I like learning; I just don't like school...

I feel I speak on behalf of many people my age (20) out there: I have fallen out of favor with today's education system. I'm not lazy; I don't think I'm too cool for school, but the educational system undeniably makes me unhappy and lazy when learning subjects that interest me. In the realm of knowledge, the realm of the pursuit of understanding to unknown degrees, why do I/we feel limited, constrained? Why does, for example, Biological Engineering (not my field of study fyi) not jump out the page like 3rd grade science? It should; shouldn't it? So, how do we upgrade our brain matter for an age in which it may matter?

Fact, life is not only school. Fact, balance creates positive harmony in all facets of life. Why is school, mainly college/university life, an aberration? School dominates our lives; many simply don't have a life outside campus. This is suffocating and ultimately doesn't prepare one for the real world. If education wishes to inspire students to follow their dreams in a world which is limitless, why constrain them in a world of limitations? I went to a private boarding high school. Oh wow! Visions of a small Oxford in which one dreams of changing the world spring to mind. How wrong you are my friend; for how can one dream of changing a world that one has no contact with? Break down the walls between society and universities, between society and students. College is not a period of liminality.

I took a year off before enrolling in a university. I learned more in that single year, without school, then I learned in four years of high school. Ummmm, wait, no, how, please contain yourself.

The classroom consists of four relationships. They are: student-student, student-professor, student-subject, and groups-subject. Education is best when all of these relationships are utilized. Even with the exclusion of one of these relationships, education's effectiveness suffers profoundly. By breaking down the walls, class no longer is regulated to classroom. What this does inevitably is create individualism centralized around the school subject. There is personal interaction with the subject and students are allowed to make what they will with it. By taking a year off, I eliminated the middle man, the teacher, when accessing my interests. A teacher shouldn't be a middle man.

I could blab for many a more paragraphs, but have homework. Things change, it's about time education followed the natural progression of things.

Celebrating Diversity in the Classroom

The problem with education today is a lack of using students' creativity in the classroom on behalf of professors and students, therefore missing out on using their diversity to build a better and more interesting education. For example, in big lecture halls the individual is lost in the mass. In smaller classrooms, as well, a few stand out, but rarely is the diversity brought by students' different backgrounds used efficiently to create a more interesting learning environment in today's college classrooms.

I have an example, though, where I have found the use of diversity, it was in CS103, through the use of creativity. In class, many people participated and what they contributed was different, but still our diversity played a small role in the everyday classroom. Instead, it played a major role in the completion of our final project, a Web Page built from the same set of tools which we had learned throughout the semester but we had free reign on how to design, it with only a few basic rules. It tapped into our creativity and the end products were quite dissimilar from each other. Some people built personal sites, while others built sites for businesses or non-profit organizations; some people built theirs from scratch using html and java, while others used templates; some were interactive, some were basic; but they were all unique and expressed their developer's personality. Our sites were different because we were in turn different, we were all individuals with different interests due to our backgrounds and personal experiences. We came from different cultures and upbringings, and our race and gender affected us differently. Therefore, we expressed ourselves differently. 

I believe that our creativity is what allows us to express our own individuality more than anything else. Mr. Mundel said, "without this creativity, individuals cannot express their own backgrounds and often get stuck in the boring mold that is modern education." I agree with him because without creativity we cannot express ourselves and therefore, we cannot learn and work together in the classroom to have a more engaging and interesting learning experience. We are stuck in an isolated bubble where our learning derives only from our textbook and our professor, in a one way flow of communication. I believe that the modern classroom lacks creativity and if we could find a way to integrate it with our modern education, students and professors would benefit from the engagement it would bring. 

Constructing the New Humanist in Undergraduate Education

We are five former CS103 students interested in promoting community in undergraduate education. We invite you to join our conversation and help us explore both the abstract and concrete of the topic.

As we prepare for our panel discussion at "Constructing the New Humanist in Undergraduate Education" an event sponsored by Boston University Office of the Provost, we are eager to share our ideas with you and the rest of undergraduate community. It is our hope that in doing this we can develop an even stronger panel discussion by incorporating your perspectives. So please, join us and be a part of the conversation.

For a more detailed background, please visit the link above to learn about the New Humanist event.