By Matthew Finelli
School is hard. I don’t think learning is the hard part, but rather finding the motivation to shovel through the chores and timelines associated with our courses. Personally, I find it hard to be motivated when I know I have to do something and easy to be motivated when I am free to choose my tasks. Maybe you have felt similar to this. I don’t want to do homework, and I’d rather learn about anything else on the Internet. This is the thing about curiosity: you really can’t force it, you can only follow it. Unfortunately, an efficient education system allows little room for freedom of choice, at least early on.
Here’s a quote from Carl Sagan:
“My experience is, you go talk to kindergarten kids or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. And they ask deep questions. “What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?” These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th grade students and there’s none of that.”
What happens to our relationship with education when it isn’t driven by our own curiosity? In my personal experience, it took me ten years to return to college after high school. When I graduated, I knew that school just wasn’t for me because I couldn’t do homework. I was made to believe that I couldn’t be a scientist because I wasn’t good at math, when in reality, it was just a mismatch between the way I learned and a system that works for “most” people. In this system, some people are validated and some are not, tough luck.
In defense of the current system of education, one may say it’s important to instill a work ethic in young people. I guess my work ethic came out of nowhere because it certainly didn’t come from highschool. Yet, I came to be a highly successful professional, outperforming my peers consistently in the military. I’m majoring in biochemistry and I have a 4.0 GPA, so it seems like the education system initially misidentified me.
I don’t really know what a perfect system would look like at a high level. Maybe it's not possible to make a system that works efficiently for every brain. I do, however, know that the worst possible scenario is to walk away from education thinking that it’s just not for you. We have to defend our curiosity. It’s perfectly acceptable to just survive college, and it will surely be worth it to get a degree, even if you can only do the bare minimum. But don’t let an outcome like this make you think that you aren’t capable of learning, because our education systems are not totally accurate in judging us. Take it from me.
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