Education should open the mind.
Effective learning involves creating and solving our own errors. Go ahead; over-step, stretch, become too enthusiastic. When you make those mistakes common to all high achievers, use them to learn. Then enthusiastically attack again.
Pry open your mind, don't let your education rust it shut. Learn to think, not to follow. Combine your learning with action, letting unavoidable errors impel you to seek greater understanding.
Coco Chanel is quoted as saying "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." As the bureaucratic age winds down college degrees as requirements are replaceable; independent thinkers and visionary leaders are not. Cultivating a love of learning is becoming imperative for success.
"I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: 'Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?" - Leonardo da Vinci
Churchill has been attributed with a statement to the effect that "to be young and not be liberal is to have no heart, to be older and not be conservative is to have no brain". If this is a mostly true insight than why must institutions of higher learning spend so much energy shouting long and hard on ideas that students will probably embrace naturally.
If you are a student, ignore repetitious bombast, seek out convincing counter arguments. Then, through synthesis born of contradictory views, make up your own mind. Until you wisely decide to change your mind once again. Open your eyes and observe even as your ears are assaulted.
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky
Question authority, scientifically test and verify answers, embrace fully only self-proven knowledge. If a pronouncement isn't subject to rigorous challenge, repeatedly verified, and made ever more accurate; it is opinion, not knowledge. History is littered with debris of false, expert-authority opinions. Human progress has been accomplished by those that ignored "established facts," doing the impossible, advancing against the scorn of brilliant and highly educated naysayers. A kite rises against the wind, not with it.
We need freedom of expression if we are to discover truth - if like that kite we seek to soar.
Do not remain two dimensional. Question those of us with educational authority. Expand your thoughts to understand all views that pertain to an issue. "We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us" - Virginia Satir
We each learn differently
Shouldn't education be forced to discern and approach individual needs? The bureaucratic answer is consistent - "we need more teachers, and smaller class sizes." If each student is taught the same curriculum, regardless of their skills, desires, temperament, and abilities; class size is immaterial (except as it grows the power and wealth of protected education industries and unions).
"Does the inherent impossibility of traditional education, training, and other formal learning processes drive insane all of those involved for too long?" - Clark Aldrich
In commerce the day of one size fits many is just about over, replaced by self crafted solutions. In education everyone must fit our size is still the rule. You have three choices: you can settle for diminishing expectations of programmed mediocrity, you can fight toward a bureaucratic peak of a settling heap, or you can become a powerfully unique individual.
It is your life you are developing.
Your life, and the lives of your children, will prosper to the degree you can openly structure self-directed learning and keep it pleasurable. This is the educational importance of the Internet - you can discover and test thousands of ways to learn, finding what suits you best.
This article is the handiwork of Allan R. Wallace
