The art of building character through education
It has been two years now since the Seattle, Washington-based company Payscale.com published results from their survey that ranked Loma Linda University graduates No. 1 in the nation when asked “Does your job make the world a better place?” The question was intended to assess meaning in life, and 91 percent of our grads said they believed they did make the world better.
I have puzzled over that survey. Who of our grads answered that question? How many? From which of our schools? Why did we do so well? How important is it to find meaning in what you do? Is it the key to happiness, to a good job or advancement, or just a nice side benefit if you can find it?
David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who is on the faculty at Yale, is one of my favorite commentators on today’s world. Brooks grew up in a liberal Jewish home in Greenwich, Connecticut. His parents sent him to a Christian primary school, where he began his exposure to other worldviews. Five years ago he set out to write his latest book, focused on “cognitive humility.” But a Christian colleague convinced him to morph that topic into “moral and spiritual humility.” In the book, The Road to Character, Brooks shares his journey of trying to understand our
…show more content…
While highly respecting them as people, he says “they assume that the culture of expressive individualism is the eternal order of the universe and that meaning comes from being authentic to self. They have a combination of academic and career competitiveness and a lack of a moral and romantic vocabulary that has created a culture that is professional and not poetic, pragmatic and not romantic. The head is large, and the heart and soul are backstage. … To ask about the meaning of life is