the issues of life, personal, family or community in some technical fields.  The evidence suggests that even in the development of communications technology we have lost something in the living interrelationships that require much to maintain at satisfactory levels.  So it is that we have greater instances of divorce, of anti-social behavior that includes mass killings of innocent persons – and so the story can be extended.  I have heard several wives say: Don’t marry an engineer unless you want your life to be regimented.  I have even heard prospective engineers say that.  Even Einstein told his wife that she should not enter his study without invitation.  His second wife survived the marriage because she was able to say when queried, that she may not have entered his intellectual life, but: I understand Dr. Einstein. She may have gotten more practicality from her education, in living, than he.

Parents, even Christian parents, largely measure education in the preparation for a lucrative occupation in a career.  Education in the biblical Christian context is primarily interested in finding a life of values (preferably based in righteousness); a concern for problem solving in the human context (preferably based on serving needs of human beings); an awareness of personal life that creates cooperative experience with others in the pursuit of happiness; and, an ethical way to sustain daily life in responsibility to nature (preferably an occupation that affords sustenance for self and dependents, including something that advances the meaning of a good life, ideals and hope).  Scripture encourages the concepts of joy, peace, love, rest, recuperation, friendship, faith, fulfillment, mental activity, devotion and the like.  My education, family, studies, experience, work, and other involvements are expected to contribute to my good life.

If I am to choose one of the undermanned areas, what will those areas give that will advance the meaning of life, and the expectations related to forty or fifty years during which one is fully engaged?  When we can find potential for achieving divine values in a technological society highly dependent upon engineering and occupational education, we will not have so great difficulty in finding needed candidates for purpose.  That we have, in America, the environment for all disciplines cannot be doubted.  Immigrants from nearly every country, with various cultures, languages, and politics seek freedom and opportunities afforded here.  They are welcomed in industry, even in education and government, offering benefit to society and future.  They will become Americans, perhaps influencing their children to become like themselves, but the mix will be changed, the horizons different, the life will become newly-American in some ways – perhaps.  The great loss, from the point of view of these Pages will be that the emerging society may be less Christian, more secular, and lose, even by deliberate action, some life factors we would not want to lose.  It is foreign to God’s way that we give up on building a society of human beings made in the image of God.  It might be easy to say, by an old man, and I will not live to see it.  Dignity of mankind is in a life worth living.