Living teaches more than school, university does

This is a controversial issue whether living teaches us more than school, university and other social institutions. It’s really hard to say definitely either “yes” or “no”. The kind of knowledge we acquire at school or university differs from what life teaches us, it’s just knowledge for different purposes. For example, if one is destined to become a novelist, some exotic interference and general knowledge would sometimes be more useful than a degree. But if one aspires to become a scholar, it’s absolutely necessary to put oneself through a university course.

Anyway, there have been numerous claims, that school, which supposedly prepares us for after life, is nothing but mental gymnastics. Lots of young people say, that the knowledge acquired there is hardly relevant for the real life, that school-leavers often don’t know what career they’d like to pursue, because they have a restricted view of life. They wish they had had a glimpse of a wider horizon and of prospects potentially open before them. Some people seem to study just for the sake of formal education, cramming, as they say, useless knowledge into their heads. From my point of view, we’d value our school education more, if we were taught how to apply our knowledge in real life. If what people learn were directly connected with the things they like, they would have a considerable incentive to study harder.

There is an example of a wonderful solution to this problem – the City-as-School programme in New York, where students spend their days as part-time apprentices in various spheres. The programme is individually tailored to fit student’s needs and interests. Credits are given for satisfactory completion of assignments and the student’s standard as good a chance of getting into a college as their counterparts from ordinary high schools. Many of the CAS students are those who were bored and unhappy with conventional education. However, there are still doubts, whether this kind of life experience can replace the academic development acquired in a classroom.

Supporting the viewpoint that life experience is more important than formal education at university, there is an evidence of many people who have achieved eminence without university degrees. Among them are, for example politicians Winston Churchill and John Major and the playwright Tom Stoppard. Those people believe they would have been less successful if they had slapped a three-year preservation order on their adolescence and gone to university. They don’t argue that universities are wonderful places, but state, that putting oneself through one of them is no guarantee of brilliance. The explanation is that people without a degree tend to be more original, while graduates tend to conform to those, who wore down the stones before them.

However, my personal point of view is that school or university education is necessary basis for life, which afterward may correct or widen your knowledge. Education is what really gives us the choice of the path we want to take and nobody makes us take the knowledge we acquire for granted. We can be original through developing critical thinking, and it’s also achieved by education. Uneducated people are too easy to control and that’s why to my mind compulsory education is a basis for democratic society.