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self education: a manifesto I constantly keep in mind what the American novelist Mark Twain had to say about having to go to school: "I never let my schooling interfere with my education." Indeed, the young Twain was a chronic truant, skipping classes for adventure along the Mississippi River. It was those wild schoolboy days that provided the grist for his chronicling of America in the 1880s in such novels as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Things have changed since then. Education in present day Singapore is a far cry from the one that Twain went through. Time and circumstance allows us to enjoy a schooling that is much more comprehensive and utilitarian. We therefore expect that schooling contributes to our education rather than detract from it. The knowledge and expertise that we acquire from our studying equips us with the necessary skills to seek rightful and honest employment in the field we have been trained in; together with what we have imbibed since our days of sitting in kindergarten chairs, it constitutes our formal education. |
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Yet I hope that people do not look at me and say that because I am an undergraduate that I am an educated person. I say this because although schooling may prepare a person for work, there is no school that I know of that can be comprehensive enough to adequately prepare one for the duty that is life. It is not possible to expect any pedagogical institution to provide an all rounded education, for they necessarily concern themselves with the task that they have been entrusted with: that is, to instruct our untutored young minds with the necessary skills and knowledge as defined by its syllabus. Anything that falls outside of this delineation is therefore up to the discretion of the teacher. This is why the heavy responsibility of education falls squarely on the shoulders of the individuals. Only self-education will accomplish what formal education will not. So, unlike Tom Sawyer, I am not a recalcitrant truant and pursue my formal education in earnest. But I also know that getting good grades is not the be-all end-all of my short four years here. For while I am a student, I am more importantly, a person, and I would much rather that I be a better person than a better student. By this I mean that we should learn more about the how the world around us works, how it affects us, and how we may affect it. I mean not taking for granted the privilege that being able to learn in an university affords us. For certainly beyond what the syllabus can teach a person, there is more that can be learnt from the people that surround you everyday: your teachers, your classmates, your friends. For we will not appreciate the opportunity we have for learning until it is taken away from us. In Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, the future was a place where all printed word was deemed seditious. All types of books were burned because of this misguided ideology. In order to counter this, those people who still loved to read had no choice but to commit entire books to memory, in effect becoming the books themselves, ensuring that the author's words lived on. And although you may begrudge having to understand an entire semester's worth of readings and textbooks for the examinations, perhaps one day, you will find a book that you truly love and learn it by heart. By: Jared Tham. Published: The Nanyang Chronicle, July 2000 |