A Rambling on School, Education, and the Meaning of Life.

School is in full swing again, and, although we are only five weeks into the semester, I am mentally done.  Every morning when I wake up I have absolutely no desire to go to school. School is not my problem, though; I just don't want to go to school. To be honest, I miss homeschooling. I think what I miss most (apart from being able to sit in my pajamas on my bed to do school.....) is the depth of learning. I miss reading the books, and I don't mean just reading them and moving on. I miss really reading them and deeply studying. I'm tired of lectures! I miss actively learning. This is not to say that I don't actively participate in class: I do my homework, think critically about the lectures, discuss them with my friends, raise my hand in class, answer questions, ask questions. What I really miss is pursuing knowledge. Sometimes, I feel that in college I learn even more broadly than before. Maybe it's different in a major, but right now, it feels like the teachers have too much content and not enough time. We breeze through material so fast. In my humanities class—side note, it reminds me so much of history! Oh! how miss history....—we sped through Egyptian history and spent just two days on Greek history. For my world literature class, we were only able to read parts of Homer's Odyssey and only spent one or two days discussing it. Our schedule has us reading a work, or selection from a work, every week. In my homeschooling days, I read about three books per semester, spread out over the weeks. I had time to digest, think, and truly appreciate the content. I miss homeschool.

Homeschooling taught me to love learning. It taught me that an education is more than a grade. I still like my straight A grades (I am soooooo annoyed by my A-  in Algebra, which I probably deserved, but loathe with every cell in my body), but education is more than that. The grade simply reflects how much you learned. To be honest, most students at the college annoy me. Want to know why? Because they don't seem to understand the reason for college. In one of my classes, there is a student who arrives, sits down, answers role call, gets up—as if to use the restroom—but doesn't come back until the last 10 minutes of class to gather his books. If he doesn't leave the room during class, he sits in his chair, stare at the clock and huffs and puffs. My friend who sits next to him has even heard him complain, "This is SO boring!" I am so tempted to turn to him and ask him a very simple question, one that all students should ask themselves: "WHY ARE YOU HERE?!?!!" If your answer is not "To learn all that I can so that I can go into the world and be a successful person," then you need to leave. What good is a grade in the real world? My older sister who is majoring in nursing, heard of a situation where a large quantity of the freshmen cheated on a major test. When I heard this, it occurred to me that cheating really gets you nowhere. Even if someone got away with cheating, or plagiarism, how have they benefited themselves in the long run? Has it ever occurred to those considering cheating, "Maybe this is on a test because it's important and I may need to use this later in life." Isn't that what education is really all about? Training for the real world? Now, I understand that we are not getting practice living in the real world while sitting in a classroom. However, we are learning some very important theories, practices, and ideas that are imperative for a civilized culture to survive.

Maybe I'm over thinking it. But, personally, I think college is overrated these days. I absolutely believe that is it important, but it has become an entitlement versus a privilege. It might not seem like much, but as soon as our mindset changes, everything changes. The modern world has come so far, maybe too far. We have lost gratitude, trust, love. With food, homes, jobs, and health so readily available and normal, is praying and thanking God for his provision even real for us? Or has it become simply a meaningless ritual? Maybe we should ask ourselves that same question: "Why are we here?" What is the purpose of our life? Are we taking short-cuts, taking life for granted? Or are we living life for the glory of God, to proclaim his love and salvation? Even without a conscious realization, a person’s view of life is based upon what he or she thinks. How we think will determine how we act.