Youth is a time for living, not preparing

Date published: 1/17/2008

WE DON'T consider it the "goal" of a song to get to the end. The entire musical arrangement isn't aiming for the last note. It's not an ordeal to get through. Time passing is not a problem--musical notes may take into account what came before and what's about to come, but not because they're rushing to a finale. They only want to contextualize and make everything sound pretty.

So why don't we treat life more like a song? There's so much rushing around, so much eagerness to finish another stage of preparation, but why? I think it's a big mistake (and one that's likely to screw up a big portion of one's life) to think there's some sort of plateau to life, where everything finally gets to where you want it to be. Life is a constant process of change, resistance, self-renewal and overcoming. To be brought up to believe it's all moving toward a point where we can be free of all that and relax contradicts life itself.

And it doesn't help that our education makes us think of our youth as a big period of "getting ready": "Now's not the time to go out and do something--now's the time to prepare. You're helpless! You don't know the ways of the world!"

When how we learn is so different from how we apply that knowledge (sitting in a classroom being far different from any application of what you learn there), there is a disconnect in the brain. There's what you do when you're learning about something, and then there's what you do when you're actually doing it. This sets up the idea of preparation--but in reality, there's very little difference between what something is like when you're learning about it and what it's like when you're doing it. People learn by doing. As John Dewey says: "Education is not preparation for life. Education is life itself."

Date published: 1/17/2008