[I'm really late on this one...and I'm not doing what the blog prompt said. Oh well!]
The Intrinsic Good of Thinking
I had my girls read "Is Thinking Good for it's Own Sake" by Clifford Williams from The Life of the Mind. It's a really neat article - it makes you think about thinking :D
Williams opens his article by talking about how Americans tend to require everything they do to fulfill a concrete purpose. It's kind of like a quote from a story about the American Revolution. A French general was training American troops, and he wrote to a friend in his country something along these lines: "You tell your European soldier to do something, and he does. But I have to say to my American soldier, 'this is the reason you are to do it', and then he does it."
So often here we look at college and we expect it to accomplish something - like getting us a better job, more money, etc. This easily leads to grade grubbing--only doing enough in a class to pass it and get a good grade, without caring about the subject matter. Williams argues that this should not be a student's only focus.
Instead, he says, students should see knowledge as intrinsically good - valuable in and of itself, without reference to what it can get you. Williams makes the point that, especially as Christians, we should desire knowledge for it's own sake (because God values it) and not only for the material benefits we get from it. There is beauty in the process of discovering, and we should enjoy that.
