It occurred to me last evening, as I was paging through C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, that for some reason I was vastly enjoying the slim tome and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. It wasn’t just Lewis’s clear and succinct prose, which I’ve always enjoyed for its ability to convey complex concepts in an understandable fashion, or even my overarching agreement with many of his observations on literature, many of which still seem relevant today, some fifty years after they were published.

No, it wasn’t those things at all, but still, as my eyes scrolled over his words, I couldn’t help but smile. All I was sure of was that his writing ability had little to do with my good mood as I read. Sure, it’d been a good day – I was full of a good meal, brimming with desert and caffeine, but that couldn’t be the total picture.

Then I realized – it was the first time I’d read any work of literary criticism since my graduation from my English MA program some nine months earlier. But that alone wasn’t the whole story. During my time spent studying literature and creative writing, the five years spent toward a BA and MA in English, I’d encountered and read many volumes and articles of literary criticism. And through I’d been impressed by many of them on a purely intellectual level, respected the brilliant minds that created them and hatched their concepts and formulated their impervious sentences, I didn’t enjoy a one of them, not one bit.

What then, made this Lewis book different? I was sure, even as I stared at the cover on the nearby table, that it had nothing to do with Lewis’s ideas, interesting though they were. The simple fact of it was that I was enjoying the book above and beyond the intellectual flirtation his ideas provided me.

After a few minutes wandering aimlessly around my living room, unsettling the cat from her perch in the fur-covered papasan chair, I began to understand that my enjoyment of the book stemmed from my motivation for reading it. I was reading it on the recommendation of a friend, an old man who runs the local used book shop. His bookspertise was such that I’d gone to consult with him for recommendations, to ask him for similar stories like the novel I am writing. I have specific ideas about the function of stories and literature, and after a two-hour conversation about those very topics, he asked me if I’d ever read Lewis’s critical work.

I hadn’t known it existed, up until that moment. He quickly found a musty old copy in the backroom and let me have it for a bargain at fifty cents. “No one else would even pay that much for it, smelling like it does,” he told me. I left it in the early summer sunlight for two days next to a glass jar of sun tea, and that cleared up the smell, leaving me with a serviceable, if stained, copy.

I was eager to read it, simply from his descriptions, but it was another three days before I got around to it, the business of daily life being what it is. When I finally approached the book, late last evening, I paused again, this time to trod down this line of reasoning, finally arriving to loom over the cat on the papasan chair, considering my motivations.

It seems to me that the reason I’ve enjoyed reading the book so much, is because it was useful to me. It directly pertained to what I was writing, and therefore, what I was doing with my daily life, that is, considering a novel and typing it out as the story developed. Lewis’s book, which contains ideas about how literature should be considered, was a timely and fortunate find.

A cup of coffee and a snack later, I was back on my couch, this time deep in thought.  I’d read many books in college that were useful to me, and some that were timely. A select few had even touched me in the way that Lewis’s had, but none inspired the sense of, dare I use such strong a term, joy, in me. But why?

I’m loathe to simply relay to you, as you sit there reading this essay, a simple string of my realizations, but the fiction writer in me must maintain a sense of flow and I confess that a string of realizations is the best way I know how to do that. I’ve never been a great scholarly or academic writer, so please bear with me: I’ve some things to say. The consideration of Lewis’s book created in me a wave of crystallization much in the way that Robert Pirsig describes in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it begins as an idea seed in an uncrystallized solution and from that idea seed a whole crystal seems to grow.

For a long time I’ve had a beaker, if you will allow me to continue with this ham-handed metaphor, of ideas about education, higher education specifically, and the experience reading the Lewis book provided the crystallization for me. Here, for your consideration, were the ideas floating in the beaker, in no particular order:

1. Recently my mother went back to university to finish the four year accounting degree she began three decades earlier. She chose to do this for the simple reason that in today’s job market, twenty-five years of accounting experience wasn’t enough for advancement when all she had was her associates. So she’s returned to school, not to take accounting classes, because those requirements are mostly fulfilled, with the exception of a few classes to become updated, but general education. Currently she’s taking Earth Science. Before that, Film Appreciation. All so she can complete her accounting degree and get a better accounting job.
2. I have, from five years of education, a decent amount of student loan debt that I’m having trouble paying off, despite the nonexistent salary my unpublished novelist career is paying me (ha, ha, my professors did warn me, after all, I can’t blame them completely). The wages from my day job as a technical writer for a small computer networking company are adequate, but it’s hard to make payments each month to a nameless loan company when I receive little day to day benefits of those payments except keeping credit agencies at bay.
3. When earning my MA I taught freshman composition for two years. My students thought every assignment I gave them was useless and dull, and though I assigned projects and papers anyhow, I agreed with them that what I was teaching them was useless and dull, though probably not for the same reasons. But I had no control over the scope of the curriculum. It was handed down to me from on high.

