Quotes Tagged "philosophy-of-learning"

For those of us who do find ourselves still sitting in classrooms come the age of nineteen- those of us who are the lucky, the often unwilling, the privileged few- we are met with the opposite of the undergraduate apathy we were taught to endure. We find that learning cannot survive without passion, that evolution cannot exist without chaos, and that self-betterment cannot occur without humility. In fact, if we wish to learn virtually anything at all, we cannot do so without a fundamental level of self-betterment which pervades even our deepest unconscious. If we continue to learn, we realize that this means that our most precious beliefs about the nature of reality itself will be questioned, and everything we know and love and held on to for dear life will be held at gunpoint by the throat by contraposing ideology which threatens our beliefs about existence itself. We will realize that the world as we knew it was incomplete, we will realize the finitude of our own minds, we will realize the complexity and wonder of a rich and multifaceted world that is both more beautiful and more horrifying than we ever knew nor could have dreamed- and we will run in fear, or we will love it. It is a visceral, instinctual reaction, one which equivocates to either shock or awe, and one which likely embodies both. It is a reaction all beings share when faced with something utterly new- the defamiliarizing threat and thrill of the sublime. It is both inexplicably gratifying and deeply uncomfortable to become aware of your own beauty, of the utter, tantalizing, inexplicable divinity of every second of your life- your paralysis in the face of God is a synthesis of both the person you once were, which society has crafted you to believe you are, and the personhood you have always possessed and shared with the universe itself, a personhood which is deeper and richer than all knowledge or any issue which corrupts our class or economics or cripples the politics of our time.

We will realize that the world as we knew it was incomplete, we will realize the finitude of our own minds, we will realize the complexity and wonder of a rich and multifaceted world that is both more beautiful and more horrifying than we ever knew nor could have dreamed- and we will run in fear, or we will love it. It is a visceral, instinctual reaction, one which equivocates to either shock or awe, and one which likely embodies both. It is a reaction all beings share when faced with something utterly new- the defamiliarizing threat and thrill of the sublime. It is both inexplicably gratifying and deeply uncomfortable to become aware of your own beauty, of the utter, tantalizing, inexplicable divinity of every second of your life- your paralysis in the face of God is a synthesis of both the person you once were, which society has crafted you to believe you are, and the personhood you have always possessed and shared with the universe itself, a personhood which is deeper and richer than all knowledge or any issue which corrupts our class or economics or cripples the politics of our time.

There are days when I would gladly hit “Return” and please refund my debt to Sallie Mae to stop those impossible bills from coming, but it is not for the fact that I believe I’ve been cheated. I, like most millennials, am disillusioned with the net return of academia, but I have not been cheated by education. I have been cheated by a corrupt system, and it is education that has taught me the difference. If I could say education had a product, I would like to say it is abundance. But if education had a product, it would be an empty box. And if successful education had a product, it would be the match ignited which set that box on fire and set the mind upon which every essay on “knowledge” ever written in history was cast into the fire to burn.

I, like most millennials, am disillusioned with the net return of academia, but I have not been cheated by education. I have been cheated by a corrupt system, and it is education that has taught me the difference.

Most hard-hitting, truly provocative thinkers I have read will argue, of course, for intersectional advocacy and social equality, but each of them still shrouds, indiscriminately, some qualitatively-ranked mythos of ‘learning’ (or, implicitly, education) as some kind of holy grail to cultural change. But education is really, more than anything, the chronicler of cultural change and the documentarian of human developments. It is, by nature, in the business of analyzing, segmenting, and adjudicating things- hardly at all in the business of creating them to propel into the public, as if university campuses were somehow the laboratories of God.

We doing these things because we’re moral, enlightened people. We’re doing these things because we are embedded within longstanding structures of institutional power, and education is just one of these functions. And it is a function with tremendous social power to oppress or to legitimize, to open or to close, to create or to calcify, to inscribe or to erase, to pardon or to punish- to dictate, or to free. The one we choose to do, we ought to choose carefully.