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Archived Bulletins
July 2003
REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING AT ASHESI
By Kentaro Toyama
Visiting Lecturer, Calculus: Spring, 2002
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| Visiting Lecturer, Kentaro Toyama |
Early during my two-month tenure at Ashesi, I was shocked by how frequently the desire for wealth figured in my students' dreams. Of course, it shouldn't be surprising that a school whose emphasis is business and entrepreneurship should attract those who want to make money. But what struck me was the sheer strength of their desire - for the majority of my students, wealth was the pinnacle of attainment. This didn't jive with my perception of them as some of the most wholesome and remarkable people that I had ever met. Aren't well-formed souls supposed to be beyond materialistic cravings?
Over time, I came to realize that the apparent contradiction was merely a conceit of my own mind - a post-industrial, upper-middle-class, liberally leaning mind. What I came to realize is that in a country like Ghana, struggling as it is for economic independence, those seeking legitimate wealth are on nothing short of a spiritual quest.
In affluent societies, ambition, particularly when directed at money, is justly viewed with suspicion. It's considered crass, even immoral, to seek opulence beyond one's needs. "Beyond one's needs," however, is the key condition: we don't cast aspersions on the ambitions of the impoverished. Greed among the poor is no more possible than gluttony among the starving. Acquisition of capital in developing economies is not only forgivable, it's necessary for survival. Still, survival by itself is hardly spiritual.
So, what makes a quest spiritual? I would propose that it is those secular qualities that are common to all religions, that part of religiousness upon which all faiths might agree. I'll focus on three.
First among these is that a spiritual quest is a journey of conscious growth toward wholeness as a human being. Wholeness includes qualities such as discipline, self-confidence, independence, and compassion. While most of us fumble haphazardly toward these traits, those on the spiritual path deliberately choose these qualities as goals and will sacrifice comfort in their conscious effort to achieve them.
My students understood well that their dreams weren't easily attained, and that they needed discipline to achieve them. I prescribed an assignment a day, for each of which it took the teaching assistant or me several hours to write the solution set. The students worked them diligently and, in some instances, heroically. One student would every day turn in the half of each problem set that he struggled for hours to complete and then thank me for what he had learned. Another student shot me blank looks in class, but nightly forged her bewilderment into the knowledge needed to ace the next day's quiz. As the term went on, I could almost sense the neuroses forming in some students' psyches from the exhausting hours of derivatives and integrals. But, I think they knew that these were necessary hardships to be endured if they wanted to realize their dreams.
Conscious striving pervaded other areas of the students' lives, as well. Students sought opportunities to speak in front of an audience as a way to increase self-confidence; organized extracurricular activities, as a way to learn leadership; or engaged with charities and other non-profit organizations, as a way of expressing citizenship and compassion. I believe they would have sought those things as ends in themselves, but their ambitions served to intensify this seeking.
Intense...but beautiful, too. Among my students, I witnessed a profound camaraderie that could thrive only amidst a purity of intention - which I would argue is another mark of the spiritual quest. There were friendly rivalries and fierce debates, as is expected at any good university, but there was not a trace of the petty envy or jealous competitiveness that I had seen during my undergraduate years. Students helped one another and worried for each other. They brought to mind Alexander Dumas's musketeers - only it wasn't three of them, but twenty-five. One woman, whose dearest wish was to buy a comfortable house for her mother, also envisioned an Ashesi reunion some day hence, arriving in a new car, parking next to the shiny vehicles of every one of her classmates, and giving a speech to inspire incoming students. I didn't decline when she offered to buy, for each of her teachers, a sporty car of our choosing.
That brings me to the third characteristic of the spiritual quest - the seeker's efforts benefit the whole community. In Asia, lay people take for granted that the silent prayers of cloistered Buddhist monks have redeeming value for the rest of us who live worldly lives. This was true as well of medieval monastics in the Christian tradition, Sufi mystics among Muslims, and likely also for traditional spiritual guides in Africa.
But no faith is required to understand that the financial assets an individual accrues can help support a community. Homegrown capital is required to displace foreign investment, and to end what Kwame Nkrumah identified as "neocolonialism" - the siphoning away (by developed countries) of natural resources and the fruits of human labor from developing nations. All other cash flow into third-world countries disappears into corrupt pockets (which finds shelter abroad, in turn only feeding outside investment), or into critical, but ultimately evanescent forms of humanitarian aid. I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that internally and legitimately accumulated wealth is the best fuel for a nation's economic engine.
Finally, people on spiritual quests willingly offer what they have attained to help others. This generosity was common among my students. Many were engaged with charitable causes through their churches. Others set up extracurricular volunteer activities. And, in journal entry after journal entry (the last five minutes of each class were set aside for answering a question that the teaching assistant or I posed), my students described how their imminent financial assets would supply scholarships for Ashesi, provide healthcare in their villages, or create jobs in their home countries.
No doubt, for better and for worse, these dreams will change as time goes on. Seekers often set new goals. What matters is that the effort will be made - and will lift the fortunes of a continent. I'm reminded of the eras of the Homestead Act in the United States and of postwar reconstruction in Japan, when the personal ambitions of individuals led to the grace of their nations. Today, both America and Japan must look toward quests beyond material wealth, but for Ghana and West Africa, there is no other salvation.
So, to students of Ashesi, I say: Work hard, play hard, and be ambitious!
Acknowledgments: I'm grateful to Susie Lee, Scott Stossel, Dan Toyama, and Haruki Toyama, for providing comments on earlier drafts.
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