A Road Less Travelled

I’ll admit that I have a special advantage over some people who say college is a necessary part of learning. It’s not an advantage that I can take any credit for. I may not be any smarter or more diligent than the average teenager heading off to college but I still have this advantage–my father’s supervision over my education. I learned to read early, not because anyone pushed me toward it, but because I come from a family that loves books and I wanted in on it. Most of my free time was spent on reading. If I wasn’t working on a craft project (or sometimes while I was working on a craft project) I was probably doing something with words. Reading, writing, crossword puzzles, Reader’s Digest word power quizzes. I started writing several novels before I turned twelve, but most of them petered out on the first page.

We had a running joke that Merrianna and I weren’t allowed to learn anything on summer vacation. Of course, we always ended up asking my father for some scientific explanation and after he told us he would say, “But now forget it, because it’s summer vacation and you’re not supposed to learn anything.” When I was younger I barely got the joke. I wasn’t trying to learn anything; I just wanted to know. I think I was about nine when my father got out a pencil and paper to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity and E=MC2. I don’t remember the question that sparked this discussion but it probably came from a Heinlein book I was reading.

High school was more of the same, but more intense. I read what seemed to be massive amounts of information on economics, and enough of it stuck to give me a firm grasp on the basics. I read history and math theory. Then for fun I read Jane Austen and The Scarlet Pimpernel and Kidnapped.

One of my projects was an exercise in discernment–basically listen to this tape, make some notes of what I thought, then go compare them to my father’s notes. I was nervous I might get it wrong, but it wasn’t really a hard assignment. I’d heard my father do this since I was very small–I’d heard him explain that this television program was okay to watch as long as we understood where the characters were wrong, I’d heard him rip apart fallacies in articles he’d read.

Everyone has a different reason for recommending college to me. But a fair number of them boil down to either ‘college is where you learn to love learning’ or ‘college is where you learn discernment’.

I’m pretty sure that I would enjoy college. I would enjoy meeting people there. I would enjoy the academics and the atmosphere. I would also enjoy being able to write this blog post without Super Mario music running in the background behind me. Tough.

I don’t need college to learn to love learning, or to learn discernment. Thanks to my father I already learned both of those. Yes, I always need more practice. But now that I have the basics I don’t need college to practice them. I can practice right here where I am. Even with the Super Mario music running in the background.