:: worlds in words ::

I don’t know if this is a recent trend or not – I highly doubt it – but a theme has been making itself very evident to me lately all over the place.  In real life, in articles I read all across the interwebs, it seems that a large amount of people are trying to deal with the adjustment of moving from a school environment into what we call “the real world”.  While some have been able to transition with relative ease, others are struggling with the differences.  There seems to be a period of chaos in moving from the world of academia into the career life.

Let me start off by saying I went to private school.  I don’t like to tell people that, because invariably, whenever I tell someone that I went to private school from Grade 6 until graduation of high school, the response is always the same: “Oh, you were a rich kid.”  To be fair, my family was fairly well off.  My parents put me through piano lessons, martial arts, and all that jazz.  I’ll never understand how they managed to do so, and still puzzle over it to this day.  While they were international bankers back before we moved to Canada, they now own and run a small post office/gift ship in Toronto.

Anyway, back to my point about school.  It was a private gifted school for which I passed my tests in Grade 5.  It was a school that offered primarily only “academic” courses, focusing heavily on math and science – there was no Home Ec, no Gym, just Physics and Calculus and Biology and the like.  The only “non-academic” courses that were offered were Theater, Music, and Art – and even then, it wasn’t an option to take throughout all of high school.

My memories of high school are fond.  Granted, my high school experience probably differs greatly from many others’.  For one, I skipped nearly all classes in my final two years.  I think the only classes that I showed up consistently for were English and Philosophy.  I spent most of my time playing guitar in the common room, smoking in the back of the school, out playing pool with friends (who were, uh, also skipping class), or just… not going to class.

Ironically, I was heavily involved in the school.  Being what it was, it had a very small student body – at my time there, I believe the numbers peaked at 350 students for all of grades one through thirteen.  For American readers: yes, we used to have a thirteenth year, the last year of high school, which no longer exists.  I was in the last year to experience that wonderful transition.  I was on Student Council all the way through, staying Vice President in my last two years.  I ran extra-curricular activities, watched over kids during lunch hour, did the morning announcements every day, and played on almost every sports team.  I was in just about every play and musical as well as Captain of the Improv Team.   I was in a band, dating girls, doing my High School thing.

I thought I was King Shit of the world.  I was popular, I was cool, I was invited the parties and enjoying life.  I was doing well in school, eventually graduating with around 95 average for my top six classes, which would get me easily into university.  University – that shining, glimmering, golden goal.  The light at the end of the tunnel.  My gateway into the Real World.  All throughout high school, I couldn’t wait to go to university.  To live on my own, to be able to study what I wanted to study (and I told myself that I would actually start applying myself there, whereas I just winged it in high school), and to prepare for the rest of my life.

The first problem?  I chose Fine Arts Theater as my major.  I’m being facetious, of course, but it did present some real problems for me.  It was a very specific major with very specific application.  I narrowed down my field of opportunities from the beginning by making that choice.  I disappointed a lot of people by choosing that major.  First amongst them, myself.  By the middle of the first semester, I was already thinking about transferring out to University of Toronto and into a different program.  By the second semester, I wasn’t even attending most of my courses.

I can’t say for certain how much of that is because of my program and how much of it is because of the university experience itself and how much I was let down by my grand expectations.  I had high hopes for the York University Theater program, especially since they were touting Rachel McAdams as a graduate, and hell, she made it big.  But first year was a joke at best.  There was so much to learn on the technical side of stagecraft, and those classes I enjoyed to the fullest (minus the part where they slave-labored us as part of the course) – but just about every other class had me going, “Seriously?”  The one class I was taking out of my major, Philosophy, was mind-numbingly painful.  The Teaching Assistant knew more than the Professor did.  I started going only to the discussion groups, and skipped the lectures completely in favor of just reading the assigned texts.

I thought that University would be a shining beacon of intelligence.  I thought that I could drink my fill of the wisdom of my superiors, enough to start vomiting my own half-baked awesomeness once I was finished.  But I soon found that it was full of mediocrity – at least in my experience – and that moments of true learning had to be laboriously hunted down and shot.  I had a small group of friends that I would hang out and talk with, and largely ignored everybody else on that campus.  The level of pretension and jargon-slinging were just absolutely incredible.

This is starting to sound like an incredibly bitter post against education, and that’s not my intent in the least.  Case and point: I’m trying desperately to get back into university this year, hopefully by the summer semester, to complete my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University.  It’s one of the many reasons that I joined the military, because they’re willing to pay for my education.  What I’m trying to say is that I was very disillusioned with my first university experience.  It seemed like everyone was having a a themed party and I showed up completely out of dress and got handed the skunky beer.

I think that out of all of my friends, I hit the “Real World” first.  By nineteen, I had dropped out of university and enlisted in the military.  I was working full-time for the first time in my life, and it wasn’t a coffeeshop or a restaurant – I was firing live ammunition, living out in the field, slapping on cam paint and HOORAH.  I had a child to look after, a family to provide for, bills to pay, debts to manage, ridiculous supervisors to appease, insufferable coworkers to handle, and so forth.  Not to say that military life is necessarily Real World – it can be very much a macrocosm at some points – but you get the gist of what I’m saying.

So here I am.  I’ve spent three years in the military exactly to this date.  On 21 Feb 2007, I showed up for Basic Military Qualification, AKA Boot Camp, in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec.  And now I watch as many of my friends struggle to transition out of the University life and into their own, trying to find their way, trying to figure it out.

I think that the education system gives us this impression that there’s an endstate to all this.  I don’t quite know what “all this” actually is, but there it is.  But so many people are fighting even just to find a job or an internship.  A large number of them have gone abroad, traveled much, and accomplished great things.  But an even larger number of them have retreated back into the education system, going for a second degree or a graduate degree in the hopes that it will help them in their future lives.  Some have just gotten out of university and gone into college for something applicable that they want to pursue.  Others languish.

I say “retreated” back into the education system not necessarily because these people were frightened off or anything – many of them had a graduate program in their sights before they even began undergrad – but because in my eyes, the education system is a fortress.  It’s something completely apart from this thing that they call life, and in many ways, that’s a good thing.  It’s an isolated, fabricated environment dedicated to students learning.  But what are they learning?

They say that school teaches us how to think, how to analyze, how to question and come to our own conclusions.  I disagree.  I think that at best, school teaches us facts and information.  It teaches us how to learn.  It’s up to us, then, to figure out how to process that information and transform it into something relevant and real – to bring the theoretical into the realm of the practical.  Some of us go through internships and work terms to help ease us through.  Some of us hit the ground running.

I’ll try to refrain from speaking generally because I know that my experience doesn’t necessarily mirror many others’ for whatever reason.  For myself, I had a hard time adjusting.  In school, I was friends with many of my teachers.  Even though I skipped most of my classes, they were still people I would talk to and joke with, people that I had respect for and people who (I hope) respected me in return.  I got good marks on my assignments.  I did well on my exams.

Well, that doesn’t count for shit out here.  Nobody really cares that I went to a good school and got good marks.  Nobody cares that I gave a seminar minutes after getting a tooth literally knocked right out, bleeding all over my presentation (well, except that it makes for a good story).  All that really matters is: how good are you at doing your job?  There are guys that I work with who failed out of high school.  There are guys that I work with that have college or university diplomas.  But when it comes to your evaluation as a person, your worth as a soldier, nobody really cares about that expensive piece of paper.  And to be honest, I prefer to work with a lot of the guys that struggled through school instead of those who excelled in the system.  They’re smarter, faster, and get the job done better.

So where does that leave me?  I’ve never believed that the education system was an effective model for personal growth.  I believe that it does work for learning, and learning how to learn.  And I do want to learn.  But for me, it’s a means to an end.  Undergraduate is the new high school, everybody knows that – it’s hard to get credibility in the world at large without at least an undergrad.  Even then, it’s nothing special.  Hell, even a Master’s doesn’t impress half the time.  Moreover, from my group of friends at least, having a degree doesn’t even mean you’ll find a decent job, or even a job in the field you studied.

Part of what makes the whole deal so hard, as many articles I’ve read have quipped, is that students are often coddled throughout their educational careers.  There’s a fair bit of handholding and inspirational talks from teachers and professors, helping that struggling student across the finish line.  Everyone is told that they are unique, special, smart.  In the scheme of the macrocosm, they feel connected and important.  But once they get out of school, how much of that is relevant and applicable?

In the end, the world is what we make of it.  I think I could’ve had a much easier time of things if I’d been helped along, which is where I think parents come into the picture.  Parents should be the one helping their children through that transition, and kids should be free to reach out for their parents for advice and assistance.  I’ve never had a good relationship with my parents, personally, and I was actually disowned slash cut off slash whatever you want to call it by the end of my first year university.  My father figure through school was my Theater teacher, which I think contributed heavily to my choice of major.  Look, I can sit here and talk about daddy issues all day, but my point at the end of the day is this: let school teach facts and learning.  Parents should be the ones teaching Real Life.

I thought that by the time I got to University, I knew everything worth knowing.  Who am I kidding, I thought that by first year of high school.  Who needs parents?  They’re stupid and they just get in the way.  They live in a whole different world, and they don’t understand how anything works nowadays.  The typical teenage stance.  But I’ve come to realize just how much of an impact they could have had on my life had we had a real relationship.  And how much I’m missing because we didn’t.  Yes, especially with my father.

What I couldn’t receive from the wisdom of my parents, I’ve had to learn the hard way.  Through fucking up.  Over and over again.  Hell, half the shit that they tried to teach me, I discarded and learned the hard way.  But through that experience, I smartened up a bit and realized that yes, my parents are ridiculous; yes, they have no idea how much the cultural climate and the world around them has changed; yes, they are conservative relics of the old country – but they know what they’re talking about.  They’ve done their fair share of fucking up and learning, and they’re trying to teach me so I don’t have to go through that pain.

It goes hand in hand with schooling.  Just like you should be learning in all the time that you’re at school but not in class – the schoolyard politics, the socialization – you should be learning when you’re at home.  If you ask me, there should be a three to five-year gap between high school and university to let people out into the Real World and learn before committing themselves back into the hands of the education system if they so choose to do so.  I think that would be best, and that University (or College) would be far more effective at that stage of personal development rather than going back-to-back with high school.

What a completely unstructured and all-over-the-place post this was.  Cut me some slack, I’m still getting back onto my blogging legs, and I’ve only had one coffee today.