Words on Education

Deliberate Education

Walden by Henry David Thoreau is a powerful philosophical adventure where the author goes into the woods and begins reflecting upon the complexities and issues of city life. Many of the problems we have seen today were developing during Thoreau's time, and he, while away in the woods, predicted many of the trends that we see in full effect today: the economic demands to maintain adequate living conditions, the social pressure that gets in the way of finding your own voice, the overwhelming consumerist mentality that the vast majority of western society seems to enjoy and the decline of quality in education. Thoreau was able to discover all this by moving himself physically from a place of loud, distracting and limiting ideologies and in turn found himself in a new place of simplicity and serenity. This change in his environment wasn't just a concrete movement; it was a transcendent transition that leads him to understand the true essence of life itself. The idea of removing oneself from a material environment to discover an entirely new mindset is one that I have personally experienced through my time in academics. A topic Thoreau talks about with frightful accuracy, despite his words being written in the 1850's, is:

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life; - to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made.[1]

Thoreau emphasizes the value of learning through other means besides classrooms and testing and how we have to learn to connect the knowledge we gather throughout our life to seemingly disconnected ideas. The education system must stop letting money influence how we teach and take away the power standardized tests have over our schools. The importance of standardized testing and GPA has had a major impact throughout my entire life. I was burdened with being a good student but not actually learning anything. I simply memorized everything then emptied out all the information that my short term memory had bottled up for the tests, and I repeated that process for every assignment. I wasn't really learning anything, and my only motivation was the high expectations my parents had for me and the fear of the repercussions if I let them down. The stress of this inefficient process of learning led me to abandon the world of academia entirely, similar to what Thoreau did in Walden by leaving his city life. I left school feeling liberated, and for the first time, I was free to truly pursue learning.

After I made the decision to give up on school, I was motivated to experiment with the process of learning. One thing always rang true for me despite my dislike of school. I have always loved learning; I just wasn't aware of it. I was the weird kid who spent a massive chunk of his precious afternoon watching "History Channel" and the 1st grader who picked up the 5th grade Science book because my curiosity compelled me to learn these topics urgently. It wasn't apparent to me in those moments, but later on, it became clearer to me that I was always an unconventional learner. Recognizing this was the first step in my journey towards self-understanding.

I explored a variety of different methods and techniques for this process. I used audiobooks, watched YouTube videos, lingered around museums, eavesdropped on a couple of smart people's conversations and even took a traditional drawing class just to get closer to finding my learning style. One of the most important resources I experimented with were Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). The idea behind these MOOCs is to make university knowledge available for everyone all over the world regardless of their location or financial situation. A bundle of prestigious institutes - Harvard, UCLA, and Stanford- and websites like Coursera, Udemy and edX offer these courses all year round. These provided a variety of subjects like Computer Science, Graphic Design, and Entrepreneurship, which really helped me figure out what I'm good at and, more importantly, what I am not. It was like a virtual college with all the responsibilities of deadlines and like-minded peers going through these obstacles with you. In the age of information, there is no excuse to not seek an education, especially when lots of that information is free. This phase in my quest was a very fun time in my learning path and one I shall never forget.