Learning Also Occurs Outside Classrooms

Teenagers are constantly being threatened with the “real world” and its responsibilities and obligations.

It’s tempting to rank high school near the top of the list of best years, yet it stagnates. New programs like Running Start and the Skills Center notwithstanding, high school classes claiming to spread knowledge are nothing but rhetoric lacking practical application. Little wonder the threat of the “real world” seems so dire to a sheltered young person well versed in the “why” but incapable of properly carrying out the “how.”

Most of us graduating this month have spent 12 or 13 years in public education. It is a well-meaning system that subordinates experience to facts printed in black and white, discrediting the lessons taught by the “real world” in favor of those of the classroom.

Education does not begin and end in a classroom. The true advantage of learning lies in the variety of sources.

All theory and no practice is a dangerous lesson to teach.

A month in Ireland last summer helped drive this message home for me.

While mornings were passed in a classroom participating in discussions of Irish history and mythology, I spent afternoons wandering local markets, exploring narrow Galway backstreets and navigating the Dublin bus system.

The locals, looking at my dark hair and eyes, tended to be less polite to me than an Irish-looking teenager, often muttering derisively, “Tourists!” under their breaths, believing I understood no English. One woman actually told me with a big grandmotherly smile, “Your English is very good!”

I smiled and replied, “Thank you. So is yours.”

Not only did I expand my knowledge of Irish culture, I developed tolerance I was able to apply not only in Ireland but also in Spokane.

It should be obvious that education comes from both academic and environmental sources. But few take advantage of experience. Experiences peculiar to individual environments are elemental in forming a complete person.

High school might not be the best time of one’s life, but the lessons learned are essential and invaluable in one’s progress in the “real world.” Graduating is merely a milestone, a welcomed tangible result of learned lessons of all kinds.