Have you ever felt your own electrically excitable cells
being introduced to one another? A thousand tiny neurons are suddenly able to
communicate with a part of your brain that used to be silent, dull, and most
importantly, useless. New circuits and pathways are found, resulting in the
permutation and combination of new ideas. This
is what living and learning, insight and reflection look like. Our existence as
humans relies on our getting the most out of our firing neurons, which digest
information and navigate new thought waves. The decision is inbred: either we
fight to keep our neurons interactive or we succumb to the inevitable—the death
of thinking.
* * * Real Learning
* * *
Many individuals that modern society holds to great prestige
embody the most diverse collection of understandings. Praised for their unique
contributions, their core mission was first to learn the trade of humanity and then
their profession. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Franklin and Noam
Chomsky are masterminds whose understanding of leadership, the sciences, politics
and other subjects have infused their critical thinking and problem solving
with an advanced level of creativity. This cream of the “successful humans”
crop is made up of those who dwell within the multi-faceted realm of
scholarship. The question becomes: do we accept that those who achieve are born
geniuses and simply wait for the next one to pop up or do we consider that some
great teacher instilled a curiosity
and a will to learn which allowed them to transcend their momentary disequilibrium and experience the
information-digesting, synapse-building, neuron-firing type of learning?
Trace the circular pattern: from
writing stems linguistics; the origins of speech are rooted in psychology,
which is the gateway to the physiology of human thought. From the study of the
brain comes the entire sphere of subjective social and political happenings that
are being processed inside our internal sensory machines. Our human species
does not have the ability to separate ourselves into impermeable substances. As
Walt Whitman drummed in the opening lines of “Song of Myself,” “I celebrate myself, and sing myself / And
what I assume you shall assume, / for every atom belonging to me as good
belongs to you” (1). In other words, every subject we encounter, break
down, digest and re-combine into new orders is another addition to a singular
and unified field attempting to uncover the “why” behind everything. As in all highly functional “thinking caps,” one
is able to better make sense of a specific subject through having an advanced
understanding of another and the opportunity to look through multiple lenses.
However, an intense amount of work
to achieve a more porous knowledge-absorbing membrane may push the frightened masses
to skip the hard work of multi-faceted learning and specialize. Indeed, this is
the vigorous yet unfortunate phenomenon that has gripped our generation. The
solution to this problem, which is located at the intersection of poor learning
habits and a lack of will, comes only after the doubts and “easy-way-outs” have
been destroyed. The setback many encounter with having
the curiosity and will to learn, in this broad sense, is that they have not
fully learned how to learn. Are we apprenticed to the “banking concept” method
(Freire, 1), which prompts a student to lose perspective and mechanically
program a single subject into their hardwire, useful for regurgitation only, or
are we creating a methodology that helps us ignite learning via our own passions
for the subject matter? With the latter, the focus lies not in memorization but
rather in internalizing the
subject—learning something in a way that tattoos concepts onto the membrane of our
unconscious.
Many insist that this method produces a jack-of-all-trades
graduate who knows a little about a lot and is therefore ill fit for our
specialized and technocratic society. Such
a point of view contributes to the paradoxical structure that today underlies post-secondary
education in the United States.
Our system consists of choosing a major, taking courses specific to that major,
and then ruthlessly searching for a job for which only the major (one you had
been rushed into choosing) can qualify, thus foregoing “a broad general
education that cultivates respect for the diversity of different disciplinary
approaches to the same questions” (Smetanka, 4). The academic dean of Saint
Vincent College,
Smetanka notes, “What’s your major? has
become one of the most common ice-breaker questions during [college] orientation
and beyond” (5). It’s a primary example of how schools mold some of the
brightest 18-year-olds into limited and peripherally challenged smarty-pants. The solution to this spaghetti-maker system,
churning out the same shaped students, lies outside standardized learning. Those who contend our current system already
caters to the diverse nature of human consciousness do not acknowledge that the
conformity students experience from grade school is the same force that crowds out
the growth and development of individual capabilities.
