Life is still our best teacher
EDUCATION is my soapbox. Always has been – even before my stint as a high school teacher or having kids.
Learning and access to information should be free, fun and available to all, with a primary focus on critical thinking, questioning the status quo and absorbing enough facts to help one get on in life, regardless of which path one eventually takes.
I realised, though, while studying, and through watching my own children move through their school years that despite what the world says, life is the best teacher – not a stiff certificate from a tertiary institute confirming you paid and passed.
The ideal life combines social intelligence and becoming informed. In a progressive school or university environment, these aims neatly dovetail each other, giving people exactly what they need: the ability to negotiate one’s role in society and improving one’s brain, one assignment at a time.
Drifting through some memorabilia a few years ago, I dug out my old scrapbook from Rhodes University. It’s a funny thing; there’s no record of lectures, notes, exam symbols or even an acknowledgement of my degree. My A3-sized ode to me is all about us: the people who shared what was to become the best couple of years I’d spent anywhere.
Belinda and Morag from Zimbabwe – immortalised in photos taken during coffee breaks in my residence room. I learned more about politics, culture and Africa from them than I ever did from history books or, more recently, uncle Google. Or Anneleigh from the Free State. Beautiful, gracious, smart Anneleigh – former ballet dancer, perennial A student, sensitive poet and, though we didn’t know it yet, a future career star as one of South Africa’s most talented brand managers.
I don’t know where Cidalia is. She was a dark-haired, level-headed psych student of Portuguese descent. Fiercely loyal, made fabulous coffee. Lana’s in Oz now and just as monumentally artistic as she was then. Most phenomenal Fine Arts student ever – and damn nice. Wouldn’t harm a fly.
I met my best friend at varsity. Our paths have diverged and melted together over and over but we’re still the red-head and Jewish girl who bumped into each other on the stairs, first year. We made each other feel we’d come home, away from home. We still feel that way, a billion hours later.
My husband ditched his degree a few months in. He’s the smartest man I know and terribly good at what he does but feels an itch to study. I get it – though he doesn’t realise that it’s not about the learning but the living.
And that’s the reason why we should do as they ask by passing matric, choosing a field and registering for a degree, a diploma, a certificate – anything, absolutely anything, to have that experience.
A little learning is a wonderful thing – but the best bits about it are free. And you shouldn’t have to pay for that privilege.