A friend of mine gave me the recent best seller “When Breath Becomes Air,” written by Paul Kalanithi.

It is not a summer beach read unless you like to cry at the beach.

 
Also, I can’t say that there is anything in this book to reflect on that directly relates to EHE either. For that reason, I write about this book for its sad beauty.

It is the true tale of a man dying; a beautiful and talented man who teaches us, in many ways, how to live. Paul reflects on King Lear, Occam’s Razor, and Greek tragedy, on the meaning of life, and science, and love. He reminds us that, “This is not the end. Or even the beginning of the end. This is just the end of the beginning.”

Read it and weep, but also read and treasure it for the treasure it holds within. Perhaps the best time to read it is this Memorial Day, which traditionally honors veterans.

Paul Kalanithi is not a veteran, but his memoir may help those of us who visit a cemetery or reflect on cherished memories this weekend.

I wish you and your families the best this Memorial Day.

My monthly book review celebrates a book by one of our own “family members,” Ashley Perez. She is the wife of Arnulfo Perez, assistant professor in EHE’s Department of Teaching and Learning.

Out of Darkness is an award-winning young adult book, for those who are 12- to 18-years old, about a small town in east Texas during the 1930s.

Perez is obviously intimate with the geography and peoples of east Texas. Her use of language, describing the seasons and transitions of time, is beautiful. The themes of this book, however, are very adult. Those themes include murder, rape, incest, disaster, love, loss and prejudice. There’s a mean girl, a mean man, and mean sentiments.

If the book were a movie, and it probably should be, then I would rate it R. The important overriding theme, however, is the “R” of racism.

 
Perez’ achievement is creating a cast of characters, black, white, and Mexican, who the reader can’t help but care deeply about. She paints a searing picture of what those relationships led to in those days.

Alongside all this is the story of the single greatest school disaster in American history: the New London School explosion, which killed 295 students and teachers.  

 
The account is eye opening, sobering and deep.

Out of Darkness is a well-crafted book. Perez is obviously a very talented writer, able to tell a story simultaneously from multiple perspectives.

I recommend you read it before you share it with your children and then talk to them about it.

There’s a lot to learn and talk about.

I attended a Polytechnic State College (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, to be specific), so what I say next might surprise you.

I had a broad and liberal education. I took physics and fiction, history, philosophy, and economics. Some of these were my all-time favorite courses even though I was a biology major. I regret that I did not take a poetry course.

Because of this, I wince when I hear that people say statements such as, “All higher education needs to do is focus on technical/career preparation for the job,” at the expense of a liberal education. I am puzzled when all the pundits claim our graduates will have seven or eight different jobs in the future, jobs that we don’t even know how to currently describe!

America’s education worked in the past precisely because it was not as narrowly-defined, prescriptive and technical as either the European or Asian models. America’s education allowed our students to explore, to try ideas (and majors) out, to reason, to sample many different subjects, to conceive and to create. There are many things within higher education that we should change and/or refresh, but losing a liberal education is not one of them.

There is so much we want our college graduates to know and do, such as:

• How to find and access knowledge (of course!)
• How to learn
• How to analyze data
• How to reason
• How to make a scientific argument
• How to recognize the interconnectivity of life and the world we live in
• How to compare and contrast belief sets
• How to experiment
• How to communicate
• How to understand our own and others’ motives and choices, and finally,
• How to live with a curious, open-ended attitude in a world of complexity with enough intellectual, emotional and hands-on skills to navigate it, come what may.

A narrow, job-training focus won’t provide our graduates with what they need to know to succeed.

Let us not become limited and limiting in an age when all of human knowledge is accessible and the future is limitless. Let’s preserve a broad general education. Update it. Focus on problem-solving and integration, but keep it.

Our democracy and national well-being depends upon it. So do we all.