Leonardo Da Vinci, master of a range of skills, wrote, “Everything
connects to everything else.” The more diverse our understanding, the deeper
our problem solving becomes. So if the educational system is the primary method
for fostering learning, why is our
system limited to the classroom? A few answers are already taking place: expanding
curriculum to include the arts, advocating for broader undergraduate “majors”
and restricting specialized courses to junior and senior years. However, time
spent outside the university—either traveling through a new country or volunteering
for a local enterprise—could be the proportionate mixture of application and
understanding that students need. This idea of “learning outside the classroom”
has taken root in the high school-university-occupation model through building non-traditional
and oddly shaped paths of learning.
* * * Inside the Gap *
* *
The so-called gap-year has been growing its stock over the
past few decades, inviting those who dare to invest into a realm of exploration
and experience. “A gap-year is a structured period of time when students take a
break from formal education to increase self-awareness, learn from different
cultures, and experiment with possible careers” (American Gap Association Data
& Benefits, 1). Unlike the university system, the gap-year provides students
a dual-sided front: it faces the super-specialized mind by dragging it into
real-life scenarios while it simultaneously enhances the student’s thought
process—similar to a petri dish filled with a culture of multiplying and
interacting cells.
The original intention of a university was to create
well-rounded members of an educated population.
Not until the university system
became the university industry did
this praiseworthy ideal shift to the highly competitive, bankrupt-producing
machine we find today. When the industrial revolution hit our nation, we
allowed the era’s capitalistic personality to infiltrate the way in which we
educate (Springer Link, 2). The vital loss of classical curriculum and the rapid
rise of mass schooling directly contributed to the overall sense of rush
implanted in our high schools. We are told to finish our schooling as soon as
possible and get into the workforce! Yet within this confining ideology that we
have sewn into the American educational system are fibers flexible enough to
reflect the growing needs of present society. Today’s generation is inherently
going to be the collective group to bring the gap-year from its knees to its
feet. Through spending time in an entirely new setting, young minds have no
choice but to re-evaluate what it is they truly care about, the principles that
they stand for and the mark they wish to leave on the planet.
When one feels trapped, confined to the thoughts and ways of
others, it is not only a problem for that specific person, but it creates much
more of a problem for society as a whole. We may all possess a “wild tongue”
(Anzaldua, 1) but many who have been raised to be good students may not have
simultaneously grown the courage to voice it, especially if it criticizes the
status quo. Fortunately, the pursuance of any sort of gap-year or modification
to the traditional high school to university transition is itself a step
outside of the standardized box that society has labeled as the only way. The fear
to speak and the pressure to stay silently stuck in the box is the monster I
have met on the “art of learning” battlefield. It’s the same monster actively
pushing all of us students away from our diverse interests, and in the process,
stealing the fire in our bellies (and brains) to learn.
* * * Personally Accountable * * *
As a junior in high school, when faced with the opportunity
to graduate a year early and take a gap-year, my keen sense of curiosity was
met with precedence. I walked into the principal’s office, made my request and
braced myself when she responded that taking time off of school could limit and
even deter me from college admission. I would have to remain in high school for
one more year even though I had completed all required courses—in essence, stuck
in the system. Though nervous and scared, I could not stomach the thought that
I simply could not because it is not what
everyone else does; little did I know that standardized thinking was leveraging
the people who had taught me how to know myself. Right in front of me, many of
times overlooked, were my parents—both of Indian heritages yet one raised in Mumbai,
India, and the other in Cincinnati,
Ohio. Their complementary methods of
molding me were like a pair of magnets; sometimes I learned that there were two
extremes to a way of thinking while at other times I saw the magic of congruent
communication. My mom, coming from a
life of maids and the conservative mentality in the Indian subcontinent, pushed
me from the beginning: Books over boys;
no getting up until there is no more food left on the plate; school, snack
time, homework, then play… if time. My dad, knowing the “American way,” pushed
my brother and me in a different way: Sports
are a requirement; experiment with them all but inactivity is not a choice;
‘What did you do at school today?’ is not a rhetorical question; the more
thorough you are, the more points you score; never act out of two things, greed
and/or fear. It’s these concepts, engrained in me from the time I wore diapers,
which has led me to believe in everyone’s ability to make a choice, and that if
there is a will, there will be a way. Out of this North Star that I carry in my
pocket at all times came the firepower to break from conformity.
