December 15th, 2024
Last night, I submitted my last project of the semester. I just did a semester of college! That’s one down, this time around.
So: what did I learn?
Turns out: a hell of a lot.
College did not radicalize me, or even re-radicalize me. I have actually been rad most of my life. But school has a way of letting you know what you don’t know, and the tools it has already given me to help me be a better human are incalculable. I have known things; but the things I’ve learned about the environment and technology and writing and art and design just this year alone has reminded me how big this world and its history is, and how little of it all I really know.
After the election, there was much talk about education and its impact on voting, with terms like “diploma divide” invented to explain what exactly happened. The results of the election made it clear: the less educated an area was, the more likely it was that its people would vote red. This conversation inspired immediate backlash: “You can’t just go around calling people uneducated!”
But here’s the thing: you absolutely fucking can.
Because being uneducated is not the same as being stupid.
There are plenty of intelligent people who never graduated high school (or even went to high school). They did different things with their lives. But many of them don’t know much or anything about our environment or science or different religions or economics or politics, and don’t even know how to tell if what they read on Facebook today is true or not.
That’s what it means to be educated.
And for my entire life, I have dedicated myself to pursuing an education. To learning things that are hard or uncomfortable or that I might not even give a shit about (but often grow to care deeply for).
I’m always telling people who ask me how school is going that this is the kind of stuff that I would be doing anyway, but now they’re giving me credit for it. And school has been a vast, welcoming abyss to really dive into; the deeper I go, the more I find out what education itself really means.
“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership,” said Chinua Achebe.
Isn’t this what we all want? The thing is, we have to work to get there, and we’re farther off that path than we used to be.
So many of us are looking at the world right now and thinking: how unfair. How corrupt. How expensive. How unhealthy. How stupid. How mean. How violent. How destructive. How unjust.
And all of these things are true. But education gives us the knowledge, training, and strength to fight back and to restore our relationships, with each other and with our land and planet. Education helps us transform our despair into hope and joy.
So what did I learn? Like I said, so damn much.
Most importantly, I’ve learned that learning begets learning; that it’s not enough to just ask questions, which is the internet’s favorite dumb pasttime. Nothing in society has ever happened because people were “just asking questions”; everything has happened because people haven’t stopped learning, fighting, and working towards the answers.
The Den 