Learning

Seeing as my previous post was successful, I must now attempt to remember the last five weeks of my thoughts and write them down. I think that I can handle that. I find that I actually learn much more from this class than I do from most of my other classes. As much as I enjoy regurgitating information back at the teacher (which has its place I suppose), I get a lot more out of this class where thinking is actually encouraged and all of the answers to my questions don't have to come out of the textbook. A lot of that might have to do with how I communicate with my parents and my brother. We are very big into discussing things. If any of us have a question about something we just talk about it and figure out the answer. It also helps that my parents are two of the smartest people that I know and so they already know the answers to most of my questions. I really appreciate the fact that even if they know the answer and could easily just tell it to me, they still ask me questions and get me to think about it. In many ways, this class reminds me of that, except that a lot of the questions that we deal with are more subjective and so the answers don't really exist in the same definite way. To me learning involves gaining the tools to be able to figure things out for oneself. My problem with most classes is that they just drill a particular set of facts into everybody and send them on their way, without ever explaining the significance for the information or the reasons for why such facts are the way they are. I guess that I'm still a little bitter about all of my teachers in high school that would "teach" us things and couldn't even tell us why such things were so, we were just supposed to memorize it to pass the test. As much as I like taking tests, I really don't go to school in order to get good grades or spend hours of my life doing busywork, I just want to learn.

I would really like to talk about the idea of college in this class. It is my belief that a large part of the students in college don't really belong there and would get a lot more out of a different path. As far as I can tell, college started out many years ago as a place for people to go and learn for the sake of learning and becoming better people. Once inustrialization took over and communication grew to the point where large businesses could look at a wide variety of applicants for a job, they realized that people who had gone to college would probably do a better job for them. This gave people an incentive to go to college other than simply learning, but that they could get a better job than they could have otherwise. Now it seems that it's at the point where there are so many underqualified people going to college, just because businesses will hire them because they must be smart if they graduate from college. A lot of people just go to college to party and have a good time anyways, which seems to me to be a very expensive way of finding some drinking buddies. I read a study a few weeks ago that my dad sent me about how people's IQ plays a large role in their education. Just because a teacher can take a slacker getting Ds or Fs and inspire them to get As doesn't mean that everybody making Ds or Fs is capable of such an improvement. I'm going to try to post it after this if I can figure out a way to do it. So why not just have a lot of these people go to a vocational school for a couple of years to actually get training in their field without having to take the classes at a college that they don't get anything out of, can't comprehend, and simply don't care about. Maybe I'm going crazy and need to believe in people more, but staying in a dorm with a bunch of freshmen guys hasn't yet been a good way to instill more faith in future generations. I hope that this doesn't sound cynical or condecending, and if it does then I hope that you will believe me when I say that I don't mean it like that