(no subject)

[emilyne]

today feels like a list day

five things i learned in five years of highschool:

1. that i can never go to class and still manage reasonably well
2. that i had more to gain from the people i associated with outside of class than what i was being taught in it
3. creativity and lateral thinking will not get you very far inside the classroom
4. there is a right answer. you will be taught what it is.
5. that there was nothing i was taught in five years that i could not have learned by picking up the textbook and reading it over the course of a few days.

six things i learned in one eighty-minute lecture on hobbes in this morning's political philosophy lecture:

1. that there is no truth or order to the world, only valid and invalid deductive reasoning
2. that ours is a schizophrenic society wherein we spend our childhoods being taught to share while simultaneously are inculcated with capitalist notions of personal gain and entitlement
3. that if i should take anything away from the lecture, it should be the caveat that indulging your children's every desire will not make either of you happier.
4. that we tell dictionaries definitions, they do not tell us
5. there is no rational explanation of desire. all thought is premised on "if...., then...." , and where 'if' represents our desire, then reason and rationality is the relationship between the 'if' and the 'then'.
6. that hitler's actions were not irrational or incorrect (according to hobbesian logic) until after he lost the battle of stalingrad. howver, according to general opinion, the desire for world domination was where hitler's real 'kookiness' lay.

i resent being graded. how much freer would i be in my educational choices if my future success wasn't predicated on an occasionally arbitrary system of ranking? shouldn't a system of higher education encourage people to diversify their knowledge rather than encouraging them to only pursue that at which they excel? i preform poorly in math and science, and so they have been gradually pushed out of my education - not forcibly, i grant you, but by the pressure of maintaing a good CGPA and the fact that lower level physics and biology courses do not count towards the established number of credit hours i require to graduate.

so, the upside is that i'm finally learning something useful for the first time since...oh, boy, i'd say since i left mcnabb in grade four. the downside is i still feel like i'm being cheated by the system.