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romulus wrote a wonderful essay for class. I'm biased, though, because he interviewed yours truly for the paper. Here it is. Readers, there are a few errors that I'm not going to bother editing. He wrote this really quickly. The numbers are obviously for citations, and I'm not taking those out, either.
“Whenever you cook a turkey,” she told me once, “you have to make sure that it cools for twenty minutes. This helps the juices pull back into the meat.” She’s always full of advice. Her advice is not uneducated, either. She reads. She reads and reads and reads. She reads books, she reads news articles online, she reads blogs, and more importantly, she reads people. My friend Ashley is full of knowledge on how to interact with this world, and she has filled her mind with this knowledge independent from any institution’s standards. When walking into Ashley’s apartment, some people may have to restructure their ideas of how a high school dropout may live. It’s a homey space, with knick-knacks on the wall and two sweet cats keeping watch over the cozy kingdom. Her kitchen is a place of magic – my favorite moment of wizardry occurring when she made chicken curry. The night she made that meal, I was sent home with a bag overflowing with food since my part-time job and school had taken their toll on my pantry. Oh yes, and she is also a very lovely friend.
Being that friend, Ashley does her best to understand my own life experiences. We met when I was a politically and religiously conservative 15-year-old, and she was a 16-year-old atheist with a big personality. Somehow, despite the images our peers had of us as stereotypes, we bonded over a love for conversation and debate. We met each other in the middle in a way that solidified a friendship. To us the bond wasn’t about what we believed, but how we believed it. I had never encountered a non-religious person who was able to talk about her beliefs without belittling me, and she had never encountered a person who was honest enough about his religion to discuss it in a way that wasn’t pushy or judgmental. Judgment was something we instinctively left at the door.
As the years passed, I took a path into college and she did not. Due to extenuating circumstances with her family, Ashley dropped out of high school with the consent of a doctor and received her GED a year later. Even though she doesn’t see college as a plan for her immediate future and is very critical of education in the United States, she does not judge everyone who does go to college. When discussing my own educational experiences, she observed that I seem to be “attaining an education that complements” who I was, who I am, and who I will be. 1 According to her, my education is a catalyst for the person I want to and will become. If this is so, who’s to say that her experience with self-education is illegitimate?
As she defines it, education should be a series of experiences that inform your life. This can be attained through formal schooling or personal research. Ashley chooses self-education and a diligent love of knowledge as her path, even if her grandmother is not so convinced. Having raised her from a young age, and having gone through college herself, Ashley’s grandmother is not thrilled about this life of self-education. According to Ashley, her grandmother sees her as if she hasn’t fully grown up. “Grown-ups go to college,” Ashley said, “and since I didn’t take that step, I am not fully grown up to her.” 2 It’s a point of contention between the two since Ashley’s grandmother is a big fan of the college atmosphere. Seeing that her granddaughter is obviously a bright and capable woman, she assumes that the next step is to take that intellect into a formal education. This is not the only prejudice Ashley encounters. When discussing certain topics, she feels as though her collegiate peers see their information as more legitimate. “It’s as if the professor has the final say in matters,” she remarks, “they don’t think about instructors’ biases.” 3 There’s a haughtiness she experiences in dealing with people who go to college; this haughtiness stems from a notion that education is imparted, not sought out. To many people, an education is something that is to be given to them. For others, like myself and Ashley, education is something that should be sought after. This distinction is important because, when discussions occur, there is no possible way in her peers’ eyes that she can have credible information. Since they were imparted an education by an institution, and Ashley received hers through diligent research, the legitimacy of her information is called into question. This does not, however, sway her in her beliefs on the matter.
When I asked her how she gained these values, she told me that they are largely based on one experience as a teenager. Seeing that the school district in her hometown lacked proper sexual education, and seeing that her body was changing, Ashley began to research words and phrases at the age of 13. “I remember one day I heard the word ‘vulva,’ and no one had previously told me what it meant. So, I went home and searched it.” 4 She continued to research everything she could about sexuality; she learned about anatomy, STDs, and contraception. She knew then that the educational system failed her, and that she was in control of her own learning. When she dropped out of high school a few years later, this value she attained as a young teenager gave her solace.
Despite her wealth of knowledge, and despite friendships with people in college, Ashley often feels condescended by her collegiate peers. A mutual exchange of ideas and concepts, for her, becomes a game of rhetoric. “The biggest thing I’ve learned on my own,” she says, “it is that rhetoric is powerful. People use words in incendiary ways.” 5 When attempting to discuss things with her peers, she finds that recognizing their rhetoric is a key to understanding her own argument and the people she is arguing with. It clues her in to what kind of person she is talking to. “When someone tries to play that game with me,” she remarks, “I am able to read them as a person.” 6 By reading people, Ashley feels as though she has the upper hand. She senses this upper hand, and sees it exemplified in peers’ insistence that she is, in fact, the condescending and patronizing part of the discussion. “It’s as though my knowledge and self-education is so threatening to others that they automatically pin me as patronizing. I’m not trying to tell everyone what to do, I just want to learn.” 7 Even though she has proved herself to be a solid intellectual outside of a normal college experience, Ashley doesn’t rule out the possibility of college. “If the time is right, and the money is there, then I will consider going to college. I’m not going to rush myself – I’m fine where I am.” 8
Inasmuch the government and society tell us that education is important for success, Ashley’s story paints a different picture of what it means to be educated. Surely, she would also describe education as “compulsory,” but her terms are much different. Education is about self-betterment, and this self-betterment can come in diverse ways. As long as a person is continually letting their mind open up to the world around them, and that person is discussing their ideas with others, then they are, in fact, receiving education. Simply going to class and receiving high marks on a paper or test does not cement their ability to learn. In this way, Ashley’s story turns a conventional definition of schooling on its head and questions many college students’ intellectual legitimacy. When going by Ashley’s standards, it is probable that there are many students currently enrolled in college who are not learning at all. It is worth wondering: when someone is solely focused on grades and grade point averages, how can they really be absorbing the information? What makes an education important is what the student aims to get out of it. It’s not handed out in the form of a degree, but sought after in a spirit of curiosity and wonder.
Thanks, Kevin. <3
