Facing down the gauntlet

Exams start next week, and as per usual around this time each year I come to question the entire point of education.

Is it to teach us what we need to know? Hardly. We learn some facts about how volcanoes are formed, how to program a calculator, how to build a robot. We never get taught the things we really need to know. We don’t get taught how to socialise, how to find others, how to be happy. We are taught how to obey, conform and crush imagination.

I have a friend who has spent her whole life, up until college, in a single sex school. End result? She’s uncomfortable around guys. Oh she’s loosened up, definitely, but she has spoken often about how she can’t “find someone” because of how uncomfortable she is.

We move through school being degraded and treated as inferiors by our teachers. We move through college, and though we learn to be self sufficient, we are taught to conform. We spend our whole lives trying to achieve some piece of paper which says we have the same qualifications as hundreds of thousands of other people. What sets us apart?

How many people don a suit, work from 9 until 5 and disappear? Remembered for a generation, maybe two and then….gone. Vanished.

And yet I’m too much of a coward to break the mould. I have been broken, I am forced to conform. I am stuck here.

Save yourselves and break out. Do something new and amazing! Be remembered!

One Response to “Facing down the gauntlet”

1. Diff.Thinkr says:

   December 5, 2009 at 9:40 am

   Yep.. You are right on the breaking out part. Nobody will know a person sticking to the “norm”. Be creative. Be different. Dare to be..
   Diff.Thinkr´s last blog ..Cheeky enough to call me Geeky

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