The idea of the academic conversation is a topic that we, students of the Global Citizens CAP stream at UBC, have recently been discussing in our ASTU100 class. Questions on the nature of the scholarly community have been fuelling our discussion (led by Dr. Luger), a discussion that has clearly sparked the curiosity of many including myself.
While I do believe that the scholarly community is a well refined and educated place for conversation, I believe that the question is bigger than simply how or why we contribute to exclusively academic conversation. It seems that we, as budding scholars, are really asking; why does one learn at all?
As I began to give more and more thought to this question over the course of the past week, my train of thought took a wrong turn down a discouraging track. Chances are, whatever knowledge you discover, whatever thoughts one has, it has already been discovered or thought through by someone who preceded them. Education is, essentially, feeding students knowledge that has already been discovered. The fact that it is already known is what enables it to be taught. While a university setting claims to leave room for creative thinking, there are few (if any) new conclusions to be drawn. So what good is it to learn at all? If I can’t contribute anything new, I may as well save myself the hassle, quit learning, and become a hermit.
Scholars are supposed to be the smart ones. Shouldn’t they have realized by now the futility of their quest? This concept began to manifest itself in other aspects of life and became quite burdening. For a few days, I was savagely pessimistic about the idea of a university and academics. I became critical of the value of creativity.
So I thought about music, about writing songs- a widely praised embodiment of creativity. Literally everything that makes musical sense must be explored and written by now. Logically there just aren’t enough options that exist to come up with a musical progression that hasn’t been created yet, recorded or not. Yet artists and composers still manage to create new songs. Chances are the musical structure, the chords, the lyrics, whatever else makes up a song… chances are that they’ve already been created or used. But by some miracle, the artist has organically arrived at something new. There are traces of what the artist has learned along the way (what we like to call influence) but by way of their own unique and personal approach to music they have succeeded in lending it a new voice.
For me, this reality is largely what began to shed a more positive light on learning. In academics, this same new voice that artists achieve is what we can and must contribute to the conversation. Though the same knowledge or the same truths may have been discovered and written long before our time, there is value in the fact that we can give them new shape in the present.
What humans do so well is ignore the value of the process and the growth it nurtures. Success is something that we tend to measure by the end product, instead of by how we strive to reach it. Yes, much of what there is to know has been known. Much of music has been written. Many if not all mountains have been climbed. But there is value and joy in getting there, regardless of who has reached it before we have, and in getting there we’re able to give it a new voice.
We’ve been given a world to make sense of and the journey of making sense of it is precisely what makes it exciting and worth making sense of.
-Joseph