Thoughts on Education

I recently read Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman, which is this fantastic collection of stories from Richard Feynman’s life, a physicist who’s always curious and a bit mischevious. In one story he discussed how appalled he was at a university he visited in Brazil. The students were great memorizers, but didn’t really grasp the material they were learning.

As he tried to show them the problem with this, he gave the following story:

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek – even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” – and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, “What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then the sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

I said, “That’s how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids ‘science’ here in Brazil.”

Does this sound familiar? This is why I’m so disillusioned by our educational system. No one is here to learn, only to get good grades so they can get a good job. How do they get good grades? By memorizing.

Some of you might know that I consider studying a form of cheating. If you’re being tested over your knowledge of a subject, studying is the means by which you fake that knowledge. That isn’t to say I don’t study – I don’t study much, but I do skim my notes before a test. Our educational system has devolved from testing your knowledge to testing your memorization skills. Studying isn’t cheating because you’re not being tested for knowledge.

I try not to let school get in the way of my education, and do a good deal of learning outside of class through things like the BIL Conference. BIL was so exciting because it was a gathering of really smart people who wanted to learn. While the lectures were great, I most valued the hallway conversations. It’s so refreshing to spend time with people who have a passion for learning.

I often feel like I’m missing out on the real college experience, and that Texas A&M University isn’t a “real” college. I want to hang out around Oxford, Stanford, Princeton, and MIT and have those interesting and random conversations with intellectuals, which I was always told college was like. I want to take classes that are interesting and actually learn something, without worrying how the class will affect my GPA. I want to spend my four undergraduate years in an environment similar to the one we created for two days at BIL.

Now that I’m almost done with school, I feel like Texas A&M cheated me of an education. Everything I’ve done and learned these past few years have been despite this institution, not because of it. I want to take a few years getting a “real” education – go to a great university and sit in on classes that interest me. I don’t care about grades or a degree, I just want the knowledge.

When you work for a grade, you’re learning for someone else. Whether you have to get that 3.5 GPA to get a job with one of the Big Four, or you need a 4.0 to get into some graduate program.

True learning is internal. I learn because I want to learn. Selfish, I know.

I have been repeatedly disappointed by my formal education, and I now turn to my informal education to teach me.