Saturday, June 29, 2013

WHY do you even STUDY?

Why do we study?


For those of us who go to universities or schools, we know how it is. All the requirements we have to pass, the grades we need to get a certain mark for us to get honours (let alone pass), the routinised schedule of going to a certain class at a certain time with a certain professor and certain classmates - these constitute the school experience.

How do you feel about all this, though?




Do you feel inspired to go to school every day, as if there's a fresh, new, and exciting experience about to unfold? Do you feel a sense of exhilaration that there's an adventure into a specific field of interest? Do  you feel like you come alive through the lessons that you learn in school? Do you feel as if the pages which you read about the subjects you're interested in light up in all kinds of colours? Do you feel as if you learn more and more each day as you find purpose and a fresh beginning to all your productive work?

Or, do you feel as if it's a drudgery to sit through the lectures of certain professors? Do you feel as if you are being forced to study things that you aren't even interested in? Do you feel a sense of being dead, dreary, and dull through the repetitive and boring happenings of school that happen every single, every single, every single day? Do you feel as if the daily grind of reading a mountain of readings makes your outlook in life black-and-white? Do you feel as if it's so full of stress that seems to have no end and/or no purpose?



It seems to me in my experience it can be a lot of the latter quite often. Or maybe I'm exaggerating that. Or am I?

When do we "learn"?

I read that Mark Twain once said, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." I see the truth in this that I think we can all get something from. I believe that schooling does not constitute what education is. Schooling is the formal going to a university or "educational institution" in order for us to go through classes, get grades, and get a diploma for it. Education is the very learning about life and everything about it.



It can be said metaphorically that the true educational institution is life to which we were enrolled into at birth, our campus grounds are the universe, and we graduate at death. The implication here is this:
Learning never stops, whether we are in school or out of school.

How many of us have had dreams of being one thing or another, and have had those dreams crushed because of practical reasons? For example, I know a friend of mine who wants to be an architect, but since it's not really feasible for him to be one, he got into an Economics course and is planning to be in the real estate business. I think that as much as we need money to survive, it is not money that makes us really come alive. The quote of Jim Carrey is appropriate here:




“I hope everybody could get rich and famous and will have everything they ever dreamed of, so they will know that its not the answer.”

What is the answer then? What do you think?

What's the Ideal?

I like going back to the time of the ancient Greeks. In my understanding of what I've read about their educational model and philosophy, and it's not like our educational model nowadays. In the time of the ancient Greeks, they regarded education as the pure pursuit of knowledge and truth as a good in itself, and we all know how many contributions in science, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy that all the ancient Greeks have made to humanity as a whole, and those contributions can be seen in our modern society. Some sample contributions: http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/philosophyscience/tp/EarlyPhilosophe.htm

The educational model for the ancient Athenians was a formalized system that trained the youth in arts and in battle, so they could be adept as citizens in both times of war and of peace. The educational model for the ancient Spartans was supposedly all just for making the citizen really capable for war. I got that from here: http://greece.mrdonn.org/education.html. It may look like the picture below:




That's not what I really particularly like though, but what I do like about the ancient Greeks can be summed up in Socrates. Here was a man who prized wisdom and learning above all things, and he simply embodied it through his life of discussion and discourse, with endless questions being posed to the public. If you've read  "The Apology of Socrates" by Plato, you can see how he was just such a passionate man about learning and truth and knowledge, that he was willing to die for it. In fact, there are so many youths that he influenced that he was charged as one who single-handedly corrupted all the minds of the youth, but if you really read "The Apology," he seems to be the only one helping the youth. The rulers of that generation eventually decided to kill him by convicting him of the charges of "corruption of the youth" and "teaching new spiritual things". He was ordered to drink hemlock, as can be seen below:



What I like about him and the times that he lived in (mostly because of him and other philosophical people like him) is the discourse. There was a lot of discussion amongst the different people becasue Socrates was a mover and shaker of the established mental foundations of his time. There was engagement between people who actually gave so much concern about what they think about things, especially those really essential to us - and yet we take for granted. Things like justice, wisdom, love, peace, freedom, truth - these were the topics which Socrates immersed himself in, and tried to immerse other people in. I think this is missing in our generation, as this poster from jaredleto.com says:



What I like about their pure pursuit of knowledge and truth, is that they didn't compartmentalize things. They took the pursuit of truth as an integrated endeavour in  which there aren't any categorisations that confines one into a specific box and we define that person according to that box. In modern day universities for example, we can see that there's a school of Humanities, school of Fine Arts, school of Engineering, school of Medicine, etc.

Can or should we really standardise education?

While the specialisation in itself is helpful for producing competent and skilled people in certain fields of endeavour, what about holistic personal development? What if people don't just want to study this thing or that? Some people may want to specialise, and that's perfectly fine. But what if you don't just want to specialize? Most of the world's systems of education make it difficult for those who choose to be a more well-rounded person. I see the potential of the Interdisciplinary Studies courses or tracks in this regard as to allow more freedom of learning.

Also, it doesn't mean if you are good in one thing that you can't be good in another. Is it because of this notion that you can't be good in many things that makes people think that we should make programs in such a way that you are only allowed to be good in one thing?

Also, it is in my experience that I can say that some people learn faster than others and some slower.  It is simply a law of nature. What if there are people who can learn a lesson in a half or a third of the time another person does it? Will we standardise education in such a way as to limit the progress of the fast learners or slow learners? I really like Henry David Thoreau's take on this:


What does it mean to develop a person in the first place? If we're not concerned about development of the self, what are we concerned about? Maybe we're concerned about how to develop a certain company, or a certain field of endeavour? Sure, that's good if you believe in a certain something, as to contribute to the group. But won't you contribute your best to the group if you first developed yourself to your full potential?

Besides the speed of learning being standardized, the very image of an ideal student is not based on reality. The liberal arts orientation of some schools don't really place as much importance of intelligences other than the logical-analytical-mathematical reasoning, but what about the other intelligences? In high school, for example, how much time do we devote to the arts and how much time do we devote to logical analysis? Chances are much more time is devoted to the logical analysis. But people are simply not smart in the same ways. We are intelligent in different amounts in the different intelligences. (Multiple Intelligences). We seem to have a fetish for a certain ideal of a student, one well versed in logical-analytical reasoning, but not in other aspects. But that's just one type of student. I'm of the opinion that there are much more intelligences than the once imaged here:



I think that we should tailor our educational systems to really bring out the best that the an individual student can be, being a really student-centered, and unique educational experience, because every student is unique with his/her own talents, interests, capabilities, and potentialities.

 An example of this model of education that I found is this:
http://www.mi-childsplace.com.ph/main.php?h=44. I don't exactly know how the performance of this specific school is, but I think it's worth a shot, especially if we can extend this to the college level.

So these are some of my thoughts on the educational systems, and how we approach learning. Any thoughts, comments ideas?

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