If your early twenties are about finding yourself and having new experiences, your later twenties are about trying to answer the questions brought up in the last 5 years or so. It's been the theme song of my life lately, between my 8 year old neice's incessant interrogative about the mundane and overheard to a rousing and educational round of twenty questions in the car between Texas and Colorado to the constant question of what I'm going to do when I graduate, and I just don't know. I don't have the answers. I don't make the rules. Even the question of what we really want, how it's going to manifest itself becomes a huge cloud of whothefuckknows. I know some things. I like to think I know more than most people. Trying to make sense of things is a tough job, and I wonder if other people are asking questions too or if they're just floating along a sea of blissful ingnorance.
I just finished a book for class (I know) which poses as one of its central tenets the issue of "authentic questions," and how they really bring out the real life learning you should get in school, rather than the kind of learning you don't get when you try to figure out what the teacher is looking for. Curriculum questions like, "Was Huck Finn a good boy?" and "Why did Hamlet hesitate?" These kinds of questions can draw upon the fact-driven knowledge, the class discussions, but also and more so from opinions, beliefs, interpretations. These are not the questions being asked on standardized, multiple choice tests, fueled by political and economic reasons. That's why the schools are fucked up.
The biggest question is why. Why a lot of things. Anyone who thinks they really know probably is full of shit. But keep asking.
Pics from Colorado, one of my favorite trips so far:
2 comments:
I know this is an older post and no one will probably read this question but here it is anyway: I wonder about the validity (a loaded word I know) of the continual slam on the schools as being "fucked up."
In di brandt's "Literacy in American Lives" she pointed out that the school system is educating a higher precentage of people to higher levels of literacies than ever before in American history. Is that a failure? I wonder if we constantly attack the public schools because we (whatever ideological stance we are taking) simply want everyone to think like we do, and are pissed when the schools don't make that happen.
Thanks for scrolling down. :)
I think people (myself included) say it as an umbrella slam, because there are a lot of needs not being met in a lot of schools, although many great things are happening too that don't get recognized as the problems of some schools (shootings, dropouts, fighting, pregnancies, disrespect, etc) are glaring. It's something lazy cynics (myself included) say when a full-on ideological discussion isn't appropriate I guess.
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