on my education

it's really a source of discontent in my life, a struggle i deal with all the time. not a struggle like cancer or a dying kid, so no, it's not something i lose sleep over, but it's something i have to deal with considering all of my workmates have a degree and some of them have masters, and yet, if i were to get promoted, some may feel slighted because they have more education. i can perform better, be smarter, more efficient, more innovative and all those other business terms, but when you don't have a degree, people have room to question.

when i was in school the whole enterprise felt empty. i didn't feel like i was getting educated, certainly not receiving a complete education. a few classes brought me joy, made sense, appealed to my intellect. others were led by professors that needed to teach to continue to get research funding. most classes felt forced, students forced to take the classes, professors forced to teach. there was very little education, mostly it was repetition and memory and very little critical thinking. read two chapters, take a quiz. read two chapters, write a 5 page paper. listen to me talk, take a test. that's not challenging and certainly not sufficient preparation for the world i encountered after school.

so why is it a struggle? well, despite feeling that school was a waste of time, i'm now pressured into believing that it was valuable and holds merit in my current job, and maybe that pressure is solely inflicted by me, it's not something that i necessarily feel at work, but it's something i know is a factor at least to be considered. and in all reality, though it really shouldn't be, i'm honest with myself in knowing that it is. i would prefer the level of work i do or the level of expertise i bring to my position or my team or my company as the defining judgement, and it is, but it's only a part of the whole. and so what am i to do? go back to school and take classes in topics i'm not interested in? how would i justify my work paying for classes that i'm interested in but won't necessarily help my career? and the follow up question to that would be, wouldn't any class i take that i enjoy and that increases my cognitive understanding of the world help my company?

so i watched a video today on TED about rethinking the liberal arts in america. i've never thought about what constitutes liberal arts, what it means or why it has value, but after watching the presentation embedded below (not a very exciting presentation by TED standards, but informative none the less) i realized that i got a liberal arts education. i started with a major in information systems, took computer classes and learned to organize information, or at least was supposed to learn that. then i decided i would major in philosophy and history, and took a ton of those classes, studying taoism and kant and plato and descartes alongside learning the techniques of war throughout history and about vietnam and ancient asian cultures, i remember being bored in some of those classes and writing haikus and poems in a big yellow spiral notebook. then i decided i should major in education, get a teaching gig and have the summers off to explore and think and live. i studied facilitation and lesson planning. then became disenchanted with that and decided i should drive to california because that's where happiness was. and in all honesty, my education deepened there, felt more real there, i read 12 books in 2 months, watched amazing old films like the bicycle thief, and i meditated and sat in the park and cried while reading a poem traveled down my arm and wondered if it was stendhal syndrome, or if the history of my life and all that i've ever experienced combined with the weather and the time of day and the angle of the sun so that when i read those words i had no choice but to cry, that i had no option but to react to something that i found beautiful with tears. that was my liberal arts education.

i touched a lot of different disciplines. i soaked up what i thought was valuable, put it in my back pocket, and carried it with me. the education that i got while in school really and truly was invaluable, but not in the sense that most expect from it. i learned a lot in those years, how to be away from my family, what it feels like to come home to a family that loves you, and to actually understand that love, you know, sometimes you have to step away to realize how important something is, and college allowed for that. i broke up with a long-time girlfriend and learned to fall out of love, a lesson that i'm still perfecting (rather reluctantly) and tried to deal with the aftermath of being shunned for the first time in my life. it was an amazing period of self-actualization, but most of that is unaccounted for in the records, there's no piece of paper to be seen, there's no official document that certifies that i learned anything while being there. and it feels blasphemous and disingenuous and rotten. and it feels worse that i have heaped pressure on myself to go back and get that official document now, when i'm in a completely different place in my life.

aside: i remember sitting in the library shelves at umbc reading artaud, i was studying poetry and thinking about it in abstract ways, and artaud was fairly insane, but ingenious, and he also wrote plays, so i sort of combined the two and conjured up a play that would essentially take place in a huge well, it would require a one-of-a-kind set and whatnot. so i walked over to the theater section and looked for books on alternative theater, or abstract performance and found very little, but decided i would reach out to someone that might know more, and being in such an institutionalized place in my life, i contacted who? a professor at columbia. what response did i get? none. he was probably doing research.

my "liberal arts" education is the only reason i am where i am, and my education didn't stop when i left school. i worked construction for a few months, a plumber's assistant, carrying pipe and fittings and getting lunch and telling stories and taking direction and watching, more than anything, watching. i watched our foreman run the site, how he handed out criticism, how he spoke to us, how we all wanted to be his friend and do good work for him. i remember walking to lunch one day, i worked across from the world bank building, there were always lots of foreigners around, this english man noticed my "don't bush it" shirt (in reference to the 2004 election) and told me he approved of my sentiment, i had my hard hat strapped to my belt and looked dirty and the shirt seemed out of place to him, so he asked about it, and i lied, told him i was sort of doing a social experiment, i was interested in seeing how different the environment in construction was compared to corporate america, and he said he could tell i wasn't a typical construction worker, and i bumped into him a few more times over the next couple of months and we always said hello. but, what's funny is it really wasn't a lie, i was experimenting, only without a plan, i didn't take the job to experiment, i needed money to get across the country, but when given the opportunity i took away as much as possible. when i was a waiter for a summer, living out of my car at the beach, i learned a lot: multi-tasking, working under pressure, working under exhaustion, working under deadlines, determining expectations, team bonding/building, all sorts of business type terms that people go to b-school for. then i got a job in IT and learned the ins-and-outs of computer systems in four months. then got another job in IT and another and now i'm more business-oriented, with a twist of IT. my point is, without my diverse, liberal education, i wouldn't be able to perform at the level i do now, i wouldn't have the facility to do my job.

and now at work, increasingly, i feel that in order to ensure my spot, i have to have an expertise, i have to be really good at one thing, which is what higher education attempts to do, and what the presenter in the video below bemoans. i don't want a single focus, it's boring and predictable and not something i'm at all interested in. i'm fortunate to work on a team that is incredibly diverse and is tasked with incredibly diverse projects that really allows me to not only use the talents i have, but also develop the skills i severely lack. and though i think both my boss and company see my talent and trusts my ability, i still feel the gaze of higher education looking down on me, chastising me for not finishing, telling me my discontent in those college years should've been swallowed and i should've toughed it out and labored through it and walked out of there with a big white piece of paper that people frame behind glass and talk about at bars and on dates and at conferences.

is it ok that my education is unconventional? is it ok that i study more now than ever? that i'm more engaged in learning both at work and at home more than i've ever been? is that quantifiable enough?