Reflections before the Education Day romp

Thursday, November 24, 2004, is this year’s Education Day. Its theme is a mouthful. It is, “Explore the wonders of education and capture life’s real meaning.” CNMI upper elementary grade teachers were encouraged to motivate their students to reflect on the theme, write a 50-100 essay, and submit it to the Education Day organizers. Three winners are to be selected and awarded with cash prizes. The writers will read their pieces during the celebrated day itself.

I asked my students to do a quick brainstorm of what they might write. We parsed the theme to its component parts. Images associated with “explore” and “capture” were fleshed out. We recalled moods and states of being when one “wonders.” We hammered out scenarios of facing “life’s real meaning.”

Given the class’ data, they were then asked to write a brief essay. We did not get any of their output to the organizers. However, putting together the written meditations and expressed reflections of Simeon Skilling, Krystal Anade, Jhaneeka Atalig, Kevin de Torres, Christina Tudela, Roselle Dimapilis, and others, here’s a take on the theme (on a 7th grade reading level according to the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale).

“In the CNMI, we spend eight years of compulsory schooling. That earns us a lifetime habit of learning, the promise of lifelong self-conscious continuing education. The wonders of education began for me the day I stepped into a classroom of new faces and new activities. I was old enough to know I was scared. Of what, I did not know. And I was too shy to reveal what I did know. Even by then, and not by any absence of humility, I thought I already knew a lot. Little did I know. But the journey of discovering I, me and myself, encountering a world that was not I, me, and myself, was how I remember my first day in grade school.

“For five years now, I have grown into a seeker of wisdom, a pursuer of authentic knowledge. Much of my search is for a credible understanding of the world I live in. I am curious about the environment that sustains me and other human beings, its intricacies and fragilities. I am intrigued by the delicate and mortal person that I am who lives with similar other people in community. I meet interesting and strange people but the one I encounter most often is the complex person that I am? This thinking, feeling and acting bundle of human energy interwoven into a lattice of social awareness and care. It is through this self-knowledge that I discover the awesome gift of human friendships and relationships.

“Education reveals what I do and how I feel. It helps me define who I am. Classroom study courses instruct us to use our brains to manage our bodies and their complex sense organs. The same propels the mind to the world of larger organisms in this planet and the long seemingly endless stretches of the know universe. I create sounds to make words that allow me to communicate to others clearly and well. I manipulate those words to make signs and symbols that capture events and locations. I create pictures that reside in my memory. I can share those symbols with other people. We develop writing, reading, speaking and symbol-making skills. These allow us to be connected in one language field, in one communication network. It makes common understanding possible.

“Mathematics makes us think of parts and wholes, and our functions in each. Science encourages us to ask “how?” Social Studies tell tales of how other people at other times and in other places lived their lives. It lures us to diversify the calcifying social roles we play. Language enables us to explain what is meaningful and important. It allows us to ask ‘why’ which connects us to the journey of consciousness and the cultural expressions of common humanity.”

Today, the challenge to learning, and the agenda for down-to-earth education, is getting the skill to distinguish what is real and what is not real. Much of life is “make believe.” Ours is a time that excels at creating palaces of illusions. My education is about staying on the ground. The flight of the imagination is allowed to soar but reference points, like ground benchmarks, need to be kept in sight. Not only do we need to learn the discipline of making a living, we are also challenged to learn the art of living a life. We have many tools that aid this journey of learning, including our inherited cultures and traditions. We already have within us, with our body senses, our minds and feelings, the sophisticated means to undertake this wonderful journey. All we need is to self-consciously choose to use them.

Many learning patterns lead to flights of fancy to the “not yet.” Many curricular invitations are an attractive retreat to the wishful reminiscences of the “no longer.” Capturing the real meaning of life means wrestling the paradoxes, the ambiguities and the complexities of the here and now. There is no easy exit. There is only full-filled and engaging wrestling. Capturing the real meaning of life is not about filling up an empty mind, but in learning to keep an open mind. In staying open, one learns to celebrate the wonder of the new, and the ever-renewing wonder. The journey is its own destination and is thereby its own unqualified reward. Then the learning journey journeys on

We learn to live. We live to learn. Such is the wonder of education. Encountering the awe of it all, we discover life’s real meaning. We learn to live to learn. We live to learn to live.”