
Higher education is an opportunity that is taken very seriously in today’s society. There is a certain honor in achievement that students receive when finishing a degree, but why is this? What do we learn in college that we put so much pressure and effort into school? Foster relays the message that higher education rids people of their ignorant and selfish manners in his speech “This is Water”. Without higher education we tend to remain ignorant in our “default setting.” By reading “This is Water”, it can be argued that education gives an opportunity to consider all perspectives. This is important to new members of society in order to become well rounded and empathetic.

Human nature has always relied on people thinking for themselves. For centuries, survival of the fittest has been a real and occurring situation. Reflecting on this, it makes sense that people are inherently selfish, yet these selfish patterns have blocked off society’s consideration for their peers. Foster states that, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” (Foster XVI) with this he insinuates that with education comes freedom from our normally selfish patterns. He uses the term sacrifice, generally defined as giving something up for another something or someone else, to contrast our our innate ability to be selfish. The pursuit of higher education displays quite the opposite of selfishness, as in engaging in addition schooling, people display new perspective’s which education has provided. Foster also speaks of the time spent “paying attention” and how this is an advantage that people gain from highly sought education. When people stop thinking of only themselves, they acquire a new appreciation for those around them. Due to today’s higher education people more often consider others and their varying perspectives to influence their own. We begin to pay attention to the more mundane aspects of our environment and take them more seriously. 

Foster points out the value of liberal arts education, not only for your ability to get a job, but also for your ability to see things in a different light. We are all born with a selfishness that foster refers to as:

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. (Foster XV)

Later Foster explains that through education people can escape from this default setting. When life is explained as boring and frustrating people may only think this applied to themselves in a singular way. One may think that only mundane and awful things happen to themselves but when we consider the unselfish thought that others may be experiencing the same things, we learn to take their prospective into consideration. This becomes important when making decisions in society. To be a well-rounded person, they must consider that their actions affect other people. When Foster shares his speech, his audience is consisted of newly graduated college students who can be assumed to have little to no idea of what they have just spent the last four years of their lives and thousands of dollars on. A degree, sure, but truly what did they gain from this piece of paper? It is interesting to note that Foster also takes credit for his own default setting and points out that it’s hard wired into each person. It is made obvious that people obtain the ability to think for themselves and about themselves but this speech also supports the fact that people are capable of caring for others and sharing sympathy. Education gives the skills to pay attention.

Ignorance is bliss is a term that many may agree with in some situations, but this saying tears down everything that education stands for. We learn history for the main purpose of preventing the same such actions again. If we ignore these events, we can no longer have any control over preventing them in the future. When Foster states that, “freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline” (XVI) he gives us a clear equation of what higher education means. Nowhere in this statement is ignorance involved. The selfish thoughts that all people share are cut down when education is involved. Instead of thinking only about yourself and your problems, people can consider the fact that they aren’t the only ones living in a society and that the world doesn’t revolve around them. The term freedom is recurring in Foster’s speech. 

Although it is very easy and tempting to think that only one person is the center of the world, it’s argued that with higher education these thoughts are minimized. Foster states that these selfish and ignorant thoughts are common and expected, but that they can be overcome. Our opinion of ignorance and college education’s correlation grows throughout Foster’s speech, not only because of his examples, but also because of the way he teaches us to look at other perspectives. When people engage in the world around them, they make better informed decisions; which can also be considered more educated decisions. The idea that one person is the center of the world is eliminated. Once people can understand that there is more out there, they gain a greater appreciation for the education they have received and hold a greater honor for that silly piece of paper we call a college degree, because it means so much more.
