The heart of the matter

I love basketball. If our men don't win the national championship, I'm going to see exactly how far I can shove a fork up my nostril. But, quite frankly, there's nothing I can say that either hasn't been said or won't be overly sentimental. So I'm sticking to my regularly scheduled program.

Education is a lie. The theory behind learning is that knowledge coupled with language will lead to deeper understanding, that if we can analyze and describe an object or concept fully, we will begin to perceive its true nature. It's why many of us spend so much time learning complex phraseology for deterministic, post-modernist, phenomenological aspects of reality we could have easily articulated in fourth grade. And it explains why most of us, can, and often do, hand in a paper we know is crap, taking a lot of space to say very little, but still receive a good grade.

Yet language does not actually free us from the bonds of ignorance; it's an obstacle to true understanding. The more we know, the easier it becomes for us to abstract ourselves from the material we purport to be learning and to fail to connect to what really matters-our personal relationship to the world around us.

I studied abroad my junior year and spent four days in Paris. The city overwhelmed me with its beauty. I'd simply never seen anything like Notre Dame or the Louvre, and I spent hours wandering the streets, enchanted by the most minute of details and alive with an insatiable, unexplainable desire to absorb the city into my skin. I may now know Paris better than I do Durham. Without the words to describe my new environment, the language to classify the beauty of the Seine or the Latin Quarter, I was forced to penetrate to the heart of the city and emotionally connect. There is a reason why ignorance is bliss, and why when people experience extreme emotions they do not have the words to explain how they feel. Language makes us stop perceiving and, perhaps more importantly, stops us from believing we can be intimately connected with a city, a theory or even another person.

As a child, I was fascinated with people and loved to observe their behavior. Before coming to college, I naively believed that by studying psychology I would eventually be given the keys to unlocking the mysteries of the human spirit. Instead, when I came to the University, I learned about cognitive dissonance, the fundamental attribution area and the in-group/out-group phenomenon. I was taught a set of skills and terminology that helped me to better understand the field of psychology. In the process, I misplaced my passion for people and the emotional character of their lives.

At times I used to feel enlightened, more aware. But I realize now I only had a new layer of BS I could espouse. My education had informed me like political correctness makes us more sensitive: I mistook a rhetorical flourish for true understanding.

When we were three years old, the world was always new, always exciting. Since then, we've journeyed through over 12 years of schooling and systematically classified our world. In the process, we've unconsciously stripped away our innocence and removed ourselves from the educational process. Schools, like hospitals, insist on treating all people the same rather than recognizing the diversity of the human spirit. Schools, like hospitals, think they are making people better even though so many of us feel dead inside.

Education is a lie, but it doesn't have to be. We are all to blame for creating structures that depersonalize us. We all have a responsibility to ensure our education does not remain a broken promise. As students, we need to force ourselves to look beyond language, beyond our newfound "awareness," and emotionally connect with the material. We must make an active, purposeful effort to accomplish what is so easy for us in our private lives and become more self-centered and ego-driven. Questions concerning our feelings, attitudes and our personal reasons for caring about what we are learning should not be saved for touchy-feely classes on poetry or spirituality; they should be at the heart of all our educational explorations.