I watched a video about 3 weeks ago called “Why I Hate School But Love Education”. It’s a spoken word video with a student standing outside of some buildings at what appears to be a university. The title of the video exactly represents the message he’s trying to convey – he hates school but loves education. It took me a little to actually understand what he meant by this. At first I didn’t feel like what he was saying was particularly important or relevant but I decided to watch it again just to be sure. What really bothered me about the video was that he opened it by citing some very famous and important people of our time – Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, and maybe some others. Very rich, very successful, very powerful people. He ties them all together by noting that none of them have a degree. I didn’t like this one bit, and I still don’t. He uses a very very very very very small percentage of the population, a very small, specific, and very special group of people, to try to make his point. Later on he talks about Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Jesus (I don’t see how university is relevant here), and Elvis Presley. Another very small percentage of the population, with very specific talents who were successful – the things that they were good at don’t even need school to begin with so I was really confused as to what was going on. He says, “let’s look at the statistics”, and then goes on to only look at the top 0.1% of people in their respective fields. How can you use any of this to say that education isn’t any good? An interesting statistic would be how much more college graduates make in their life time compared to those who don’t attend. Anyway, his usage of these very rare cases to make his point felt very weak to me, and still do.
But, I’ll confess, there’s more to this video than just that. I think the real message he’s trying to deliver is that school is not always the best for everyone, and it doesn’t guarantee success, and that it doesn’t even necessarily make you educated by the end of it. To this, I think I can agree in some respects. I think that GRS is particularly good at attracting and developing people who try to critically think about things and people who have very broad horizons and open minds, but I feel that in many other programs this isn’t the case. I was in Science for 2 years and I know that I could have easily graduated from school with a Bachelors in Biology and not really know much about anything – there’s nothing there to make you want to learn more about other things. Everything and everyone is so focused on their grades and GPA that people are too scared to take “hard” classes, even though they might be classes they’re really interested in, or classes that are really important. There’s no class that they have to take that try to make you look at different topics and ideas and things other than whatever particular and specific subject that you are studying.
So when this guy is saying that he hates school but loves education, I can kind of see where he’s coming from. Just because someone went through school, doesn’t necessarily make them “educated”. Or, it might make them educated, but only in a rather narrow sense. Here’s the video I’ve been talking about.
watch?v=y_ZmM7zPLyI
Source:
http://blogs.ubc.ca/coreygrs/2012/12/21/education/