These past 15 years of schooling have taught me to do one thing very well: to obey and to be afraid to disobey.
I write papers in which every paragraph is outlined for me, and I want nothing more than to choose one thing from that paper and write a book about that one thing. Rather I have to cover dozens upon dozens of subjects and I must only use a certain amount of pages and only a certain author and I must be done by tomorrow at 5 pm and blahbidy blahbidy blah.
obedience. and I continue to obey. . . for fear of bad grades? what are grades but one man or woman's judgment of my ideas? No. They are not judging my ideas. They are judging how well I can repeat their own personal ideas and beliefs in my own words.
I don't want to do this anymore. obey. learn things I have heard thousands of times when there are so many things I don't know. Do exactly what they tell me f0r the purpose of pleasing them.
It is tiring. It is making me lifeless. thoughtless. It makes me feel weak that I cannot replicate what they want me to. "I have other ideas, I swear. Good thoughts, too. I just am not capable of replicating what you want because I am not you. I am not you. I do not share the same beliefs as you.. I do not share the same experiences. We have read different books and met different people."
The university is creating so many docile, obedient young men and women.
2 comments:
The American education system is inherently flawed in the way you've just described. The knowledge base available to humans is exponentially expanding. We used to be able to have such "Renaissance men" who were considered experts in science, art, engineering, and theology. But modern intellectual progress has kept pushing what an "expert" has to be able to do, and now almost no one can be considered an "expert" in multiple fields.
What that means is that there is no education system in the world that is able to supply all the information a student would ever need throughout his career. Indeed, the most important thing a student can learn is no longer a certain set of skills or ideas, but rather a mastery of the art of learning. In this age, the most important thing a student can learn is how to find pertinent information, internalize it, and utilize it in creative ways as the need arises. And rote memorization and replication produces exactly the opposite of this.
little boxes on the hillside little boxes made of ticky tacky little boxes on the hillside and they all look just the same. and the people in the houses all went to the university where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same.
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