"I could get straight A's if I didn't learn anything."
School is not in place to teach us. It's to meet deadlines and learn what certain professors value so that you can answer a set number of questions accordingly. It's for jumping through hoops and conforming to an institutions time frame and . This is what I've learned so far in college:
- How to stay awake when you want to pass out from exhaustion.
- How to deny myself preservation instincts.
- How to memorize quickly and forget even quicker to make room for the next batch of information.
- How to compartmentalize an entire subject into a class, and from a class into a professors set of values and interests, and from those values into a set number of questions.
- To believe that I have to take a specific pattern of classes to gain a title in order to be prepared for a career later in life.
- To fill my time not with creative pursuits and research into what I find fascinating and valuable, but to only look into those facts which my professors find important for a specific class that I have been predestined to take by an institution.
- How to conform.
- How to stop thinking for myself.
- How to be miserable.
- How to stop living.
If I knew how to break free from the system, I think I would.
2/20/11
As an educator in training, this hurts. It's so true. It's the crutch that education leans on. We don't teach innovation or inspiration, because we are outnumbered, and people are so diverse. We run out really fast when we try to provide it for everyone. So we "teach" by putting everyone through the paces that everyone "should" go through. We say "here is my perspective, or a fragment of it, or a perspective that a vague authority probably wants me to force you to accept... ahem, know and learn. I will not provide any meaningful context, because I'm tired. I will not adapt to your needs, to you desires, to your interests, because you have too many. We have a system, it's broken, but we survive. So deal with it. Or fight it and live with the consequences of not conforming to a rigid, hierarchical world. Now write this paper. Here's what I want, you just do all the work without thinking, and certainly without experiencing. You'll get just enough to get by."
ReplyDeleteThis is how I've been educated many times. This is how I have been educating many times. My passion is to change it.