All I Know is I Know Nothing (NOW!)

Postaday for May 13th: Land of ConfusionWhich subject in school did you find impossible to master? Did math give you hives? Did English make you scream? Do tell!

Sorry to say this, (I am, honestly,) but I was one of those know-it-all smart-alecks who thought he knew everything. I’ll go ahead and blame the education system where I grew up, which you can call Wichita, or Kansas, or the United States, or The West. It wasn’t exactly vigorous.

I can tell you about some of my fun failures, though. When I was in 11th grade I went through a rough period where I just didn’t see the point of anything. I failed many classes that year, not from lack of understanding, but just because I never turned in any homework. Lasting effects: none. Don’t let your kids read this— high school in America is more or less a joke. The best thing I can say about high school is that anyone who survives the chafing process is better suited to combat the grossly unjust social structures that society tries to foist on the populace.

I’m a still bitter? Nah…

When I took the ACT, the college entrance exam for schools in the midwest, I decided I’d major in whatever my lowest score was: the idea being that it was the area I need to do the most work in. My lowest score was on the English part, and that’s what I got my BA in. The rest is history? I guess so… I love to write, although, again, let me tell you that writing classes in college don’t teach you how to write. They do teach you how to critique, how to analyze, and more specifically, how to articulate that analysis. This is actually a pretty good skill for writers to have, in my opinion.

College itself, like highschool, is not really a place to learn anything. I don’t mean people don’t learn— they do— I just mean that success seems to come not from what you know but who you know. The education one receives at, for example, Wichita State is not going to be all that different from that received at Harvard for the sufficiently motivated student.

The key there is the “motivation,” in that a Harvard will be more competitive and drive a student more. So it’s those other students, those fellow competitors, that give someone at an Ivy League school an advantage. And then the connections made, the relationships, that’s where the real success comes from. The network you build in college is where all the potential comes from.

And if there was one skill I never mastered, it was establishing, cultivating, and taking advantage of a social network.

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