Mom and Dad had pushed me out of my comfort zone in
childhood, and so now I, with all the courage I could manifest, pushed them in
the same way. Why should I spend an entire other year in high school when I
could spend a year doing something unimaginable? They agreed! I felt the
butterflies, the tingles in my fingertips and a heartbeat unlike any other when
I walked the halls of my high school in rural Ohio
knowing that I was leaving a year early. Indeed, I would have sweaty palms, a
lump in the back of my throat and several cases of panic knowing that I was moving
to New York with my parents and brother in order to keep the four of us under
one roof—for that was the reason I had decided to graduate a year early. What kept
me most on edge was that by the time we heard of my dad’s new job on the east
coast, college application deadlines had passed. One year spent outside the
American education system—would I ever get into college? Would I be a vagabond
in search of what everyone else had magically received in their senior year?
Even more worrisome, would I be eaten by a monster? I was far from confident
that this was the right move. The doubts ran in hysterical circles, and it was
not until I landed in Lubumbashi,
the capital of the copper-rich province in the Congo,
in December of 2013, that I found the reason, initially hidden in my gut, why I
was meant to graduate early: service to others in providing educational opportunity.
I spent the year working for a not-for-profit organization called Malaika,
which operates a School for Girls and Football for Hope center in the village
of Kalebuka, about a half hour drive from the town of Lubumbashi. The year took
me to many places: to the home of Malaika’s founder, Noella Coursaris Musunka,
in the Costwolds of England; to Oxford and London; then to Paris, France, and
to Geneva, Switzerland. After the glamour of the adventure settled in, the real
work began.
We would rise at about seven
a.m. inside the home Noella has built for her mother and sisters in
central Lubumbashi—the walls
flaunted matte colors of green and orange, providing a subtle Carpe Diem. We
would arrive at the school after a sweaty, bumpy drive in a van, where
continuous French was thrown around and my mind tried to pick up all the new
words. Inside the school I felt a need
to sit down at the back of a classroom and hear the English being taught and
numbers being added. After a week of watching the local village come out every
day to act as security guards, cooks in the cafeteria and custodians for the
bathroom stalls, I soon realized I was not the only one taking in new
sights.
* *
* Congolese Treasure * * *
One of the teachers, all of whom were trained at the University
of Lubumbashi, approached me with a
smirk and asked, “Why have you come here all the way from New
York at the age of seventeen? Don’t you have school
or work or even friends to take part in and enjoy back home?” I stumbled,
paused and retreated into my head: Why am
I not in an American high school surrounded by kids my age, worried about who
my prom date is going to be or which AP credits will best suit my college
resume? I had no answer. However, later that same day when I exchanged
glances with the five-year-old Congolese school girls, I felt their smiles
telling me, “Hey, you’re just like us!” I could not understand where this feeling
of pure bliss was coming from. Then I thought back to a prior experience I had at
twelve years old while visiting India
with my family. Walking the streets of Mumbai, tightly gripping my mom’s hand, a
boy my age with a grin on his face, grateful for the two coins in his palm,
looked me in the eye. Instead of seeing him as separate from me, I felt as if I
were staring into my own reflection.
He wore a thin cloth to cover his midsection, and the rest of his limbs—wrapped
in shriveled skin the color of hazelnut—were not fully present. One leg bent backwards
and the other, chopped off mid-thigh, allowed him to walk on his hands for the
few meters of the block he occupied. Distorted in many ways yet perfectly
positioned, he was artistically flawless in delivering a unifying message. I
saw myself inside his begging body. I realized at this moment that we human
beings are fundamentally forbidden to shield ourselves from events outside our
comfort zones. This unknown, unnamed boy, born into the lowest caste and purposefully
made to warrant sympathy, rests inside all of us—it’s the voice telling us that
we are all one in this meshed-out game,
so struggle to be your best and I’ll struggle to be mine. Thus, at the
intersection of my ancestors’ heritage and the life I had known in rural Ohio,
I accepted my identity as a mystery larger than I could ever imagine but
enriched through the experience of love and acceptance.
