If I could, I would be a professional student.
I have thought and said that for a number of years but now I'm thinking I may have changed my mind. I've been considering what I, or any of us, gain from attending/completing a course in a traditional Western Style university.
School, we are told, teaches us the rules. Rules about how things work in the real world of market places, board rooms, from the other side of desk in a classroom, atop a steel table in a kitchen, in any number of places where we envision ourselves to be once our degree is earned and training complete. I'm now 9 years into a 4 year degree and haven't been in a classroom of any kind for over 3 years. This gives me pause and makes me wonder both what I'm missing and what I'm gaining.
School is meant to teach you rules, but as I work in the real world I find there is hardly such a thing or at least that they are not as common as I was expecting. My adventures in the real world serve to show me the many exceptions to the rules and I see that as a grand dilemma. There is never an exception to any rule. An exception disproves a rule. When you find enough rules to be disproven (keeping in mind that you - or your parents if you're so lucky - paid good money to have access to these rules) you wonder why you even bothered in the first place if you can now count on very little of what you spent so long ramming into your brain. The point is that school can not and will not give you answers. It's not going to give you the magical codes of life that would can use to avoid conflict or struggle or even guarantee employment and certainly not success.
Education, at every level, is not meant to give you rules to life and work by. What you get in return for applying yourself is knowledge of the tendencies, the history, the notable points, and the scope of your chosen field of study. You learn where your subject has come from and from there you can envision how you see yourself woring to move it forward. Once you have these things it's entirely up to you what happens. A cake won't make itself just because you line up the ingredients, even if they are the best in the world.
So, with that in mind, I'm gonna keep working every day to gather my ingredients and wether they come from a prestigious university or the school of hard knocks, they all go in the mix (with a ton of hard work and a few hand fulls of luck) and I hope that one day I can have a tasty cake out of it - or even a batch of cupcakes if that's the way it turns out.
I have thought and said that for a number of years but now I'm thinking I may have changed my mind. I've been considering what I, or any of us, gain from attending/completing a course in a traditional Western Style university.
School, we are told, teaches us the rules. Rules about how things work in the real world of market places, board rooms, from the other side of desk in a classroom, atop a steel table in a kitchen, in any number of places where we envision ourselves to be once our degree is earned and training complete. I'm now 9 years into a 4 year degree and haven't been in a classroom of any kind for over 3 years. This gives me pause and makes me wonder both what I'm missing and what I'm gaining.
School is meant to teach you rules, but as I work in the real world I find there is hardly such a thing or at least that they are not as common as I was expecting. My adventures in the real world serve to show me the many exceptions to the rules and I see that as a grand dilemma. There is never an exception to any rule. An exception disproves a rule. When you find enough rules to be disproven (keeping in mind that you - or your parents if you're so lucky - paid good money to have access to these rules) you wonder why you even bothered in the first place if you can now count on very little of what you spent so long ramming into your brain. The point is that school can not and will not give you answers. It's not going to give you the magical codes of life that would can use to avoid conflict or struggle or even guarantee employment and certainly not success.
Education, at every level, is not meant to give you rules to life and work by. What you get in return for applying yourself is knowledge of the tendencies, the history, the notable points, and the scope of your chosen field of study. You learn where your subject has come from and from there you can envision how you see yourself woring to move it forward. Once you have these things it's entirely up to you what happens. A cake won't make itself just because you line up the ingredients, even if they are the best in the world.
So, with that in mind, I'm gonna keep working every day to gather my ingredients and wether they come from a prestigious university or the school of hard knocks, they all go in the mix (with a ton of hard work and a few hand fulls of luck) and I hope that one day I can have a tasty cake out of it - or even a batch of cupcakes if that's the way it turns out.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment