Chapter Sixty-Two: Uncollege (~jinghan)

Imagine this, you go to check your emails expecting homework, correspondences with people from Australia and some promotional stuff (just for good measure. But instead you have this in your inbox from your psychology teacher.

Folks-

Below is a link to an article in today’s New York Times.  It’s about a young homeschooler that I know from Winters, who is starting a social movement called “UnCollege.”  You don’t have to QUIT college to embrace some of the ideas and do some of the things Dale is advocating.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/how-students-can-take-charge-of-their-education/

Just wanted to pass this on to you for your consideration.

Here’s to always seeking the best path, and hopefully finding it sooner rather than later!

So what do you do? You open the link and spend the next three hours neck-deep in articles.

I encourage you to have a look at this: http://www.uncollege.org/ and read this: http://uncollege.org/academicdeviance.pdf

What is it? It’s what got me thinking about the value of my education. We come to uni to work out what we want to do with our lives, some days I feel a lot of direction, but a lot of the time I feel like I’m just being lead around a maze with no end.

The problem, I realised, is that I thought uni would tell me what to do with my life.

And sure if I believe this long enough uni will tell me what to do with my life, but I am more and more realising that uni will not necessarily tell me what I want to do with my life or what I should do with my life to walk out at the end happy with myself.

The solution is that I need to stop expecting something that is a mass education system to tell me what I am uniquely capable of and what I can do for the world with my skills. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to drop out of uni like the manifesto talks about (let’s be honest, I am far to addicted to those little scores that get published at the end of each exam period…) but this is definitely give a good jolt to my stagnant trust in the education system to tell me what my life will be about.

If you read either of the articles I’ve linked, you will be faced with the three questions:

#1. Who are you?

#2. What are you good at?

#3. Why are you here?

I don’t think these are questions you can answer once and be done with, but definitely questions you want to think about if your current answers are “no clue, not much and not sure.” Because, I believe it is true that if your life has not taught you how to answer these three questions, then no amount of H1s in MAST30021 Complex Analysis will make your life successful.

I think what these questions really are about is:

#1. Be honest with yourself.

#2. Stop making excuses for yourself.

#3. Do not be afraid of making goals because you are afraid of failing them

Sometimes the only reason we don’t know ourselves is because we have weaknesses and shames that are just too easy not to think about. And we’re just as afraid of knowing what is good about ourselves because we are afraid of being called out for being arrogant. But if you do learn to know yourself you’ll find that you can have faults and attributes without being arrogant or ashamed. In fact, arrogance and shame come about mostly when we’re not admitting to who we really are, right?

And similarly, we often complain that we are not good enough, when really what we mean is that we don’t want to be good enough because then we’ll have to actually get off out butt and do something. I don’t believe that anyone is so lacking that they’re not good at nothing.

Me? Afraid of making goals? Oh yeah.

Well I’ll be trying to answer those three questions for myself over the next week/month/year/decade, I hope you will join me.