‘Rescuing Socrates’ And Personal Reflections on Education

“Education is in the questions, NOT the answers”

– Roosevelt Montas, Rescuing Socrates

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in my newsletter, creatively titled “David’s Newsletter,” in December 2022. If you enjoy this, you can subscribe here.

For a lot of young people, college is the biggest stress. This, I believe, is for mostly good reasons. It determines where you’ll live, who you’ll meet, and what your entire life will center on during life-shaping, formative years.

At least, I know these years shaped the course of mine.

I had an unconventional college experience by any measure.

I started when I was 20, after two gap years.

I chose to go to a school without a traditional campus.

This made it feel like I was just a person living in New York who happened to go to school, rather than centering my identity around being a college student.

Most unconventionally, I chose a program, The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where every student creates their own major.

As any college study can attest to, the question “What do you study?” comes up so often, it becomes either a constant stress or a chance to go on autopilot.

I had honed a whole spiel about how in my gap years I knew that I wanted to center on skills that would transfer beyond one specific career path.

I thought that creating a unique combination of skills would put me into a ‘category of one.’ I outlined this argument in an essay I wrote way back in 2020.

(I just reread it, and although the writing is just average, I think the ideas hold up.)

While I had an idea of what I wanted to study at the onset, as college went on, what I studied shifted.

I didn’t expect, for example, that an archaeology class during my freshman year would pave the way for a deep interest in persuasion, especially from a pre-modern perspective. (As an example of this interest, you can see this article on the visual persuasion of the Roman emperor Augustus.)

Nor did I expect that a class on volcanoes would fuel key intellectual breakthroughs about how to connect information with presentation.

These experiences support my intellectual bedrock, and my excitement for them went well beyond how they “applied to my career.”

In total, this helped lead to a big takeaway from my college experience:

College shouldn’t just be about becoming employable.

We should explore and try new things. We should build a base of general skills rather than pigeonhole ourselves into boxes we can’t leave, and career paths we never were that convinced of anyway. It should be about ongoing discovering rather than centering on one discovery.

Especially when people often make these life-defining decisions at such a young age.

To paraphrase Roosevelt Montás in his book Rescuing Socrates, my education lived in the questions, not in the answers.

In my view, education should guide us toward the right questions that force us to look inward at how we truly want to live.

Specific disciplines, whether it’s medicine or programming, can then overlay on top of a general foundation.

We should focus on how one should live life, rather than what one should do for a living.

It’s rather foolish, even on the surface, to think that the former is more important than the latter.

Again, to quote Montás, “The greatest value of a liberal education lies in turning students’ eyes inward, into an exploration of their own humanity.”

While this argument may seem grounded and specific to the context of college education, I think it transfers.

All of life, in college and beyond, should not be about ‘making a living,’ it should be about how to live life, and what to live life for.

In his book, this message from Montás shines through. It is his call for a “liberation education,” although he recognizes its branding challenges. He writes, “Liberal education has always been a hard sell.”

Since graduating from university, that is how I have continued to evolve.

I have brought my interdisciplinary curiosity and desire to ‘learn for learning’s sake’ everywhere I go (rather than a “how does this serve my career” lens.)

(For example, learning Catalan this summer in Barcelona has been one of the highlights of a jam-packed year.)

Almost as a bonus, a side effect, rather than what I view as the main intention, Gallatin provided me with the professional skills to thrive in an ever-changing world.

Copywriting, while far from a passion, turned out to be an excellent outlet to combine my formal background in both creative writing and persuasion along with my deep interest in languages.

Yet, I know it’s not my identity, nor a reflection of my true gifts. I view making my living as but one facet of many in my life.

If you’re interested in learning more about the value of interdisciplinary or non-disciplinary education, I highly recommend the book Rescuing Socrates by Roosevelt Montás, which I read this month.

This education, Which looks at the core of Our humanity and Purpose, should be for everyone

Montás deconstructs the flawed argument that general education is only for the elite and privileged. In fact, he argues, those historically marginalized often benefit most from this educational approach. The old joke from grumpy old people that “there are no jobs at the psychology factory” completely misses the point that a general, liberal education can liberate students from these historical patterns.

Montás writes, “We do minority students an unconscionable disservice when we steer them away from the traditional liberal arts curriculum.”

Here, I’ll leave you when one of the many sections I highlighted in the book.