Mountain climbing

So this week's news has been all taken up with the three climbers who went missing on Mount Hood. One has been found, dead. The other two are still missing, but the weather has turned severe enough that the search has been halted indefinitely, and I'm hearing that there's less than a one percent chance that they're still alive. This story keeps grabbing my attention in part because it's touched off a debate about whether all climbers should carry beacons. It's also dredged up a loose end from the talk I gave to the incoming frosh last August, a loose end I wound up not including.

Nearly all college students bellyache about the core. They don't understand why they have to take classes from departments outside their major. Some think that they do understand, and the reasons they come up with don't cast us in a very good light: it's busy work, it brings in tuition money for the school. I'm frequently surprised at how many of my very good, very mature students are the loudest to complain about having to take core classes.

I planned to set aside some time in my talk with the frosh to take up this very subject, and this is how I was going to introduce it: when I lived in Arizona, I used to hear on the news about pinheads taking off to hike the Grand Canyon in the middle of August and taking nothing with them. No backpack, no cell phone, no water, nothing. And, naturally, a lot of them ran into trouble that they didn't see coming, and had to be rescued. Now it certainly should be possible to go on a hike without bringing along a cell phone: the cell phone does nothing to help me put one foot in front of the other. But a wise person will bring along a cell phone in case something unexpected does happen.

This Mount Hood story has a lot of folks demanding that reckless hikers and climbers who need rescuing be billed for the rescue, or even that certain zones be declared no-rescue zones; if you enter them, and something goes wrong, well, been nice knowing you. Most of us have a very easy time identifying sloppy and inadequate preparation in other people's behavior, and seeing it as a very clear-cut and egregious wrong, the kind we would never commit.

But that same principle of necessary preparation for the unknown is in play when it comes to core classes. Nearly everyone changes career fields many times over the course of a lifespan. I, for example, am already in my second occupation, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if there were more changes in store down the road. We take core classes, loading up with extra knowledge of such things as history, social and natural sciences, and basic skills in writing and math, for the same reason that competent mountain climbers take along a camping stove. They likely don't enjoy shouldering the extra weight, but it is reasonably foreseeable that under certain circumstances, it will help them survive.

Unfortunately, necessary preparation is burdensome, and thus requires discipline, and people at this developmental stage have just emerged from under the externally imposed discipline of their parents, and are too giddy with relief from that emergence to be in a frame of mind to impose self-discipline from inside. But they're very ready, attitudinally, to look with disdain on hikers and climbers who set out on a journey unprepared. I just wish I could find a way to make that connection real for them, and make it deep and powerful enough that it would drive them toward cultivating a good attitude about boning up in core classes.