A Meditation on Education

Photo by kyo azuma on Unsplash

You probably remember the time you first went to school. To me, it is not one that I cannot remember, but one that my mother clearly can. Every summer evening when she tells me the story of how, when I had left her on the doorstep of that Alabama preschool, I had bawled my eyes out, begging to return to my mother, to go back to the comfort that I once had. But that was in the days before I was cognizant of myself.

I think that there is always a time in a child’s life where they become excited to learn. They learn their first letters and then want to do nothing more than to read. Their times tables, and every day it’s said on the ride back from school. The names of animals, which could be said from memory, outsmarting even the smartest adults in a room.

But these are simple trivialities. Slowly these fade. For most, they fade away until they are but dying stars in a universe that was once full of light. For me, this dimming started in middle school, and I became repulsed by the idea of learning more. When I wasn’t challenged by what was done in school, I became distant from the wonder that had once inspired me to thirst for knowledge.

The Partial Dimming

But for others, this dimness is not complete. Like a shade pulled over a window, it is almost inevitable that the sun will come through, and eventually they become cognizant again. They sometimes recognize what had happened. Others simply fall in love with learning.

They become meta-cognizant — aware of their own strides — and learn to optimize them. I think that I am now here, far from both the childhood wonder that had made me crave more, but also unable to see that point where I hated books and knowledge.

The Problem with Modern Education

This is a problem that we face in education today. We are forced to be confined by those standards and strictness which were once inspired by industrial complexes — structures that did not fit the natural lives of humans, who crave to be free and explore. It has become a deadly poison to a child.

If you ask a six-year-old ten years ago what they wished to be, they would say an astronaut, or an artist, or a musician, or some other wonderful machination of their little minds. But now it has become entrenched, molded, frozen by a system they are forced into. This sense of hope of a better tomorrow, of bigger dreams, has become compacted into a small drawer in their cabinet of worries.

This is not to say that I am against the order of higher education or structured thinking. There is merit for children to be exposed to these ideas. I would not know the works of Shakespeare or that of the Declaration of Independence without learning them. But I desire for this system, which has become rusted with age, to change.

We are living in changing times. No longer can man be restrained by the impediments and routines of machines in our modern age. Instead, we need dreamers, artists, innovators — those who will take our worries, their worries, and turn them into dreams of tomorrow.

Changing with the Tide

I wish that I were in this world, where I could dream freely — but also wish that this freedom was enabled in every step. Walking freely, hating where I must, discovering when I needed to, and returning to where I once was. This cycle must be kept.

But the institutions and tools that are used to reinforce, rather than enforce, these cycles must also be amended. They must change.

For these are but the turning of tides — an omen for the things that are to come. We must be quick in our ways, changing our rudders to go with the sea. Otherwise, our sailors will quickly drown in the water, and our treasure will be wrecked.

As captains of these ships that herald our hope, we must choose to change our path — to work with that of nature, of human nature — and become one with the lulling of the waves so that we are not swept up in its path and destroyed.