The first assignment for my education class this semester was to write an essay in the style of "This I Believe," an NPR radio show in which various speakers read short pieces on topics they were passionate about. The prompt was, "What does it mean to be an educated individual?" We each wrote an essay, got it back with comments and a grade, then read it in front of the class a few weeks later. This was the essay I read last week.
If it’s okay with you all, I’m not going to read a single word from my original essay. In case anyone’s curious, it was about a story about a bright young student who ended up dropping out of college after his innate love of learning was crushed by the cruel machinery of the industrial-educational complex. You didn’t have to look deep to see that none of it was really even about this imaginary student. It was about how I envied him for being able to derail himself from the one track middle class tape of success, while I kept slaving away in the institution. Everyone who read it had the same critique, that I never really said what I believed about education. Actually, they were mincing words. I said what I believed, but none of it was very nice.
What I really believed back then was that education is nothing but displaced suffering. You spend Pre-K to grad school walking in lines and following orders and putting off what you really want to do so that you won’t starve once your parents cut off the cash flow. What I called education in that paper is really intelligence, and I claim that it’s something your born with and something that school can only smother. I cringe, reading what I wrote, because I can’t think of anything more snobby or entitled or wrong.
The strange thing is, despite my pessimistic view on education as a whole, I really like going to school. I look forward to spending hours in my little library cubicle delving into novels that reveal undiscovered worlds or the hidden machinations of our own. My dismal outlook only really took form this year, when I loaded up on psychology courses to try and fulfill my major. It only took a couple weeks with hours of mindlessly plugging data into spreadsheets and pouring over articles written in a voice precisely measured to render the prose bloodless for me to turn bitter on the whole concept of education.
After a lot of pondering and more than a few scrapped drafts of this revision, I think I finally decided what I believe about education. It’s the search of knowledge that gives meaning to life. It’s got nothing to do with occupation, the laws of what our society finds worthy of a paycheck in our society are always changing and very rarely make much sense anyway. Instead, it’s what part of life a person aspires to understand that is personally meaningful to them. Maybe for some people that’s computer science, or biology, or math (though I can’t for the life of me imagine why). But one thing I know for sure: the domain of psychology wasn't what I wanted to be educated in. Which is why just this week I threw my middle finger up at the job market as I turned in the paperwork to declare as an English major.
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