The other day (it might have been yesterday) I got a tweet from Elmo (yeah, I follow Sesame Street on Twitter. Haterz gonna hate) that said, "Elmo is spending his summer learning his letters. What have you learned this summer?" God bless Sesame Street; I'm 19 and they're still making me think. I read that and thought, "What the hell HAVE I learned?"
Taking a year off from school has been weird. Just about everyone I know was in school this past year, whether it was high school or college. My friend Leah took a gap year too, but she was off doing insane amounts of traveling. And I mean real traveling; working on ranches and homesteads in return for food and board, immersing herself in other cultures, finding new friends and occasionally hitchhiking (she was never alone, thank heaven). Her stories are solid evidence that she learned a TON in her travels. This train of thought led me to thinking about the definition of education. Just because I haven't been in school, does that mean I'm not learning?
The way I see it, there are two very different yet equally valuable schools of education: books and world.
Book learning, to me, is everything you learn in school: math, how to read, how to write, history, etc. I know there are people who don't know how to read (like in that episode of The Cosby Show when Sammy Davis, Jr. guest starred...anyone? No?), but I'm fairly confident that it makes life a zillion times easier. Think about all the things you read in a day. Road signs, storefronts, e-mails, texts, Twitter, instant messages, subtitles, labels, books, food packages, even names on the back of athletes' jerseys. Can you imagine not understanding any of that? It just seems like it would feel so chaotic having to find ways of working around that particular obstacle.
Now for the World learning. This is the education you get by going outside, that scary place that us pale kids avoid. That is where you learn how easily your skin burns, when the light is about to turn green, the correlation between tipping well and receiving good service next time, which parts of the city to avoid, and which days tend to have the shortest lines at the Costco gas pump. Getting through the world is just as vital as being able to read the signs that direct you along the way.
I find that these two schools form a Venn diagram, and in the middle section we can find PEOPLE. Both in school and out of it, you have to deal with people. You find out which people you like and which people you don't like, and you learn where to find the ones you like. You also learn how to cope when you're forced to be around the ones you don't like without starting a jousting match in your local Starbucks. In school* we learn how to befriend teachers without sucking up (and, indeed, which teachers should and should not be befriended), how to sit by the class clown, how to sit by the quiet kid, how to form Cheating Alliances, how to get around the dreaded seating chart, how to avoid talking to people in the hallways, where to sit at lunch and with whom, and how to sneak out of class unsuspected to comfort a friend in need. Outside of school, it's more about the short term. Make this customer your friend long enough to get them to trust you so they buy the product, let the woman with a zillion antsy kids cut you in line at the grocery store, give your seat to the old guy on the bus, hold the door for others and say thank you when it is held for you, don't talk in the elevator unless your comment is guaranteed to be received as witty, say hello, say excuse me, use your turn signal, don't walk on the same side of the street as the stumbling drunk guy on your way to the car at midnight (this actually happened on Sunday night, and I am quite safe because I followed that rule).
There really is no replacement for "real world" experience, as people say. That's where the people are. That's where the hugs happen, where the conversations start, where the people get hired and where they get punched. But the book learning kickstarts your ability to deal with that world. You learned to read and ended up bonding with someone over a shared favorite book. You learned to do math and look! you know how much rent you can afford. It takes a combination of book learning and world learning to be able to keep up a conversation with just about any intelligent person, and to enjoy variety in the company you keep.
I'm so excited to be back in school. School is where the two kinds of learning get together, have a few too many drinks and experience a vague and slightly confusing encounter that results in lovely, well-rounded babies we call civilians. Because of this crossroads I can not only learn awesome things, but also discuss those things with people I can call my friends. Thanks to experience, I know how to make friends! Go me. And now, thanks to early classroom learning, I can go enjoy a book.
*I'm mainly basing this on high school, which is where MOST of us started learning to deal with bad situations in a more mature fashion. Some, sadly, never got over their tantrum phase.
I just want to know today, know today, know today / I just want to know something today. - Be OK, Ingrid Michaelson
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