Because your most recent post was so thought-provoking, I am going to forgive your complete blog failure up to this point. Indeed, I had never considered the pursuit of knowledge as insurance against the lure of the pursuit of stuff, though the scriptures themselves juxtapose the two similarly. It called to mind the things that, through talking to Jordan about her views on education in the last few weeks, have caused me to seriously reconsider what it means to gain "knowledge."
You may be aware that Jordan is not a fan of college; she dislikes her professors' styles and the structure of most classes, feels that her time would be much better spent somewhere else, and kind of wants to drop out altogether (or at least switch her major to Family & Consumer Science). I, on the other hand, would be mostly content to spend the rest of my life jumping from university to university, accumulating degrees in English, Hebrew, Near Eastern Studies, Political Science, Russian, Women's Studies, Civil Engineering, Pop Culture, etc.--and yet our goals for life are largely the same. We both just want to gain as much knowledge as we can. She, who has been educated at home by her mother, her books, and herself, has grown up believing that she can learn anything she wants to outside of a classroom--and she has! You and I, who have spent fourteen of our nineteen years in the formal educational system, have grown up believing that learning takes place in school--and it has! Each of us knows a lot of stuff, and none is a failure; the difference is, going forward, Jordan believes that her knowledge will be measured on a sort of internal scale and will continue to grow as long as she seeks opportunities to enlarge it, while I plan to measure the things I know by the number of degrees I have or the number of years I spend in school. (The two are not mutually exclusive, of course, but you understand.) And neither of us will be disappointed with the results, because we'll both finish up life much smarter than we began it. Both approaches are effective, but in different ways.
As I understand it, Jordan and her network of "un-school" supporters hold the view that public school is churning out generations of kids that think in the same ways--which of course is not completely true; public-school kids leave the system still vastly different from one another in a variety of ways. But imagine how genuinely dissimilar we would be if we didn't participate in that kind of mandated socialization and systemization. You and I, Carla, enjoy school because we have learned how to play its games; we know what our teachers want and how to get good grades, and so we do, and we're satisfied. But they are just that: games! The ways I have been taught to succeed--and by that I mean "get an A"--as I found out in my initial weeks of employment at Provo's premier pizzeria, are largely useless and inapplicable to many real-world situations. (What a youthfully idealistic sentence I am about to write:) Imagine a world where people grew up defining success for themselves, not by grades but by actual learning. You yourself can attest to the fact that (Italian) grades are often arbitrary reflections of how well you have learned (Italian). Like a true American conservative, Jordan brings up the example of education in the days of the American Revolution, when people could write and understand and act on things like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense;" people of that era were largely educated at home, and came up with some pretty revolutionary stuff. I am certainly a bit wary of making comparisons of that sort, but perhaps she does have a point there. (And that gets off on a whole different set of debates--"Yeah, but every other person was illiterate then;" "If we let all parents homeschool their kids some would never learn anything;"--I know. It's just a mental exercise.) Judging by the types of inspirational movies we like to make, our culture values individuality, bold flouting of the rules and sticking it to the man. But in real life, this is often manifested as, "Hey, even though it might be lame, you can totally like classical music if you want to because you're unique," or "Even though your parents might object, having a nose ring is really cool." No child is told he can be a farmer if he wants to. No one is encouraged to deviate from the norm in any way that might actually really matter.
I say all of this not to contradict the wisdom of Shawn Miller, because I think all of what he said is still true and even accords nicely with my (Jordan's?) point of view. And actually, there is not really a remedy to these perceived societal ills. But there is a whole world of possibilities to ponder outside the established system of learning and thinking. Mark Twain famously said, "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education," and ever since I heard that in eighth grade I have taken it as an exhortation not to let your acquisition of knowledge end when you leave the classroom. But perhaps, I am beginning to see, he meant exactly what he said.
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