Education as a Social Experience

I always thought that getting an education was preparation for my future job. At least that's what my parents, teachers, and society told me, as if once you found a job, you could stop going to school. It wasn't until high school when I figured out the difference between "going to school" and "learning", and I spent most of college trying to figure out how to learn properly. Once I started the biology graduate program, I was hardly taking classes - going to school - but continued to learn by hands-on experience and data analysis.

I find it interesting that John Dewey sees education as a social process, stating that the school should serve to expand on values that children learn at home. I only partially agree with that statement; I was born overseas and emigrated to the United States when I was 3. My parents were first-generation Asian immigrants, and many of the values that we had at home were vastly different from the values I learned at school. Asia has a rather collectivist outlook, while the US pushes children to be their own individual. As I tried to do the latter to fit in, the more my parents seem to disapprove. Secondly, as I mentioned above, education was not a process of living for me until I went to college. From kindergarten to senior year, I had a very compartmentalized view of school -- go in, learn a bunch of stuff I may or may not remember, go home, do homework, repeat. It wasn't an ever-changing process, it was autopilot. In college, I started to realize that social collaboration was an important component for effective learning, and my favorite college classes were heavily based on discussion. Education, therefore, became that fluid process Dewey wrote about, and I became aware of several other ways to acquire information aside from rote learning.

It took me a while to understand education as a social process, and I wonder why nobody ever mentioned that to me. It was always "you'll need to do X in the future" or "because you'll gain skill Y, which you'll find useful in the future". But what these people didn't realize (and I just realized it myself) is that having an education forces us to be better people... for the most part anyway. I despised group work in elementary school because it meant I had to work with people I didn't necessarily like, and I tried really hard to avoid recess because it meant I couldn't hide in a corner with a book. As I passed through high school, college, and grad school, I realized that (a) even the people I didn't like initially grew on me, (b) while group work meant more opinions, but it also meant more collaboration, and (c) hiding in a corner all the time with a book is horrendously depressing.

On a parting note, I think education really forced me to transform. I've usually taken the role of the observer, because playing any other role in the classroom meant that I would have to voice my opinion. What if I embarrassed myself? What if I was wrong and everyone thought I was dumb? I eventually became comfortable with voicing my opinion and risking looking stupid in college, and in graduate school found out that research is all about the risk of looking/feeling dumb. Yes, I would have a hypothesis, but there was never a guarantee that it was the right answer. The only thing I could do was to discuss with my advisor, and it took me over a year to realize that he didn't care about the "correct" answer, only that I had sufficient evidence for my argument....and so going back to where I learned to propose my opinion and speak up. Through an education.