The Value of Liberal Arts Education and Learning to Think

The main takeaway is that real education is about awareness and choosing how to think in the day-to-day adult existence.

### David Foster Wallace: This Is Water
* 👨 David Foster Wallace delivers a commencement speech at Kenyon's graduating class of 2005, challenging the graduates to think about the **real value of their education**.
* 🐟 Wallace shares a parable about young fish who are unaware of the water they swim in, emphasizing that "**the most obvious important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about**."
* 🎓 He discusses the cliché that a liberal arts education teaches students "**how to think**," highlighting that the real education is about **choosing what to think about**.
* 🧠 "Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some **control over how and what you think**."
* 🛒 Wallace uses the example of navigating a frustrating trip to the supermarket to illustrate the **importance of choosing how to think** in mundane, everyday situations.
* 🔥 The speech culminates in the idea that the most important kind of freedom involves **attention, awareness, and discipline** to combat the default setting of **self-centeredness**.
* 💡 Wallace contends that the real value of education lies in **simple awareness of the realities that are "hidden in plain sight all around us all the time."**

greetings, thanks, and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. If anybody feels like perspiring, I'd invite you to go ahead because I'm sure going to. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, morning boys, how's the water? and the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, what the hell is water? This is a standard requirement of commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable of stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am NOT the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious important realities are often

the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. Of course, the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education, meaning to try to explain why the degree you're about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliche in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about, quote, teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never lacked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you've needed anybody to teach you.

how to think. Since the fact that you
even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know
how to think, but I'm gonna posit to you that the liberal arts cliche turns out
not to be insulting at all. The really significant education in
thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the
capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your
total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to
waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water and to
bracket, for just a few minutes, your skepticism about the value of the
totally obvious. Here's another didactic

says look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught away from camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost. I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below. And so, I tried it. I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, Oh God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard and I'm gonna die if you don't help me. And now in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. Well then, you must believe now, he says. After all, here you are, alive. The atheist just rolls his eyes. No, man. All that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come honoring by, and they showed me the way back to King. It's easy to run the story through a kind of standard liberal arts analysis. The exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people.

given those people's two different belief templates in two different ways of constructing meaning from experience because we prize

more repulsive than atheists at least to most of us but religious dogma. This problem is exactly the same as the stories unbeliever blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up. The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties, because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will. Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realist, most vivid, and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of

natural basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth. Think about it. There is no experience you have had that you are not at the absolute center of the world as you experience it. Is there in front of you or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV or your monitor, and so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate or real. Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural

default setting this way are often described as being well-adjusted, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term. Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-analyze stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what is going on inside me, as I'm sure you guys know by now, is extremely difficult. To stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head, may be happening right now. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea. Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise.

some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention
to, and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you
cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Think of the old cliche about the mind being an excellent servant but a
terrible master. This, like many cliches, sounds exciting on the surface,
actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit
coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms
always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth
is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the
trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your
liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through
your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to
your head, and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely,
imperially alone, day in and day out.

may sound like hyperbole or abstract
nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is
that you, graduating seniors, do not yet have any clue what day-in, day-out really
means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody
talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and
petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what
I'm talking about. By way of example, let's say it's an
average adult day. You get up in the morning, go to your challenging
white-collar, college graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours. At
the end of the day, you're tired and somewhat stressed, and all you want is to
go home, have a good supper, and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack
early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But
then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this
week because of your challenging job.

so now, after work, you have to get in
your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of a workday, and the
traffic is apt to be very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it
should. And when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded because
of course, it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to
squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously fluorescently lit and
infused with soul-killing music or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the
last place you want to be. But you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to
wander all over the huge overlit store's confusing aisles to find the
if you want. And you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other
tired, hurried people with carts, etc., etc., cutting stuff out because it's a long
ceremony. And eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out
there aren't enough checkout lanes open.

even though it's the end of the day rush.
So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you
can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register who
has overworked at a

after year, but it will be and many more
dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines. Besides, but that is not the
point. The point is that petty frustrating crap like this is exactly
where the work of choosing is going to come in because the traffic jams and
crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think. And if I don't
make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm
gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop because my natural
default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all
about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home.
And it's good to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way
and who are all these people in my way and look at how repulsive most of them
are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and non-human they seem in the
checkout or at how annoying and rude it is that
people are talking loudly on cellphones.

