Waxing philosophical about wonder

I'm taking a few minutes to return from this unplanned extended hiatus to recommend strongly this piece in the Times by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the subject of school and the manner in which students are made to process their subjects. I cannot find strong enough language to express how much I enjoy and appreciate Ta-Nehisi's writing, and this guest spot continues his excellent writing on the topic of child-rearing, race, and education. And while he steers the direction of the article on towards matters of race (as is his charge over at The Atlantic), there is truth overflowing from his thoughts on the purpose (versus the execution) of education. This part made me want to stand and cheer:

I can tell you everything that was wrong with my education — how cold pedagogy reduced the poetry of Macbeth to a wan hunt for hamartia*, how the beautiful French language broke under rote vocabulary. But more than that, I can tell you what happens when education is decoupled from curiosity, and becomes little more than an insurance policy.

"An insurance policy". As he goes on he explains how this rote education is can serve ultimately as a safety net or protection for poorer and/or urban children if they indeed make it through to that very-important high school diploma; and while he allows that it is something worth celebrating given the higher rates of success for those who attain their diploma, he reminds that another goal of education is to instill in the students with an ability and drive to learn more. While it's great to equip students, especially those like himself when he was in school, it would be even better if they exited with a productive curiosity to accompany that diploma.

This piece resonated deeply with me since my upbringing strongly stressed the importance of "education" or rather an incomplete appreciation of it. My "education" was my ticket to university, and my performance at education would pave my way to further education and opportunities (Ivy League, of course), where I could continue to learn and magically emerge a successful member of society. And my "education" did just that for me (well, minus the Ivies)- it was a "smart" insurance policy through which I collected a good "education". But lost somewhere in the midst of all of this was the development of curiosity, a drive to delve into the subjects at hand (and tangential- I spent most of college tossing aside non-engineering classes with disdain as if they were holding me back from a goal of ... doing something with engineering... that hadn't materialized in the first place). Somehow, I managed to travel through secondary "education" and nearly all of my "higher education" before my sense of wonder was kindled - and by this point it was too late to spend all of my idyllic college years on exploration. All's not lost, of course. But it's a deficit of time and opportunity to discover more of the world and myself that I really regret: one that I have been spending a lot of my time lately trying to make up for.



*[From Dictionary.com: hamartia — n, literature: the flaw in character which leads to the downfall of the protagonist in a tragedy. Would've been an incredible word to have known back then for paper-writing uses.]