Minerva Chronicles: Half of the Beginning
My time in San Francisco is about half of what it was at the beginning of this semester. To condense the past four months of adventure in San Francisco into just a few paragraphs would be impossible, so I’ll let the pictures show a bit of that. I’ll focus instead on Minerva and my ever-growing understanding of what it’s about. If you haven’t read the previous posts, do so here and here.
My perspective shifts almost every day whether I’m in class or out. I’m left with a lot of unanswered questions, and a painfully lingering desire for straightforward answers. But the days for those have passed, and the first lesson to learn at Minerva is that the world’s problems can’t be solved in one hour-and-a-half discussion. And, even though literally nothing can be explained completely, the why for an answer is much more important than the answer itself. Before, every grade was right or wrong, black or white. Now I deal with shades. Before the teacher was the ultimate authority on an answer’s correctness. Now it is evidence. Before I was graded on remembering processes. Now I’m graded on applying learned concepts to help solve complex problems.
For the first year of Minerva, the main focus is not specialized skills but rather broad habits of mind or foundational concepts that are applicable and improving to everyday life. This makes the first year more of a behavioral learning process, and consequently quite different from anything students have done before which is, no doubt, frustrating. After all, most of us at Minerva have spent our whole lives in an education system completely opposite.
Before I was often motivated by fear: fear of parental punishment, fear of bad grades, fear of not getting into a college, fear of failure. And while fear is an excellent motivator to get things done, it induces high levels of unhealthy stress and paralyzes open-mindedness and creativity. Fear is an archaic motivator evolved for survival, but the fact is, we humans no longer have a problem surviving and the things we are afraid of aren’t really life-threatening. The silicon valley is a great place to realize that failure is not at all the end, so long as you learn from it. Indeed it seems that fear is not a very constructive tool, especially when used on one’s self.
Now in an education where creativity is key in bridging different topics together with a common concept, being always optimistic and idealistic tends to lead to better ideas. Nothing new can ever be created from negativity, nothing great is founded on skepticism. Perhaps this is why Minerva students live in such a great environment for a community. 125 or so people from around the world, sharing a big house, with a big dining room and kitchen — all getting along better than family. Without the roundabout support from fellow students and faculty in both academics and life, Minerva wouldn’t be the same. The positive environment is meant to foster imagination to consider creative solutions to complex problems and drive to analyze or test those.
This, however, leads to the next great question we students are faced with: Decisions based on fact and reason are almost always logically superior to decisions based on emotions, but emotions are integral to human spontaneity and creativity. What would you do if someone told you your “feelings” were wrong and were horribly misguiding many of the decisions you make every day? As hopeful liberal-arts students, we concluded that there simply must be a balance between living by emotions and living by reason. Luckily, this is true, and without emotions humans wouldn’t be able to associate a “good feeling” with their choices, causing them to forever spiral into indecision. But still, all this information and learning about the way minds work doesn’t magically let us control our own. Finding that balance will take time.
To be perfectly honest though, I’ve come to despise the idea of “finding balance,” probably because I realized how easy it easy to talk about and so difficult to find. Indeed, I am guilty of appealing to this abstract idea of balance as well, and can’t help sighing every time I hear something like this in class:
“Well you see professor, I would argue that the answer is neither here nor there but rather is about finding the balance between the two” — said every student ever who had no idea what they were talking about.
It is true that the answer is somewhere in between, sure, but this answer is only good for copping out and ending debates quite fruitlessly. For the purpose of discussion and education, an answer that takes a stand somewhere rather than nowhere and is backed with evidence is much more valuable. Even if it is wrong, it took more critical thinking than appealing to the fallacy of balance. At the very least, another student will have to think critically in order to contradict the faulty answer, and most likely this will lead to a better finding.
Here I believe lies another critical lesson of Minerva: there are those who are satisfied in finding that there is no clear right answer and then there are those who actually push to find it. Those people are the doers, the ones who solve the biggest problems, but this does mean they do so without meeting failure many times first.
Minerva was founded on similar principles. Minerva stands for an education without fear, for those motivated to create and learn and explore through their hopes and passions. Minerva stands for an education beyond emotions or reason, and strives for critical thinking. Minerva stands for the ideal global education, and this means one that is constantly changing.
Being part of the first class at Minerva has been truly amazing. But Minerva is a new school, and it’s driven by feedback. I still struggle with finding my role somewhere between student and beta-tester and both participating in and criticizing the curriculum at the same time can be difficult. There is a reward though, and it comes in the changes we see. It comes when I reflect on how much both my school and myself have changed for the better. It comes when we take a step back and are not only thankful for how far we’ve come, but are also excited for the road ahead. Therefore perhaps it is not what Minerva has been about that is important, but what we are going to make it.
