A Pattern for Learning

The girl I visit teach could not be more different from me. She’s a freshman; I’m a senior. She doesn’t know what she wants to major in; I’ve known since seventh grade that I would major in English. She listens to mainstream Christian Music (think Reliant K); I listen almost exclusively to British artists (think Ed Sheeran). She wants a sapphire in her engagement ring; I’m all about the diamonds. You name a topic, and we will each have a very different answer.

I found out today that we’ve both been thinking about the same question. Why do we go to college? What is the point of higher education? It should be no surprise that our answers are very different.

This is where my last blog post comes in. I stand by my argument that education needs to be about learning and discovering, not about jobs and future goals and whatever else. We need to realize that education is more than just a means to and end. I’ve finally realized that and changed my ideology to fit that—it took me four years, but I’m so much happier because of it. Now I can see that my classes aren’t just leading to the job in a publishing house that I plan to have one day, they are also helpful in other areas of my life. Most importantly, I’ve learned the best ways that I learn, and that will help me the rest of my life.

The girl that I visit teach is in a much different point in her life. She told me several times today that she’s been wondering why she’s even going to school. She knows that she doesn’t really want a career, and her Plan A is to be a mother. In her mind, that doesn’t require education, and so she can’t really wrap her head around why she has to go to college. She said she’s toying with the idea of majoring in elementary education—even though she would hate teaching elementary school—because it’s the major she’s most likely to get some sort of preparation for being a mother from. But mostly she thinks college is useless, and the sooner she gets out of it, the better.

The reason I even began thinking about this question and evaluating my reasons was because of a discussion we had in my Marriage and Family class. The professor talked to us about education and framed the conversation around the traditional roles of the family. He said something like, “Your education is not just a means to getting a job or making a living. It is setting an eternal pattern for learning, and everything you learn will bless your lives now and will bless your family in the future.” That stuck with me more than anything else I took from the class.

This idea tells me that there is certainly more that I am getting from my education than a degree and resume. I think we would all be better off remembering that.