Michael D. Davis.

I don’t talk much about my schooling because it is a sore spot, a sore spot more akin to a festering boil located on the perineum than a bug bite on the leg, but I digress. It is my thought and my experience that knowledge is gained better from curiosity than by browbeating repetition.

I was a good student when interested and a bad student when not. I was not a good Spanish student because I had no interest in learning Spanish. I learned one phrase to use as a joke for all my Spanish-speaking friends, and that was the extent. (Mi llamó la biblioteca or in English My name is the library.) Spanish, like nearly every subject that I struggled in, and had no interest in, I would give a half-hearted attempt at it, then resign myself to the fact that I would just never know it. The teachers never cared for that attitude.

In school, this way of thinking had me convinced I wasn’t too swift of a person. I pretty much failed everything but English and Art. Then the glorious day came, and I finally graduated. I didn’t have the money, grades, ambition, or health to go on to college. However, it was in this reprieve that something started to happen, and hasn’t yet stopped. My curiosity has taken control. I Googled things. I read things. I read more things. And I learned a whole lot. The majority share is probably useless, but nevertheless.

Educator Daniel Greenberg is credited with saying, “You can’t make someone learn something – you really can’t teach someone something – they have to want to learn it. And if they want to learn, they will.” I believe that through and through. In school, I had Math and Science, and I don’t think I learned a thing past the basics. To do my homework on that stuff was like pulling teeth. And yet, because I have a passion for philosophy, I’ve sat in the local library reading Plato. If they taught Epicurus or Seneca in school rather than Algebra, I may have paid attention.

I feel like this curiosity and drive for knowledge comes a lot from my family. Even when I refused to read, my house has always been filled with books, and my parents never allowed video games on the premises. My father, the old one, without any sort of college degree, studied by himself to pass multiple state level tests for his job when he worked. His knowledge of all things mechanical and historical is also worth noting, as he could probably tell you all about the gun General Lee used to shoot Napoleon. My Ma has read biographies on people from every walk of life. If it’s a true story, she wants to read it or watch a documentary on it. Not to mention the ever-expanding Rolodex in her mind of recipes, she, as well as my sister, have a great knowledge of the grammatical. I can’t count the number of times she’s corrected other people’s letters and sent them back. Then my sister, who has a couple of different degrees; I can’t remember what they are for.

I like letting my curiosity run rampant and learning something new every day. I just don’t think I was made for school. Looking back, English and Art, that I excelled in, were both independent study classes that I did from home. I wasn’t made for a classroom. I’ve watched hours of college lectures on poetry from my couch, but I think getting a degree would be useless. My opinion on college in general is that it is overrated anyway. I seem to know more people with degrees that aren’t using them than people with degrees that are using them.

I don’t have a moral to this. You can learn something new every day, or you don’t have to; I don’t care. However, know that if you do try to learn something every day and expand your mind, it can be with something useful or something incredibly not useful. Just today I was talking with a friend, and they said they can’t learn anything new because their head couldn’t handle it. Then, about an hour later, we’re playing this game, and we discovered that just by listening, not seeing, just listening to the first couple of seconds of a commercial from the early 2000s, they could tell me the product being advertised. Is that not amazing? Is the mind not astounding? Is that not almost completely useless?

Anyway, I’ll leave by quoting one of my favorite philosophers, Socrates: “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”