Calvin & Holmes

I always thought school a brilliant device strategically: developing a child's mind through a range of disparate subjects as they transition from dreams of being astronauts to presidents to artists, poets, NASA engineers and ultimately the career they want to pursue in college.  But I think Calvin nailed it when he said, "I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know" (Calvin and Hobbes).  School is excellent at covering a broad range of topics, but they are all (of course) standardized, and with so many to teach it's difficult to examine the subgroups of and personal approaches to each subject, and learning is made less individualized.  That's not to say it's a straitjacket of a system: one can personalize the subjects through projects, essays, and use outside the classroom, but I've always wanted to create my own schedule complete with writing workshops, classics discussions over coffee, and a few quirky classes on extraneous interests I never find time or motivation to study on my own.  And as priceless as much of the information taught in schools is, much of it a critical platform not just in helping to develop our passions but in connecting and relating to the rest of the world outside the school, I can't help thinking how much of the information (if not the skills gained in obtaining the information) will just go down the drain.  Subjects I don't use on a daily basis become inconsequential, and their particulars are erased from my mind in an attempt to make space for what matters to me.  What I'm saying here is, in the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "a man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to need, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it."  His character, the infamous Sherlock, a man beyond brilliant (and beyond cocky) who, as I've already mentioned in a previous blog, is an unstoppable criminal-busting force with a mind like a government-issue computer, doesn't even know our solar system.  As his BBC counterpart tells Watson, "this is my hard drive and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful.  Really useful.  Ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of rubbish.  And that makes it hard to get at the stuff that matters."  "But it's the solar system!" John argues persuasively.  "What does that matter?" Sherlock responds.  "So we go round the sun.  If we went round the moon, or round and round the garden like a teddy bear, it wouldn't make any difference.  All that matters to me is the work.  Without that, my brain rots."

I will always be open to learning new things, even, or better yet especially, in school, but sometimes I wish I had more room for my interests, and more time to explore them.