in the middle of the line and look at
how deeply personally unfair this is. Of course, if I'm in a more socially
conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the
end of the day traffic being disgusted about all the huge stupid lane-blocking
SUVs and Hummers and v12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful selfish 40-gallon
tanks of gas. I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper
stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish
vehicles driven by the ugliest. This is an example of how not to think: biggest,
most disgustingly selfish vehicles

think this way in the store and on the
freeway. Fine, lots of us do, except say, thinking this way tends to be so easy
and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default
setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating,
crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious
belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings
are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that, of course,
there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In
this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way, it's not impossible
that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the
past and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered
them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive, or that the
Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little
child is hurt or sick in the seat next.

to him, and he's trying to get this kid
to the hospital. He's in a way bigger, more legitimate
hurry than I am. It is actually I who am in his way, or I can choose to force
myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's
checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I, and that some of these
people probably have much harder, more tedious, or painful lives than I did.
Again, please don't think I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're
supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically
do it because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you were like me, some
days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most
days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look
differently at this fad dead-eyed, over made-up lady who just screamed at her
kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not

usually like this. Maybe she's been up
three straight nights, holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone
cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles
department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific,
infuriating red tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends
what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what
reality is and who and what is really important, if you want to operate on your
default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities
that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to think, how to
pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be
within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow consumer hell type
situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that
lit the Stars, love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things. Deep down,
not that that mystical stuff's

necessarily true. The only thing that's
capital T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. This, I
submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You
get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to
decide what to worship. Because here's something else that's weird but true: in
the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as
atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships; the only
choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing
some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh
or the Wiccan mother goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of
ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you
alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in
life, then you will never have enough.

never feel you have enough. It's the
truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always
feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths
before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already.
It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables - the
skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth upfront in
daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and
you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a
fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these
forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it is that they are
unconscious, they are default settings, they're the kind of worship you just
gradually slip into day after day, getting more and more selective about
what you see and how you measure value.

without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it, but of course, there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in

myriad petty little unsexy ways every
day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the
constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that
this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational, the
way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is
the capital T truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You
are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish, but please don't just
dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of the stuff is really
about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital T truth is about life before death. It is about the real value of a
real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge and everything to
do with simple awareness, awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden
in plain sight all around us all the

time that we have to keep reminding
ourselves over and over. This is water, this is water.
It's unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult
world day in and day out, which means yet another grand cliche
turned out to be true: your education really is the job of a lifetime, and it
commences you.

Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master - David Foster Wallace

We cannot change the world. But we can change ourselves...and that will change the world. The goal of this channel is to empower the individual and deliver profound ideas through art.

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After Skool

The 2005 Kenyon Graduation Speech: Finding the Realities of Life

The commencement speech discusses the importance of recognizing the obvious but significant realities in life, using the metaphor of fish and water.

It challenges the cliche that a liberal arts education is just about teaching how to think, emphasizing the crucial aspect of choosing what to think about.

The speech also presents a story about belief, highlighting how the same experience can have different meanings for different people, subject to individual interpretation.

The Importance of Challenging Our Default Mindset

Challenging our natural self-centered default setting is crucial for learning how to think.

The academic environment can sometimes lead to over-analysis, taking away from being present in the moment.

Learning how to think is not just about intellect, but also about being attentive and aware of our own thought patterns.

Being conscious and aware allows for the choice of what to focus on and how to interpret experiences, preventing a default state of unhappiness.

The real value of a liberal arts education is learning how to avoid living an unconscious and unfulfilling life.

The speech emphasizes the significance of being conscious to prevent being controlled by the routine and frustration of adult life.

Choosing a Different Perspective in the Midst of Life's Irritations

The daily frustrations of life can easily lead to a self-centered and negative mindset, but it's possible to consciously choose a different perspective.

By considering the challenges and hardships of others, it's possible to cultivate empathy and understanding in the midst of annoying situations.

While it takes effort and may not always be possible, making a conscious choice to see things differently can greatly impact one's experience.

Worshiping anything other than spiritual or ethical principles will have detrimental effects on one's life.

The things people worship, such as money, beauty, or power, are unconscious and default settings that can lead to never feeling satisfied.

The key is to keep this truth in mind and consciously choose what to worship in order to avoid negative consequences.

The True Meaning of Freedom and Education

The modern culture promotes a narrow definition of freedom focused on self-centered achievements, while the real freedom lies in attention, awareness, and caring for others.

The author emphasizes that true education is about understanding how to think and being conscious of the reality around us.

The text urges the reader to embrace the real value of education, which is not just about knowledge but about simple awareness in our daily lives.