So I’m still ambivalent about college. I don’t know how much it’s helping me learn. I’ve always been a fiercely individual learner, and I’m not yet sure whether or not college is the right place for me. I decided to attend college more by default, I didn’t quite have anything else to do that would satisfy me entirely. I thought I should at least give it a try. But I’m still only lukewarm at best about it’s value, and what the fuck am I doing here when I don’t think it’s the best thing for me?
I’ve always worked best on my own, and really don’t like having to do assignments and take tests. I’d much rather apply the things I learn somewhere real then to the test I have to take on it next week. I’ve mastered school for the past twelve years, the process of learning to the teacher and test, and I don’t like it. I’ve always felt that I’m not getting everything I should be out of the standard educational system, or that it’s not getting everything it should out of me.
I’ve taken classes now at both a large public university (UMN, twin cities) and a small public university (UMN, morris) and I’m just not sure about it. Specially whether or not it’s worth the arm and a leg it costs to attend. I feel queasy thinking even after the substantial amounts of aid I’m getting, and the hard earned money my parents are volunteering (I feel guilty they’re paying for something I’m so unexcited about) I’ll be left with quite a substantial debt after finishing school. All by the way necessitating my obtaining a well paying job just to regain my sense of freedom, perhaps further compromising my ideals and dreams.
My physics class is the most boring shit I’ve had to sit through in my life probably, at least recently. It’s not the traditional general science class, with 300 kids in the lecture hall, but there are thirty or so sitting in a risered class with the professor talking at you from the whiteboard. I can’t help but sleep, and it’s taken all my restraint so far not to just haul my laptop along with me and zone out entirely.
In high school I took Physics of Flight, a cooperative class taught in two periods, one by a physics teacher and the next by a computer/engineering teacher. We learned all the same physics that the honors physics classes did, in a quarter of the class time. We spent the time building and experimenting! RC cars, planes, catapults, paper airplanes, cardboard marble runs… We modeled what we were building in AutoCAD and learned to manufacture modeled parts on the milling machine in the back of the room.
And now I’m trying to sit back and keep from shoving my fingers in my ears suffering through a lecture on kinematics!
Physics of flight reminded me a lot of my previous school, where I could be found loving every minute of education I got. Barton Open was a public school (as all the schools I’ve yet attended), and a good progressive one. The Open School philosophy is a bit fuzzy to me now, having suffered through four years of semi open High School and thirty credits of University education, but it’s entirely for the development of the child into his own areas of interest.
I didn’t receive grades on any work I’d done until seventh grade. Evaluation was done verbally, in parent teacher student conferences up until then. I sheet of paper would be used to record a student’s strong and weak points, their particular interests, their learning styles, in a freeform diagrammatical sort of way. I feel to this day that I hit my inquisitive peak scholarly in fifth and sixth grade, in Launa’s Class.
The class was free form, structured with a morning meeting, elective (gym, music, science) and most of the morning for working. Lunch then Recess, followed by another meeting and an hour of reading time, then work time, and a closing meeting. At the beginning of the week all our work due for the next week would be described and written down on the board. From then on you did what you wanted when you wanted. The teacher (and nearly always there would be a student teacher or two in the same class at the same time) would circulate, answering questions and giving help.
I really wish that school was like that for me now. I remember how all us twelve year old kids would talk, joke, have fun, and learn! Now I’m lucky to even like school myself, much less find a group of peers all genuinely excited and willing to do the extra math problems or write the longest report. School has become a chore, a requisite before passing into adult life.
I’m really interested in how the internet might have changed things. I’ve learned a spectacular amount from the since my family got dial up when I was in sixth grade. I still feel like cruising around on the internet can be a lot like learning in Launa’s class – it’s not at all hard to find interesting material, passionate people, and there’s no single path to follow in your studies. I really think that the internet could make for a much fuller and richer academic education, providing there was some way to maintain genuine personal contact with peers interested in the same things as you.
Could the internet have taken a bite out of the traditional educational/social hierarchy? With kids like Mike Matas and Anne van Kesteren going from being teenagers to working positions at big time companies without the slightest thought of college, what would it take to make the resources that college makes available to the average student available to them without the mediation of college, allowing them to fully take control of their own individual education, without being pigeonholed first the institution of university, then the narrow tracks provided by Major and Minor concentrations?
What if each and every student could use the internet to build up their own study program, finding their own interests and those with similar interests? If through the internet they could find opportunities to apply those interests, volunteer, consult, even earn a little money? When it came time to move beyond just being a student in life (and should there ever be a time when one does nothing but study?), you could have built up your own unique system of knowledge, and built it in a tangible and real way – not just in your head, with a certificate from a university assuring employers you indeed do know something. With a unique showcase of what you had said and done in all your years of learning coalesced somehow on the internet, available to anyone?
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