Knowledge
by Diane
“I HAVE NEVER LET SCHOOLING INTERFERE WITH MY EDUCATION.” – MARK TWAIN
Why do we go to school? “To learn, of course.” But learn what? Because learning something factual, like “On August 6 and 9, 1945, the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki” or learning a scientific fact like “Neon is a noble gas” is very different from learning lasting real world knowledge, like:
Knowing how to handle a tough situation where two friends are fighting because of something you did,
Or:
In the future, knowing how to complete a work project satisfactorily so that your bonus salary is assured.
The factual things we learn at school are important because they help to hone our minds, improve our memory storage space and our ability to think analytically and creatively. And the second reason is that you need to know the factual things is that factual knowledge helps to get you good grades, and good grades help you get a good job and a decent salary.
But the aim of education, in the holistic sense of the word, is not to swallow and remember facts. Rather, it is to help educate your mind, so it can focus, analyse, explore new ideas, evaluate, synthesize, imagine, create, and generally make your and others’ lives better and happier. Education in this sense is very broad, and I’m going to focus on two aspects of it that I have come to realize are very important. They are, being Focused, and being Perceptive.
The first skill
Learning how to be focused is pretty much the building block of thought. How can you think through something effectively if you’re being distracted by other things? And too often, we are. There are external distractions, like siblings wandering in and asking things, and there are internal distractions, like our minds recalling interesting things that happened during the day when we’re supposed to be working on a project. If you don’t train your mind to be focused you not only waste a LOT of time( if you waste two hours a day being distracted, that’s 60 hours a month you could have spent doing something that’s meaningful to you), but moreover, you can’t immediately become 100% focused during your O levels. The main reason why many of us don’t focus too well is because it takes effort. It’s much easier to waste time doing other less important things that don’t require so much thought. Sometimes the challenge of doing an entire assignment is so great that your mind immediately wanders off.
A few methods I’ve learnt that help me are:
A). Most importantly, ask yourself Why you’re doing the assignment. If you have a strong reason for doing something, you’re more likely to stick at it. Usually the reasons for me are that it’s going to help train my mind just like exercising builds muscle, secondly the more you do what you don’t want to the better you become at doing things even when you don’t feel like doing them (the sooner you master this the more pleasant your life becomes). Thirdly the faster I finish the faster I can play.
B). Tell family members you’re working and ask if they can come talk to you later after a fixed time.
C). Have everything you need at the table (eg water, snacks, school bag).
D). Don’t make a mental rule that your work has to be perfect the first time. This is especially so for essays. Often, by wanting something to be too perfect we take ages to get it down. It takes half the time to do a good-enough first draft fast and improve it on the second draft than to torture yourself doing it perfectly the first time round.
E). Sometimes the assignment looks too daunting to even begin. So slice your time into manageable 10-min blocks, and aim to accomplish something every 10 minutes. This is how Google does everything- a big digital wall clock counts down every 10 minutes so they have something clear to aim towards.
F). Try to finish the first draft of your assignment/ the entire assignment in 1 sitting. Rest your eyes but try not to take extended breaks because it takes a while (15mins- half an hour) to overcome the inertia to get back into the mode of doing the assignment again.
The second skill
Being Perceptive. Won’t it be nice to go about your day with glittering eyes that really see so much more of everything in your life? Being perceptive means being observant and then thinking about your observations. Like a perceptive person would observe mutual annoyance between his/her two friends and think about what could have caused it, and what nasty effects might come out of it. Then he or she could act upon it and try to help make peace before the problem gets too bad. It seems most people tend to walk around with their eyes closed and not realize when someone in a group is feeling left out, or a teacher is having a bad family crisis, or a parent is getting visibly angry. Being perceptive tends to allow you to take preventive measures to help situations, and it’s always fun to notice what people tend not to see.
These two skills will help a lot in making a person not just schooled, but educated as well. And if you really want to be educated, if you really want to learn, it will happen, as is illustrated in this story. It is a story about Socrates.
A YOUNG MAN CAME TO HIM NEAR A LAKE AND ASKED SOCRATES TO TEACH HIM HOW TO ACQUIRE WISDOM. SOCRATES GRABBED THE MAN AND PLUNGED HIS HEAD UNDER THE WATER. AS THE YOUNG MAN STRUGGLED FOR HIS LIFE, SOCRATES CONTINUED TO FORCIBLY HOLD HIM UNDER THE WATER. FINALLY, SOCRATES LET HIM UP TO BREATHE, AND WHEN THE MAN, GASPING FOR BREATH, ASKED WHY SOCRATES NEARLY DROWNED HIM, SOCRATES REPLIED, “WHEN YOUR DESIRE FOR WISDOM IS AS GREAT AS YOUR DESIRE TO BREATHE, THEN YOU WILL FIND WISDOM.”
