“We are mining our minds.”
I hear the phrase repeat itself in my head as frequently as I am forced to consider the aptitude with which it describes the educational environments I have found myself in over the course of the past 22 years.
As I attempt to reflect on the experience I have had at Benedictine, it seems that these fleeting but rich years have resolved themselves into succinct and isolated moments.
Brief, echoing phrases like this one; loosely attached to images of friends and classrooms, all united in the nostalgic detachment they hold from the present.
“We are mining our minds…” I recently watched a lecture by notable British educator Sir Ken Robinson.
It was about the way in which the education systems of modern industrialized nations have oriented themselves to seek out and develop with particular interest those mental capacities that are best suited to the furthering of technological industry.
At first consideration, this seems practical if not blatantly obvious.
Certainly a society’s education system should emerge from the needs of that society so that in the end, individual schooling is for the common good.
But in a nation that finds its foothold in the ability of the individual to define their own destiny, we have bound ourselves by an insidious irony.
Progress, as we know it, has come to mean industry, globalization and continuing the maniacal attempt to make obsolete the binds of space and time.
Today we find that the common good, as it has been pursued by our education, is an illusion as the rampant path we have taken towards development has graciously bestowed on us the highest level of inequality of any industrialized nation.
The spectrum of human creative capacities has been decidedly undermined by the need for schools to produce a workforce that is ready to contribute whatever portion of their intellect is needed by the moment or to assume the skills they must to maintain a social order that finds its impetus and ultimate objective in getting paid.
Even from a school that prides itself on the education and enrichment of the whole person, how many of us will succeed in leading lives that allow us any sort of independence from occupying so stultified a position as a member of society?
Have all the glorified and self righteous intellectual undertakings of our college years been but, as Lester Bangs of Almost Famous says, a part of our long journey to the middle?
Ellie Waterbury is a senior from Boulder, Col., and is majoring in Sociology and minoring in Journalism. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
