The Musings of an Eternal Student

School is very interesting to me. I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I am very interested in what I do as a student.” I mean that I am fascinated by the very idea of school, and the corresponding ideas of education, learning, life preparation, and so forth.

Something occurred to me today as I worked on my part of a paper I’m coauthoring, a paper that is being written in order to be published. I have written all sorts of papers in my school career, and as I worked on this particular project I realized that, while it’s similar to the work I do for my classes, the paper itself is not for a class, or for a graduation requirement, or for any sort of academic obligation. And I realized that, if my future continues in the direction in which it’s already headed, I will end up writing papers for a living.

Okay, this is not entirely true, but essentially, the things I’m doing now as a student are the things I will be doing the rest of my life. I will be writing papers and having academic conversations and reading articles. My life as a student is direct preparation for my future career. I will be teaching too, of course, but even that builds nicely upon my role as a student.

The reason I found this thought so fascinating was because with it came the realization that school is not a direct preparation for most careers. The thought that I will be writing papers for the rest of my life is highly amusing to me, and it occurred to me that the reason I find this thought so amusing is that normally when we are in school we don’t expect that what we are doing there is what we will be doing for our entire lives. In our present society, that is just an absurd thought. There is school and then there is work. They are often mutually exclusive, and sure, we like there to be some overlap, but the overlap tends to be in bits and pieces of information that are dumped into our mind throughout the course of our thirteen to twenty-three years in classrooms and libraries and then can be pulled out at will when we encounter relevant situations during our later work years. The overlap is certainly not an overlap in practice.

But why should that be? Why should the few of us who can’t seem to leave school and decide to just go ahead and go all the way have the advantage of twenty-three years of (mostly) relevant work experience, while so many other people just get through school because it looks better on the resume, and then leave it all behind to do something that is finally worthwhile to them?

I’m not saying that everything we do in school is worthless, nor am I suggesting that we apprentice young students to specific careers. I just think that there’s currently a major mismatch between school and “real life”. And I think a lot could be done to make all those years we spend in the classroom a lot more relevant to the rest of our lives. That is, to the rest of all of our lives.