Education

So I was riding in the car with Jon the other day, and we started talking about education. I don't remember how it got started, but it ended up being about how employers like having a degree to look at, and how that degree was a receipt. Stupid, but true.

I find it ridiculously retarded that people can purchase an education. Because you can't actually purchase one, because that would imply that it can be owned. Education isn't owned, it's a process you have gone through that betters you and your knowledge of the world around you (or inside of you as the case may be), that you can benefit from you. It's so stupid that employers, and even just people on the street, end up making judgments and assumptions about you based simply on whether you completed high school, got your GED, went to college, finished college, with what degree, went to grad school, etc. Education doesn't necessarily have to mean that you sat in a classroom for x amount of years, and absorbed every useless piece of information that they threw at you, or that you got good grades, or made good test scores. Look at all the people in the world that were so unbelievably successful in their lives, even in their professions, that did so without a degree. And admittedly, getting an education is helpful, but people are so superficial these days, that they think an education means everything, and a lack of one means everything bad.

So many people graduate from high school without taking anything from it, and many graduate without even being able to read. Most attend school not to learn, but simply because it is a requirement of our government, and pass simply because they want out. Even those that go to college go for the most part in order to guarantee themselves a better job, and take courses that will further their career. Whatever happened to enjoying life, and learning through your experiences. Colleges are breeding robots, programmed to think the same way, and making their lives center around stress and grades, grades that won't matter 10, 15, 20 years from now: not as grades in any case. But what you learn in a course will matter those years from now.

And what about those people that are so smart, and yet so undriven by the menial conformity-centered basis of our school system? Those that need to be challenged, and expand their minds in creative novel ways? They are caged in by this system, and don't get the chance to grow, or learn in the way that their brains are engineered. And their brilliance is wasted.

When education can be bought by anyone with enough money, and people that could have thrived if not for their lack of monetary support, and risen to the top of society, what does "education" really mean? Is it a piece of paper? Or is it the process by which people learn to cope with the world, learn to survive, and to thrive? Learn to better themselves, and those around them, and to make the world, or at least their world, a better place? Who are these people that deem to define someone's worth by subjective grading processes, and whether they got to go to Harvard, or the community college in their town. When people's chances in life and in the workplace are defined by circumstances often outside of their control?

The system is retarded, and needs to be redone. Or else we are all going to become the product of this large machine, all gears programmed to spin a certain way, and play a certain part in the greater picture. Never being able to truly explore our potential, and the picture we could paint for ourselves. Confined by the rules that the people "in charge" have placed around us. Looked down upon by the weak people that have been brainwashed to value a piece of paper more than life experiences and personal successes.

But I digress, as I continue to try to work within the system in order to undermine it. Think what you will, but I know that my "education" is so much more than this piece of paper I am earning, and I am so much more than you will ever see.