Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Screw college, I want to learn something

There's this place at the corner of my mind where I want to care about what's going on around me. Where I want to understand what that funny haired man is blabbering about. I haven't felt that tug in a long time and I don't know what to do with it anymore.
I thought, ever since I graduated, that there was nothing left to learn, in the academic sphere anyway. Or, rather, nothing left worth learning. Now, I find myself wanting to learn, just for the sake of knowing more, but there's nothing. I want these people to teach me something new, tell me something I don't already know, but they don't. They tell me everything I've heard before. 

They give me long sets of numbers to memorize --the value of this, the rate of that--but they never tell me what the numbers mean, where they come from, why they are what they are. Isn't that what matters in the end? Knowing WHY rather than WHAT? But, in this world, it's all about the whats, isn't it? Who has the highest pay, who has the highest grade, who accomplishes the most, weighs the least...

And so my mind wanders. I go to class for the physical exercise I get walking there. I take the tests like a robot. Is that what our universities are producing? Breathing robots, number spewers that can't make educated decisions about the things that really matter to them? Is that really what I'm paying for? It doesn't seem right.  

And people on the street complain when people in the big house screw up. What else are they supposed to do going to institutes of higher education that don't even educate them? Don't teach them applications, only numbers. Lots of numbers.

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