Certain members of the think-tank set have some advice for disaffected young people: go work at Chipotle.
It sounds more condescending than it actually is. Management positions at restaurants like Chipotle or Panda Express can sometimes run from upper five-figure pay to low six-figure pay. Their advice was to apply to such places, get good income, and either advance further at those companies or use your downtime—as well as the money—to look for other opportunities.
It’s practical. It makes sense. But it misses the point because the disaffection people are experiencing isn’t about money. It’s about meaning.
Rather than recommend people enter fast food management, it would make more sense to find ways to give them an increased sense of purpose. And we can do this through online education.
Let me clarify what I mean. I’m not talking about online courses in business management and the like. Those already exist. I’m talking instead about online PhDs or MFAs, BAs in the humanities, and so on. Such programs could be run through Zoom or another video-conferencing application, would be relatively affordable, and would allow people to read serious things while also making connections with others who have similar interests. Access to this could, I think, be life changing.
It was for me.
I had long wanted to pursue an MFA or PhD but had reached a point in my life where I wasn’t as mobile as I would have been when I was, say, 22. I’d started a career in education. I had become a homeowner and was also seriously considering whether I should marry the woman I was dating. (I did.) Applying to an MFA or PhD program and getting accepted, resulting in a move, wouldn’t have been impossible, but it would have resulted in significant disruptions to the life I had established, including, potentially, the end of my relationship.
But while browsing what was then known as Twitter back in 2021, I saw that James Matthew Wilson, a poet and Catholic intellectual, was leaving Villanova University to join the University of St. Thomas in Houston to start an MFA program, one run mostly online. This was an MFA program that also included seminars in the Catholic intellectual tradition, with courses on the philosophy of art and beauty, the European Catholic revival, and the Catholic imagination. In short, it was equal parts great books and workshops. It was the kind of program I’d wanted to attend. And since it was online, it was one I could do without moving or leaving my job. I applied, was accepted, and am set to receive my diploma in May.
The program completed my liberal education, tightened my writing, and gave me connections to both the intellectual and creative worlds I never would have had without the program. And it gave me a deeper sense of my patrimony. I can now see, in a way I hadn’t before, how modernity broke creative, intellectual, and spiritual traditions—there is a reason we have lost sense of the poetic form, the meaning of education and truth, and the fact that there is more to human life than what we experience in the here and now—bringing about much of the confusion we see all around us.
You’d think programs like mine would be commonplace, but they’re not. I think they should be, since they would allow people to assuage their hunger for meaning and purpose. I am especially thinking of people who are interested in ideas but perhaps, due to circumstance or another reason, were unable to attend college or unable to complete their degree. Or, like many people, were unable to use—that dreaded word—their degree in a way they found satisfying. These are people who need a sense of purpose.
We shouldn’t shuttle them into dead-end retail jobs. We should be giving them the tools to think, to recognize that they are part of a glorious tradition and conversation, to recognize that ultimately their life matters, and they are meant to do something great with it.
I believe colleges and universities would bring about a revival of the humanities, properly understood, if they created online, Zoom-based programs for people who were interested—and again, at all levels: BA, MA, PhD. Doing so would allow people to gain access to a truly formative education, which is missing from all levels of schooling. They wouldn’t have to move to do it. And graduates might become writers and public intellectuals and educators. Or they might not. But they would have a better sense of what matters, and they would seek out others to talk about what matters, instead of languishing in a cesspool of meaningless work and meaningless entertainment. They would then form communities and associations—perhaps we’d see the intellectual salon make a return—which would enrich our culture. And from a purely practical standpoint, such programs would also bring more money into university coffers, keeping them open and helping them thrive. Perhaps they would even lead to the foundation of new institutions.
We’re going to hear a lot about making America great again over the next four years. Sparking an educational revival would be a way to do it.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
