Not All Who Learn Are Educated: A Philosophy on Education
A child walks down the street, grasping her mother’s hand, her own palm sweaty and sticky from the lemon Italian ice she ate minutes earlier. Her eyes wander from the trees, to cars passing in the street, to a house across the way. Suddenly, down the street, another child’s basketball rolls into the street and he begins to run after it, as a car comes racing toward him from the other direction. The boy stops suddenly, narrowly being missed by the car, which runs over and pops his ball. The little girl gasps, and her heart skips a beat. This is education.
Education is all around us. All we do, all that others do, all we see and all we hear, teaches us in one way or another. The world we live in is full of moments to learn from. Learning does not just happen in the classroom, or from reading a textbook. However, simply learning is not necessarily the same as becoming educated. Not all who receive education are educated.
To be educated is to know how to interpret the plethora of information we take in every day, and how to take this knowledge and apply it to our own lives. Whether that learning be as simple as “don’t run into the street when a car is coming” or “the derivative of an integral is the integrand.” The former is more practical than the latter, but in the right context both pieces of information are valuable. Say, for example, a few weeks later the same little girl from the earlier example was in a similar situation to the boy she observed. Her friend was calling her from the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and so she mindlessly began to pedal her bike across. A car came barreling down the street and slammed on its brakes, stopping about 2 inches from the little girl. While she had been “educated” by seeing a similar thing happen to the little boy weeks before, she herself was not educated because the information she learned was not manifested into her life and used for more than just taking up space in her brain.
While the hypothetical situation used above is simplistic and there is much more to being educated than knowing to not run in front of a car, the basic idea applies to everything. If you don’t actually let your education impact you, you are not educated. However, this idea in itself is not as easy said as done. For starters, the student must actually want to learn.
I currently attend one of the top public high schools in the state of Connecticut. Each year, the graduating class from my school goes off to colleges and universities that many others dream of being accepted to. However, every day, I walk the halls and hear kids complaining about their classes and workload, saying things like “When am I ever going to use this in real life?” and “This is such a waste of my time.” These kids are headed to our country’s top post-secondary schools, yet they are not educated.
A major flaw in our current school systems is that students’ intelligence and level of education is based off of their grades, when in reality, grades only reflect a student’s ability to play the system. If I was handed tests from the past few years of my education that I got A’s on, and asked to take them again, I can almost guarantee you that I would fail every single one of them. I am saddened to admit that I am among the many who understand how the system works, and how to “play” it. I memorize information the night before the test, and forget it as soon as the bell rings and I bring the exam up to the front of the room. In a sense, the way our school systems function actually encourage students to take shortcuts and learn in a superficial way. Students who “play the system” get the same grades, if not better ones, than the students that make an attempt to genuinely master the material, so there really is no incentive to learn in a real way.
The classes that I have learned the most in are the ones I find the most interesting. Unlike virtually any other student who has taken the class, I loved calculus. I can recall every little detail I learned, and probably will be able to for a very long time. Because I enjoyed the subject, I genuinely learned. Many students criticize their schools for making them take classes in subjects they have no interest in, or classes that may not be applicable to their life. However, in this situation, the student is at fault. It is their job to recognize the opportunity in front of them to expand their horizons and make their educational experience more diverse. Meaningful learning comes when students have a desire to learn not only because of an interest in the subject, but aspirations to grow as an individual. While I did learn a lot in calculus this year, I could’ve learned just as much in all of my other classes if I had pushed myself to have that same enthusiasm for learning, no matter the subject.
Educated individuals must also find a way to make their learning meaningful. The most important learning is when a student gains a better understanding of the world around them, and what their role in it may be. Every new piece of information taken in should be thought about, analyzed, and used in a way that changes the student in some way. Whether that be a better understanding of others or a better understanding of themselves, if students are not changed by their new learning, they never learned it in the first place.
A critical realization that has impacted me in a significant way is that I will never know everything. While this is a seemingly obvious idea that I probably always knew, its implications are what really affected me. Now I understand that if I can’t know everything, it is pointless to waste time learning things that won’t challenge me and improve my understanding of the way the world works.
American literary genius Mark Twain once said, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” As bold and daring as it is to do so, I am going to slightly alter the wording Mr. Twain used here. You should not let your schooling do anything. However, you should make your schooling whatever you want it to be. The way you learn and the way your learning impacts you is completely up to you and your mindset. So, I will end by saying this; education is everywhere or nowhere. The truly educated are the ones who can find education in anything.