While in Africa I could not begin to
understand the after-affects of this “high,” but my version of a reorganized
style of learning was something I needed to tell the world about. I was using
my education to assist in the development of projects from infrastructure to
curriculum. Throughout working with our Malaika team to help map out new
community well sites, individually teach English to young French-speaking minds
and collaborate with teachers on their lesson plans, I came to learn of a
covert and camouflaged enigma in these peoples’ chests. Unrecognizable at the
surface, its existence only becomes discernable when interacting with these
children and diving into their
community. One day I saw this treasure: they wanted to express what they could
do even when food remained scarce, light remained limited and families would
sell them in order to survive—amidst it all, the girls remained on the hunt for
knowledge. Repaying a visit to the same teacher who had approached initially, I
asked her how they maintain this treasure-piece. She said, “We ask our girls
how they envision fixing the homelessness and starvation they encounter, and
our jobs become simpler. We don’t need to motivate them to learn; we simply
have to show them the toolbox. The creativity they then bring forth is why I
come here everyday, and why I work here.”
* *
* The Notecard Ceremony *
* *
Due to my own experiences inside the “gap,” I consider the
gift that the school provides for the people in the village
of Kalebuka, Congo,
as my personal reason to hunt for knowledge. I have transformed into an
advocate for our human responsibility to our ancient ancestors, to our future,
and especially to our current being to find our own unique and irreplaceable
reasons to hunt for more. The few months between the gap-year I had
spent abroad and the beginning of my freshman year at Hofstra
University provided me with the proper
combination of time and thinkable matter. Post-trip, I prepared for a
fundraiser in my hometown of Mason, Ohio,
in which I attempted to do justice to the gratitude I felt for Malaika and the
gifts I had brought back from the year. These gifts were mainly the new thoughts I stored. In lieu of this event,
while sitting on the plane ride home from London’s
Heathrow, I pulled out a stack of notecards—each a snippet of what I wanted to
share, yet what I most wanted to convey was not just the words and ideas
written down, but the acts of capturing such moments. On the plane, I wanted to
jump up and shout to passengers: There is
a whole other life out there that we are always missing some part of; we need
to be in search of this—the lacking trait
or destination. Confidence in goodness means that wherever you are meant to
thrive will stumble upon you. To be who you are is sometimes left out of the
curriculum in pre-K to 12th grade—never succumb to the fear or greed
that others or a system may impose. Our neurons will never forgive us for not
having the will and courage to take that extra step!
Well, let’s just say I screamed it in my head for fear of
getting kicked off the plane. Nevertheless, the notecards do provide some
additional insight.
The
After-Effects of Under-aged Exploration: We’re told to listen to our elders; we’re
also told the best way to learn something is to fully immerse ourselves inside
it. So I guess the secret to learning is teetering somewhere on the dotted line
in between. This is what I learned while not being in school—what you think
when you have time to think. It is not against schools of today; schools are
the seed to all community growth and development. It is simply encouragement to
learn more about oneself and others at a younger age. A gap combined with
classroom learning could be the recipe that everyone needs to try for
themselves in order to relish the unmatched flavor.
While
preparing for my trip to Africa, a close mentor who worked inside Malaika
said to me, “There are three experiences that will change your life: death,
poverty and having your own child. They create emotions inside of you necessary
for full comprehension of what life means.”
I felt
an overwhelming gratefulness and appreciation to my ever-supportive parents,
who, along with the non-profit foundation, sent me into the depths of rural Africa.
Meeting
up with co-workers from past summer internships in Geneva, Switzerland, led me to think of the friendship existing
inside a stranger.
