(no subject)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the current education system and whether it's actually decent or not. I mean I see how it teaches us the basics of many different subjects which we can build off of later if we're interested. It also means that even if I feel like I'm smarter than a lot of people, they can still understand me if I'm talking about physics and I can understand them when they talk about Willy Loman or whatever. In addition, I've noticed how much easier it is to relearn something. So although I only remember one or two facts about bacteria, it's coming back pretty quickly, even after just one class about them. Also, I see how we learn how to follow directions, and how to get things done within a time constraint (even if that's not done effectively). And we learn how to interact with other people, even if we hate their guts and really want to kill them. We see how other people interact and all the different people there are in the world, or at least in our age group and in our town. But I wonder if these lessons and the basics need to be learned over the course of 12 years.

Which leads me to thinking about what the actual purpose of education is. Is it to teach people to work hard and conform into what the person in charge wants as butterofdolphin seems to think? Is it to create the vast number of workers needed to fuel our economy as acern mentioned on napoleonofnerds's post at the beginning of this year? Is it to keep kids out of the way until they can be useful for something as Paul Graham wrote in one of his essays? Or is it to actually provide people with knowledge? Or is it a combination of those? 'Cause it doesn't seem to make people learn very well for the exact reasons arsinyk wrote about a month ago. And I object intellectually to the idea that we're learning how to follow orders as that's what we'll have to do in life. Yes we do have to listen to the government and unless we start our own company or whatever, we'll have to listen to our boss. But I see that as more of an informed consent thing where we can see the benefits of listening to them (not only keeping our job and not being thrown in jail, but also seeing how the work we do by following their instructions affects the rest of society), while I feel like school is more of a listen to me because it will be important later in life, but I won't tell you how it benefits you. And as arsinyk said, there are more important lessons to be teaching kids than to listen to authority.

From my experience in school, it seems like the teachers all think the purpose of education is to get their students to learn about whatever subject the class is about. While, I think many students are just trying to get through high school, as they question the purpose of it, but are bombarded on every side by people saying "this is important, you need to get good grades, etc." But it seems worthless. I mean I go to school, getting drained of my energy and annoyed at how little we learn, hang out with the caf crew after school, come home and do homework, and then spend the rest of the night doing basically nothing on the computer because I'm too drained and don't want to do any learning or researching more than reading an interesting article or looking up a word in the dictionary. And then I go to sleep and it repeats again.

And I feel like I'm at a doorway and I can step through it and be free from restrictions, so I can stop listening to teachers and do my own thing, or I can close the door and listen to teachers, do my work and move throughout life in this little room of following directions. And I guess I could combine the two and do what Paul Graham suggests and treat school like a day job, learning things on my own outside of school, but I feel like I can't do both with my current motivation levels. And I guess I feel like the government and teachers know more than me and have experienced more, and they have faith in the system, so I should too... But I dunno. I guess I'm just confused right now.

If this is what education is, I'm not sure I want to continue with it. And if this is what life is, I'm tempted to go live on an island by myself.

And on a completely different note, although connecting to my island comment, last night's Lost was amazing. And I'm tempted to stay up late to watch it again on ABC's website as they now have complete episodes you can watch online for free, although with advertisements.