The Purpose of Education :: School Learning Educating Essays Papers

The Purpose of Education I suppose the reasons that brought me to St. Olaf in 2003 were shared by many middle to upper class Midwestern kids who had just graduated from high school. We played by the rules and our learning styles fit well into the public education system (and maybe we were fairly smart too), so we had a piece of paper saying that we had a good GPA. Our parents had been grooming us for College ever since we were little, making us fill out practice applications and going out of their way to drive us past the U of M on our way anywhere. We knew the rules: If you don’t get the degree, you’ll end up living in your parent’s basement and cleaning toilets for a living or pregnant (or, GASP, both!!). Those seemed like the only two options at the time sans degree. Plus, at least in my case, I had a big sister at St. Olaf and I liked books and was motivated. All in all, it was just expected of me and I was ok with it. Then, however, the summer after a very experimental and not extremely educational freshman year, I spent a summer working on an organic farm near Stillwater, MN and discovered what it felt like to truly learn. Not just reading some book because I HAD to and then regurgitate the information back out on a test, but questing for information and experiences because plants were FASCINATING and learning to drive a tractor was empowering and farming was complex, elegant, challenging and above all, very very real. For a suburban kid who didn’t know what a tomato plant looked like and never had seen the inside of any machine, learning how to grow food, the most necessary thing in life besides water, was the most relevant experience I’d ever had. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t doing something because I needed the grade or the approval; I was doing it because it interested me. So then I decided I needed to drop out of school. Enough with this book stuff, how does this ever relate to real life? Why do I need to know about Christianity in the 7 th century or the philosophical thoughts of dead white men or about the inner workings of the Krebs cycle I want to dig in the dirt, I want to learn about how to keep squash bugs off my cucurbits, and I want to fix fences and tractors. The Purpose of Education :: School Learning Educating Essays Papers The Purpose of Education I suppose the reasons that brought me to St. Olaf in 2003 were shared by many middle to upper class Midwestern kids who had just graduated from high school. We played by the rules and our learning styles fit well into the public education system (and maybe we were fairly smart too), so we had a piece of paper saying that we had a good GPA. Our parents had been grooming us for College ever since we were little, making us fill out practice applications and going out of their way to drive us past the U of M on our way anywhere. We knew the rules: If you don’t get the degree, you’ll end up living in your parent’s basement and cleaning toilets for a living or pregnant (or, GASP, both!!). Those seemed like the only two options at the time sans degree. Plus, at least in my case, I had a big sister at St. Olaf and I liked books and was motivated. All in all, it was just expected of me and I was ok with it. Then, however, the summer after a very experimental and not extremely educational freshman year, I spent a summer working on an organic farm near Stillwater, MN and discovered what it felt like to truly learn. Not just reading some book because I HAD to and then regurgitate the information back out on a test, but questing for information and experiences because plants were FASCINATING and learning to drive a tractor was empowering and farming was complex, elegant, challenging and above all, very very real. For a suburban kid who didn’t know what a tomato plant looked like and never had seen the inside of any machine, learning how to grow food, the most necessary thing in life besides water, was the most relevant experience I’d ever had. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t doing something because I needed the grade or the approval; I was doing it because it interested me. So then I decided I needed to drop out of school. Enough with this book stuff, how does this ever relate to real life? Why do I need to know about Christianity in the 7 th century or the philosophical thoughts of dead white men or about the inner workings of the Krebs cycle I want to dig in the dirt, I want to learn about how to keep squash bugs off my cucurbits, and I want to fix fences and tractors.