I
believe in all types of help… but education is a lifeboat you are giving to
someone to brace all types of water.
It
teaches you confidence in knowing that you have ample opportunities, with a
little bit of willpower and the internet, to help change what you have seen.
My mom
came to visit me during my stay in Cheltenham. In a
candle-lit Thai restaurant, over dumplings and hot-and-sour soup, she said,
“Money is there one day and gone the next.” Only later did I dwell on this.
Today, we use money as a threshold-marking measurement from which chasing
dreams both begins and ends. I am not able to stop thinking about how to reach
my dream: the ways, the possibilities, and the methods of doing so, though what
I have realized is that I cannot place it inside money’s capsule which remains
sealed. I need to place my bets on following this adrenaline-rush, mind-blowing
goodness from which spurs flexible,
moral, and intangible growth.
While
teaching a group of middle-aged Congolese men and women in our community center
in Kalebuka, a young man stood up and asked me (again), “You’re seventeen years-old,
why do you even care?” A lot of them seemed curious in regards to why I was
there. My response was a mixture of two things: I care more now because of what
I have seen and I had originally started to care because I saw how much others
did not care.
I am
storing an upgraded mind map. With the manifestation of a big problem, I have
learned to search for the opportunities hidden inside. I would then be drawn to
an action I have termed as rethinking, which means giving myself enough time to
think through potential solutions, strategize and utilize creativity as a means
of solution-creation. These three then led me to simply working harder than
ever before. The last route on the map points from this hard work to raw
inspiration exuding from the world into me and vise versa.
* *
* Gap’s Running for Office *
* *
Irony never hides. Who would have thought that being told to
not break my stride from high school to college would have been the start of a
journey that has me on continuous “look-out” for my next gap? My first time
inside this unconventional solution shook my neurons until they fired on a new
frequency. All of a sudden, there were zero degrees of separation between me
and the coolest girl in school and simultaneously no separation between me and
Esther, who returns home in the Congo
to a mud hut, no food, and an hour of light left to make out the words in her
English book. I say zero degrees because the experiences occurring to one and
stemming from one eventually matriculates—as the snowball effect depicts—into
the human sphere of experience. This truth is the gap’s subtle yet primary
motivation to attract each and every student. Imagine a cyclotron that students
could step into, speak to the “gap-year” and step out with every moral cell in
their body gushing with stimulus and the will to learn. This is the gap-year’s
campaign trail on the verge of a victory, manifesting to us how it can save the
human race from moral extermination, which is entrenched in a lack of interest
and the infamous single-subject route to an occupation. Learning how to learn
can only come after we have the untiring desire to, in fact, go deeper than how
learning is initially presented to you at the surface. The dots all connect
when one personally encounters the metamorphosis on a grand scale.
Imagine your brain as a sheet of paper, white enough to absorb
the entire color spectrum yet bounded by four corners which restrict these
patterns from coming alive. We find ourselves in this situation all too
often—better yet, we condone such behavior from the outside world and more
importantly from ourselves. Our brains need to acknowledge and dismantle their corners. When learning is instead well rounded it inevitably asks the
brain to learn from outside the geometric boundaries we use to frame our
thought processes—projecting our personal kaleidoscope on the world. However,
color is most vibrant on a background most untainted, natural, and authentic. We
have to find our infinite white space. The gap-year between high school and
college, argued as one of many solutions to the system, is just that—only one way. So get up, go, chase after it,
find your own version of the gap, whether it means taking an unrelated course
that interests you or leaving the walls of a classroom to teach those underprivileged.
This theory does not prescript radical decisions. Instead, it proposes the
application of learned knowledge in a new, untried way in order to learn, grow,
and create an internal environment addicted to the development of one’s self. In
the words of Richard Buckminster Fuller, a 20th century inventor, architect,
systems theorist, author and designer: “You never change things by fighting the
existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete” (Mindvalley, 3).
Re-published from "Falling Through the Gap," October 24, 2015, https://coffeeatthegap.wordpress.com/, Ria Shah's blog on education and consciousness. Check it!
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