Towards the end of my second year of college, as I was trying to figure out just what I wanted to do with my life, one of my engineering instructors attempted to provide his students with some helpful life guidance. This was in the form of a short, written piece that talked about how the educational system "taught people how to pick apples". That's about 80% of what I remember. The other 20% was something along the lines of how education fails to teach us what is actually important, i.e., why we should pick apples and why apples are good for us.
I wish I would have read that
piece, but at the time, it just didn't leave that much of an impression on
me. I think that proved the point the article was trying to make, by the way. Ironically though, as I grew older, I began
to appreciate Professor Joe Burinsky's attempt at enlightening his students.
I was thinking about that point
this past week as I was talking and listening to stories about how many of us
were programmed with this directive in mind. It was important to pick
more apples than anyone else. If you weren't the chief apple-picker then
you were doing something wrong. Those last two points make a lot of sense
if you are the person that owns the apple trees to be picked. For the
apple pickers themselves? Not so much. Now at first blush, this is
a bit of a stretch of the original idea behind what I thought was the whole
apple-picking narrative, as that had to do with education. After I
thought about it some more though, it really is the same thing.
Our education system, it seems,
is basically just designed to create good apple pickers.
Now we do need apple-pickers, both
figuratively and in reality. But we are painfully poor when it comes to
equipping individuals to deal with the truly weighty aspects of life. I'm
not suggesting that formal education is the solution to teaching young people how
to deal with real-life questions of substance, but I am suggesting that it at
least needs to make an effort.
Yes, by the way, some teachers,
such as my oldest daughter Katrina (proud father moment), do teach more than
just the formal curriculum (i.e., apple-picking). But that comes from her
desire to expose her students to things they aren't going to experience
otherwise. Shakespeare isn't normally resident in Brooklyn, except of
course if you are in her English class.
Where is the effort though
systemically to teach young adults how to make good personal relationship
decisions? Where is the effort to teach real financial literacy?
Where is the effort to teach them about what working in the real world is all
about, specifically the importance of cultivating and having working
relationships?
Again, at the risk of repeating
myself, I know that these things are not owned by the formal educational
system. Much of this belongs to parents, other family members, and
friends. But the older I get, the more convinced I become that what we
learn in school is to compete...for grades, for attention, for lots of
things. Good for the tree owners who need apples picked. Bad for
the people picking apples who are ultimately just executing some pre-loaded
mental code.
I'll also note that some of us
(myself included) were not really taught any of these non-apple picking skills
as kids. It was just expected that I would work hard and get good grades
(i.e., learn how to pick apples well). What I do know outside of
apple-picking has been acquired in adulthood through a lot of trials and
errors. At age 57 that continues.
Bringing the conversation back to finish this post, I was talking to a former co-worker earlier this week. We shared our two stories of life in the corporate apple-picking world, of working hard and trying to do our best, but ultimately being the victims of apple tree owners. Sometimes picking apples well just isn't good enough. That's a good lesson to learn by the way. although it would help to learn a bit earlier.
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