FORMATIVE YEARS SHOULDN'T BE SQUANDERED ON 'PREPARATION' >> HOPSCOTCH: MUSINGS ON LIFE AND PHILOSOPHYBY JOE HOLMES

January 17, 2008 12:36 am

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."

And think of how obnoxious it is to have this preparatory vibe foisted on you during your teenage years. In our culture, we've been raised to look at teenagers and young people in their early 20s as immature, undeveloped and irresponsible. While there is some truth to this, when you place this age group in its evolutionary context, you get another picture. The late teens and early 20s are the basket where almost all of natural selection's eggs lie. We are at the peak of our vitality, at our most robust, and full of vibrancy because all those traits are what are most important for our species to have to survive.

This time frame is when we'll either survive and pass our genes on or die. In a sense, young adulthood is the most energetic and powerful time of a person's life; why are we being sat in classrooms all day and made to feel helpless?

That's one of life's biggest problems--a sense of learned helplessness. When you're constantly being told to prepare for life, you slowly begin to think you aren't ready to live it. You need to wait to be taught formally how to do something before you give it a try. But this is at odds with the reality of life. As I heard (ironically enough) in a quote from my school's agenda: When it comes to experience, we always get the test before the lesson.

Joe Holmes is a student at George Mason University. Reach him at jholmes4@gmu.edu.