It was with these three concepts in mind that a consideration of Lewis’ work began the wave of crystallization in me. Beware: this is probably a polemic, I make no attempt to defend the reverse side of my ideas, but what I have to say is necessary all the same.

The formal education system in this country is vastly out of balance. In my own discipline, English, thousands more people are allowed to receive degrees than the market can support. Many of my graduate colleagues left school in hopes of finding a job within their discipline, as teachers, editors, or copywriters. But unfortunately, the face of the written language is changing. Multi-media, film, the web, even new forms of text like Twitter are changing the face of how we communicate. Our schools are vastly behind the times, graduating students without the proper tools to integrate themselves into the modern pace of business.

As technology advances the way humans communicate is changing. No longer can struggling writers attempt to support themselves in the dying print market. The old masters were all able to support themselves while working on novels through a steady stream of magazine short-story publishing. Even some of the recent writers, like Stephen King, got started this way. But even by the time he began his career the publishing world had changed enough, was already dying its slow death, and he had to support himself by teaching until he made his sweepstake-winning break.

But it’s not just publishing, or communication, that’s changed by technology. It’s our science, our trades, and everything else. The age old Greek idea (as well as medieval and renaissance) of a well rounded, university education is sadly outdated. The level of specialization required to receive a degree in a modern scientific field is such that all four years could be spent learning a discipline, and our scientists and engineers would be better for it.

If all four years are not required, then all the extra education, in drama, in geology (that easy freshman class that all students take, affectionately referred to in uncouth circles as, “rocks for jocks”), in speech communication, in film appreciation, and all the other bogus classes needed to receive a “well-rounded” university education simply serve to detain students for four years, when two would do, and increase their student debt.

Now, I’m not arguing that drama or film appreciation are not noble or useful pursuits. Simply put, however, are they necessary for a university education? What modern student doesn’t understand film? Our lives are a multimedia existence. Modern students no more need film than they need classes explaining to them how to use their cell phones, or, to beat a straw horse, how to walk on two feet. In fact, modern students could probably teach academics a thing or two, because, as has become painfully obvious, academics, especially in the humanities, are sadly behind the times.

I was allowed to graduate with two degrees in English without any instruction on how the modern business world uses English and communication. I needed HTML, javascript, layout and design instruction, copy-editing, advertisement classes, and any number of other skills I had to teach myself after I realized I needed them to perform the job I was hired to do. Perhaps I picked the wrong pursuit, but I was young and I sorely needed guidance that was not given.

Now, I have no patience for curmudgeonly whiners who present problems without suggesting solutions, so I mean to present some.

Our education system needs to be based on the realistic needs of modern students, students who need real world skills. Contemplating art, and I say this as a novelist and an artist, has no place in the modern college system when so much is riding on that degree. It’s too expensive to spend time contemplating the moon.

Forcing students to learn things they have no interest in, and saddling them with vast amounts of debt for the privilege, is, frankly, bullshit. It’s an outdated system that needs to be changed. I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that recently I read a book of literary criticism. I read it for fun, but also because I needed it. It was applicable to me. Any success that I’ve had in any area has always been won on self-taught sweat, teaching myself the skills that I needed to know because they weren’t taught to me by my supposed educators.

This must change.

Universities need to come down from their ivory towers and talk to modern, fast-paced businesses. They need to ask companies what they want in an English major, a history major, even a computer science major. They need to teach students the skills employers want. They need to institute mandatory internship programs so students gain experience and see the immediate value of the skills they are being taught in the classroom. Schools need to stop trying to dictate how things should be run, and start examining how things are run.

These are the principles that I’ve learned, as a lifetime learner, an employee, and during my two year stint as a teacher while earning my master’s degree:

1. Immediate need dictates desire to learn. If a student needs to know something for a project or an aspect of her job, she will learn it.
2. The converse of point one is also true. Without an applicable need or interest, students will not learn.
3. Universities need to do a better job of preparing students for the real world by listening, not by trying to dictate the terms. Employers want skills, not theory. Theory comes from experience with the material, not the other way around. Employers want experience. Mandatory internships, arranged by the university, are necessary.

The formal education system in this country needs to be reformed. The above steps need to be taken. Classes need to focus on what students need to perform their jobs and the information they are taught needs to be directly applicable.

Art, culture, and the other aspects that make a life worth living need to be left to personal pursuits. I say this without blanching, even as an art lover, because I know that unless a student wants to learn about those things, instruction in those disciplines is useless. It doesn’t get past the media haze unless students reach out for those things themselves, and no instruction by stodgy old men and women out of touch with the modern world is going to encourage that desire. It can only come from inside, or because students feel it’s needed.

It’s time to reform. Otherwise, I stand by the statement boldly proclaimed as the title of this essay: Formal education is bunk.