What Happened To Education?

Where does the time go? One second I’m making all of these promises to myself to blog daily, and the next thing I know, four days have gone by without a word. I get so distracted by my daily emails, that all of my writing energy is absorbed into those, and by the time I have a few moments to blog, I’ve run out of things to say. I have so many things I’d like to write about, I hardly know how to contain them within a single entry. Maybe I’ll be inspired to write a few all at once. We’ll see how it goes.

Sitting in the hallway outside my anthropology classroom on the first day of school, I overheard two boys taking about their classes. Both had apparently managed to sleep through their first class, which generally I wouldn’t find odd on a regular morning, but really, who sleeps through the first day? I don’t know, maybe it’s more common than I think. One of the boys then proceeded to follow me into the classroom where he walked straight up to the oldest looking person in the room and mumbled "yo, are you the teacher or whatever?" I was immediately wowed by his poignantly articulated intelligence. As she giggled a little in her nervous graduate student way to say yes, he took out a piece of paper and nonchalantly held it up to her. "I’m gonna need you to like sign this or whatever, cause like I already failed this class once or whatever." Again, I was wowed. She laughed and said ok, asking who his previous teacher had been. He, shockingly, hadn’t a clue.

It was funny, yes. We all laughed, partly with him, partly at him. It’s good to have a class clown, and even better to have a class screw up, knowing that no matter how poorly you may do, you’ll always have a partner in crime. Sadly, these are the kind of kids I’m usually drawn to and want to have around. I like people who can make me laugh, who don’t take things, especially school, too seriously. I like the goofballs of the world. Probably because I know how to connect with them, because I don’t have to worry about sounding sane or intelligent around them. I don’t have to worry about being me the way I generally do.

It wasn’t until later that I began to get angry about that boy’s behavior. Well, not just his behavior, but him as a representative for all his kind. While it’s fun and funny to have these kids around, at the same time, I wonder how they can handle being such a waste of space. It is a waste. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but it seems to me, if you don’t want to be a student, then don’t be. Stop wasting everyone’s time and resources simply because you don’t know what else to do with yourself.

What happened to education? There was a time when going to college was for scholars, for people interested in learning about the world around them. I have friends like that, smart friends, who deserve the opportunity to sit around with other intelligent individuals and discuss politics and art and the deeper philosophical meaning of it all. If I was a little smarter, I too, could be one of these people. I certainly have the desire, but suddenly, the desire for that kind of education has become insignificant as no one seems to be looking for it. The desire to become an educated person is no longer a requirement to attend a university. Isn’t that kind of sad? College has become just the next logical step in the order of things, a kind of waiting room where we each sit wasting time until we are called in to be assigned a profession. I just feel like it should MEAN something.

Then there’s the other kind of education, which is often the more desirable option. Somewhere along the line, it became a societal view that to be educated means to be able to have a conversation at a dinner party. To be college educated means to speak well and to know something about politics and art and current affairs. Perhaps that’s enough. It is certainly an accomplishment in itself to be articulate, but at the same time, people settle for the conversation. People are content knowing enough about a few popular topics to speak about them, without needing to feel passionate enough about anything to want to take action. It seems to me, a person can know all the facts and figures in the world, but without passion, without the desire to seek more than just facts and figures, none of it really means anything. So many wasted minds...

Really, what happened to education? When did it stop being about understanding the world around us, and start being about grades and facts and dinner party conversations? People go to college because we live in a world that takes you more seriously if you have a degree. People go to college because it seems logical and an important step to get the better job, make the most money. People go to college because the alternative is a scary, unknown, real world which we’re not prepared for, and probably never will be, but luckily, we’ll always have some dinner party conversation. Or, you know, like, whatever.