Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

MC's picture

The end of our discussion

The end of our discussion today really interested me- the struggle of reaching intellectual heights or reaching social heights, if we might do both, and trying to come up with perfection. Perfection is such a funny thing-- we know there is no way we can really make perfection because it is impossible, but we try anyway. Perfection must be perfect to everyone but only certain people find certain things perfect, and we are imperfect beings so how could we possibly correctly identify and/or create perfection anyway? Why do we care so much? I think a little bit is that to many people perfection involves ease. It's hard to not want something to be easy (I know it is for me, at the very least), and to not want everything to just work itself out with minimal effort. That's half of what our society today focuses on: making everything as easy as possible. After all, if it's easy than everyone can access it and then there are fewer problems. But maybe we should be focusing on making more people capable of dealing with the complex, because no matter how much we want it to be otherwise, our world is complex. If all we know is easy, I don't think we can reach our potential or truly understand the world around us.

Which brings up education all over again. I think of the education system (in this country at least, cannot speak for anywhere else) as how we teach socialization, at least until the college level where theoretically we are allowed free access to knowledge. We can't get dessert or the cool toys until we learn how to play nice. Learning how to socialize is aggravating, from my experience. I used to continuously entertain the idea of how I would teach children, and most of the time it was just letting the kids loose on some books and stuff and hanging around to answer questions. This is partially based off of personal experience: this was how my educational experience began, and I always felt I learned better and was happier that way, so I want other people to experience the same. Who knows what's really right or good though?

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
4 + 16 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.