Education: Obligation or Opportunity?
As a younger kid, I would go to the library weekly. Sundays were library days. I would climb into my mom’s light blue kia sorento, bringing my piles of books to return. We would travel over the Chesapeake bridge and as soon as the car stopped, I hopped out to run inside. Waving to the librarian, Mr. Dave, I would inhale the new book smell and rush over to the kids’ section, reeling with excitement to look at new books. I was only ready after finding no less than 15 books to bring home with me for that week. Barely reaching, I would throw them up on the counter to be scanned. I would start flipping through the crisp, pages on the car ride home.
As a kid, there was nothing like weekly trips to the library with my mom, but something about the library is different now. Being a student in the American school system for 12 years has changed something about reading for me. Picking up a book feels more like a chore these days. It’s hard to go back to that little kid state of excitement and curiosity. While school may be a contributing factor to this shift in feeling, it does not give us permission to be hands off concerning our education. We can’t step back and blame the system for not being up to par. If the system isn’t working, it is more important than ever to take responsibility so that we can be part of the solution.
While the school system has flaws, one of the bigger problems is the lack of ownership that we see in students. It is entirely possible to go to high school and college and not be educated; it is also entirely possible to go to high school and college and be well educated. Though society might view two people with the same degree as equally educated, it is possible that gaps exist in their education. Getting your education through school, you get exactly what you put in. There are kids in my school with 4.0 GPAs because they cheat like nobody’s business. With the goal of getting into a “good” college, school can easily turn into a game where winning is getting the highest grades and the ends justify the means. This can mean that kids who lack ownership and originality but are good at this game get praise and acceptance to prestigious schools. Participating in this game is effective in the short term, but the stakes are higher than just getting into a good school.
Faking your way through high school in order to earn your degree will get you nowhere. Actually caring about what you are learning (whether you believe it is relevant to you or not) is a part of being educated that is largely ignored. And that’s not easy these days where hating school is the norm, understandably with all the stress that comes along with it. But that doesn’t make cheating okay. Students think their teachers are bad or the class is boring so they feel justified in cheating. But let me tell you a secret: not trying will get you nowhere in life. Effort is important. Even if school is boring or you hate it, there’s a bigger picture to be focus on. School provides an educational avenue that many are lacking. Sure you can cheat your way through it, but what’s the point?
To be truly educated, you must be interested and invested. You must want to learn, or you won’t. And not just knowing the date Abraham Lincoln died or reciting the 8th element on the periodic table. Learning history and how to write and make arguments is about learning that content, yes; but also it’s about what you get out of the learning process. Sure, after high school you might never need to write an argument essay ever again, but the skills you learn from that process are endlessly important. You can learn to understand and consider different viewpoints, to read all the facts before coming to conclusions, and you can learn empathy. Truly educated do not need to know every historical event and every motif in Shakespeare’s plays. Truly educated people are those who know how to navigate the world and understand others.
Education is not about memorizing everything you learn. You absolutely do not need to know everything you have ever heard. The process of learning is much more important than any fact will ever be. Many people will take classes with information that they will never use, but that does not make that class useless. I took calculus this year. Will I need to know how to take the derivative of the integral of sin(x) in even 2 years? No, probably not. But I learned so many things about myself throughout the class. I learned how to focus more and process problems that I do not immediately know what to do with. These are skills that can follow me throughout my life.
So maybe society is wrong. Maybe the answer of education equalling the highest levels of schooling fails to recognize some pieces of the puzzle. Learning is something that will never stop. You won’t be fully educated once you graduate high school, or grad school, or college because education is not solely knowing facts. It is about being able to exist and thrive as a citizen of the world. It is about investment in your learning in order to develop. You can’t skip the work and expect to do well on the exam. Education is about being that little kid again. Being excited about learning; checking out more books than you could ever read in a week at the public library. Truly educated people are smart, but they also have empathy and understanding of others. They can look at ideas from different perspectives and consider a spectrum of ideas before confidently believing in one. They can question what they are told. They can share different ideas with others without anger or malice. They can be wrong. And they can accept that and grow.
Pictures:
http://hepl.lib.in.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Kids-Library-Services.jpg
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/pf/0910/gallery.stressful_jobs/15.html
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249936
http://graphicsheat.com/great-education-quotes/#sthash.WJh2QIXU.dpbs
