Knowledge

How do I get some

There is a misconception in this country about the failure of higher education. Everyone has a story about a family member, a boss, or a friend who has a degree and is a complete idiot. My family had a perfect example, my Dad’s brother. He took over 10 years to get a degree in accounting. He could never pass the exam and ended up working various jobs for my Dad for a large portion of his adult life. My Dad did not have a high regard for higher education, even more so if the classes were online. My parents had set up an annual scholarship in my sister’s name after she passed away. I don’t know if he succeeded or not, but he wanted to add a stipulation that it couldn’t be used for online classes.

This may be controversial to some people, but you can’t teach knowledge. That really isn’t the concern of colleges and universities. They are there to give out information. They routinely check on information retention, but very rarely for knowledge. They do make some attempts to try and make you think. The purpose of a term paper is to take a bunch of information from different sources and make it into a single coherent topic. That’s the purpose, as I understood it. Many just get away with regurgitating other people’s thoughts without any of their own.

A fellow Veteran that I went to college with got in trouble on a paper. He came to me for some reason because he had no idea what to do. This brilliant graduate student, who was teaching American History, had given him a paper to write. The paper was to be written without using any quotations. What is the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in your own words? He had ignored the first part and filled his paper with quotations. All proper citations were there. She had failed him and had forwarded the paper to the Dean for plagiarism. He had an appointment with the Dean that afternoon, and was afraid he was going to get expelled. First, I told him to relax, everything was going to be OK. I told him to explain to the Dean that he didn’t understand the assignment. Tell him you used citations, so you weren’t actually trying to take credit for someone else’s work. This is where the actual difficulty came in when I asked him about the “in your own words”. He could read it, but he could not understand it well enough to be able to talk about it in his own words. He was unable to process the information enough to gain knowledge. He also had difficulty in the photography class that we attended together. He couldn’t understand that photography was more than just taking a picture.

What does a degree get you? It gets your resume a look. Without a degree, there is a high possibility it will get thrown out before anyone looks at it. It even got interviews when at my age, I wouldn’t have. My art degree got me one job. I learned that most art jobs are tedious and boring. A lot of promises and not much follow through. College gives you a lot of information; some of it will be useless to you. A large portion of it will be of use, and in ways you don’t realize when you graduate. There are several attempts to teach you how to think. That last part isn’t a requirement of graduation.

When there is a task assigned to the information, it is much easier to check an individual for knowledge. Military schools have perfected this. They give the information. Test to see if information has been retained. Test again preforming the task with very specific requirements. Art classes were the same way. Given a certain set of criteria, create a specific art piece. Then you also had to be able to explain what you did and why. Not their fault that when it is mainly just information, it is much more difficult to determine knowledge. This is where the equation of my long-winded story finds its conclusion. Information is required for obtaining knowledge. A great deal of information is generally required for a small amount of knowledge. Information is just the first stop. No one can really be blamed if information just stays information. Gather information every day in the hopes that some of it will eventually be knowledge.

Peace and Love