A Lady's Journey to Life: Day 306 - Application of Knowledge, is it being Fostered in ourEducational Systems?

When one say that knowledge is power, it is suppose to be a form of self encouragement and empowerment for the receiver of this knowledge to gain understanding and thus enhance ones intellect within this world. But within this there are some points that I have found to have been missed that would if fully integrated into our system of living would drastically alter this claim to be practical and real for the human race, to become that which is better then before. I want to look at within this blog is when knowledge is received, but not applied within one's living, what are the outcomes?

I will share my personal experience within the educational system for this blog, and in later blogs to come give more of a researched based perspective to give more substance to my claims, but it's a cool segway I think to know where I stand due to my upbringing and economic status. I grew up in the US in a middle income family, we had enough money to live comfortably, but my parents worked hard to provide us all these comforts. We had more then many in this world, so I consider myself a 'privileged' student as we as a country have the top resources available in this world. I am 29 years old with a bachelors degree in political science, this will be an honest investigation by myself on this subject, and I will be focusing on bringing real solutions to the points I find in this research that will bring about a better system in correlation with the equal money system and the equal life foundation groups I am a part of.

So knowledge when learned and understood by a person enhances ones ability to greater understand ones environment and be able to discern from fact and fiction. But when one collect knowledge and not practically apply it within one’s life and thus within the system one is living from, then that knowledge becomes useless as it is not being practiced within one’s living and thus becomes part of the lost potential within oneself that could have been. The best way to apply this is to create ways to live the knowledge in ones life and thus use the knowledge to help those around you as well as yourself. This though especially in the western countries to which I am from is not practiced in the educational system, and in many cases pushed aside for what I would conclude to be a linear transformation of the young to be a working consumer for the greater system of capitalism, not learned and self practiced, but shaped and directed by outside forces.

Within my current experience of my education in a western country, I have for the amount of sitting, accumulating knowledge, and time spent studying, have not had any real satisfactory application process of integrating and using this knowledge in a practical way. Yes as a child I have learned to read and write, use arthmitic, problem solve, but these are basics of what we are really capable of fulfilling The knowledge and application of practical skills that could be used everyday for life, farming, house maintenance, animal care, and cooking for instances, and yes these are offered, but in special circumstances, when they could be learned and understood in the educational system from the get-go to give knowledge that is useful for one's living environment and will inform us on how our actual real world function we interact with everyday. And so use the educational platform as an integrated community based resource correlated and synced with the education process for each student to then integrate the knowledge learned in the classroom into a real world community based internship or work study where they can fine tune the practical application of the knowledge. This is not so though in the current schooling I went through, where everything was laid out in books to memorize and no real time practice hardly ever took place.

For instance in high school, I never applied anything outside of sitting in classrooms and learning from a teacher. We would write papers, but it was based on passing a class not really understanding and gaining substance from this information. Grades were a game, who can get the best scores, it was never about real education for the kids going through these systems, only to be the best, the strongest, and be the winner, quite a head trip if you didn't make the mark.

In university, we not only had to do this same platform with the memorizing information and then getting tested with no first hand experience and application of the knowledge set forth by the institution in most cases, but we had to now pay for this education to get a job to be able to live, this not guaranteed and is a very expensive venture for most people. So this same learning platform is repeated, the knowledge is only accumulated within the student and never practically applied within a real life experience setting, like in a job setting. So if this knowledge is not applied in a realtime live setting it can easily be lost due to not applying it to practice it and integrate it into oneself as a living experienced integration through time. It's rushed through and not configured to be best for the student, but unfortunately for us as the student done for the most profit margin for the university.

An example of this non integration of the knowledge accumulated was where I took over 6-7 years of spanish (this a requirement in the schools I attended), and because it was not applied in any area other then the classroom of the year(s) or semester(s) I took it, most if not all of the hours of information I had learned was lost. This not due to my intellectual incapability, but due to the obvious observation of the impossibility to retain all that knowledge with no application in real time to have it sink in so to speak and be practiced. This instance may not be for all students as some may be in spanish speaking environments, but for me, this was the case, so much time wasted and abilities of potential usefulness not utilized by the very institutions that are created to do just this. Also, thousands of dollars wasted as well of my and my parents money. Who gains though those making the money, the universities, this a big problem that will be discussed in later blogs.

So my next blogs will be on the breaking down and investigate of the education systems in different parts of the world, and exploring the different forms of learning and understanding of information to see what works best. My experience in my 'privileged' way of life and country of origin had all the resources to create the best of the populous of young to be the best we can be, but due to the structure and the politics involved of the education of the people, there is a lose, a deficit, which is counterproductive and thus need fixing.

Stay Tuned and thanks for reading.

A fitting quote from a man who walked the earth -
Lao Tzu - "Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it."