sky to heaven - the invisible life.

People spend a lot of time in schools. Nine months of every year, five days every week, six or seven hours every day. Myself, I spent 18 years in schools. I’m 33 this year, so that’s almost 2/3s of my life. It was a whole lot of time – and a whole lot of my life.

School is a place where we’re supposed to get an education. But I think what I got was less an education and more like mental torture. Memorize, test, forget. Memorize, test, forget. Over and over again for 18 years. And like many students, I spent a lot of my school time wishing I was someplace else. School was like a federal prison, and I had to accept my prison term and serve an 18-year sentence with no possibility of parole. Even though I was just a juvenile – and my only crime was being born.

We like to blame students for their negative attitudes towards education and their poor performance in our schools. We think there’s something wrong with the students and the young people of today – we think they’re lazy, unmotivated, disobedient, and rebellious. But perhaps there’s probably something wrong with our schools, our society, and us.

I believe in the love of learning, and I do believe people love to learn – especially when it comes to things they love. Pick any two subjects that you had in school, one that you loved and one that you hated. Which one did you want to learn? Which one did you do better in? For almost every person on this planet, the answer will be the same. When people love what they are learning, learning becomes associated with pleasure – and they learn better. When they have to learn something they hate, learning becomes associated with displeasure – and they learn poorly.

And that’s what happens in our schools. Our students don’t really enjoy learning, because they’re being forced to learn so many things they don’t want to. No wonder they rebel, cut classes and get Fs. Learning what you love is the key to the love of all learning. But our schools today kill that love of learning. Students can’t learn what they want to learn – they have to learn what the schools and the teachers want them to learn. If knowledge really is food for the mind, then we’re force-feeding our children. And if you ask them what they would want to learn, they’d probably say, “I don’t know.” Because they’ve never been given a choice in the matter. We’ve probably never asked them about their opinion, because we think they’re too young to have valid opinions.

During those 18 years when I was in school, if I wanted to learn anything that interested me, I had to make time to learn it outside of school time. And I usually made time to learn it by sacrificing time I used for school. Of all the books I’ve ever read that have made an impact on my life, I don’t really remember most of the ones that I was forced to read in school. The books that I do remember best were the ones I read outside of school – which I’m sure is true for many other adults as well.

School is supposed to prepare you for the world, and to give you the tools from which to create your life. But most of the important things that I learned in life, I didn’t learn them in school. How to view money and maintain personal finances, how to be happy, how to define success, how to love better, how to live better with other people, the meaning of life – I learned almost none of these things in school. In fact, I’ve spent a lot of my after school years trying to figure out the answers to these questions. And nearly all of my answers came from – outside of schools.

You may wonder why I still care about this, for I have long since graduated from school, and do not plan to go back to another school anytime in the near future. But although I am not a believer in our schools, I am a great believer in education. I believe that an education is one of the most valuable and beautiful things you will ever possess. A good education will not only give you the tools to have and do a better, more fulfilling job, it will also give you the means to live a better, more successful life – and to be a better, happier person. I believe this is what a good education should give us – but this is not what most of us get. So if you want an education, you cannot trust your school to give it to you. You have to give it to yourself. You have to educate yourself, and be your own teacher. You have to teach yourself about your life – because they do not teach that in schools. Your education is not in school – it is in yourself.