On Statistics #2

This is something I think is massively important to the success of well, anything. That is, as Viggo Mortensen's character, Man, from the film The Road would have us say, carrying the fire. Every person in the world is born with the fire. We have it as children, and it's easy to see. Children are blunt, they have no concept of humility, they don't understand any form of humor other than something which is blatantly silly, and they love it. This lack of comprehension of conventions invented by adults produces a beautiful quality though. It is this literally not knowing about much of anything that makes children so fascinating. They aren't burdened by our worries, our stresses, unaware of everything we do in the name of achieving a more comfortable and meaningful existence, which sometimes produces the opposite effect. Children live for the moment, they know exactly what they want, they are stubborn, and are incredibly hard to persuade. When I was a kid I was certain anything was possible with the right attitude, though even in kindergarten I knew that some of us were on the track for success, and others, well the odds weren't in their favor. But this idea that anything was possible, that literally anything was possible, it gave me great things. I was optimistic, I was happy, I was alive, even though I knew absolutely zero about how the world around me worked. I remember I thought I could literally fly, if I could have only jumped high enough. I thought that the stars were within arm's reach, just waiting to be plucked down from the sky for us to explore. I was going places. I had plans to go to the moon, to explore the galaxies around us, foreign planets, I had plans to perform amazing feats of strength and courage as a member of the FBI or a CIA agent. I wanted to go to Africa, to see the lions and the giraffes, to run with the wildebeests, to experience the world for everything it had to offer. No place was dangerous, no person a permanent stranger, there were no enemies for me. I had unbridled imagination, and I ran with it. Since then, I have experienced more of the world for what it is. With that comes some would call wisdom, I call it depression. In experiencing things for myself, predictably I found that the world isn't everything the world is cracked up to be. I was disappointed. There were people out there to hurt me, there were animals that could eat me, that wanted to eat me, there were people sworn to be my enemy based on their national identity, their religion, their other arbitrary and indefinite characteristics. This caused me to reevaluate some of my goals. When I learned about the Cold War I didn't like the Russians anymore, and they were the first ones to go to space, and a prevalent entity there. Going to the moon just got dangerous. As for Africa I learned about cannibalism, disease, civil war, as well as the fact that that continent has been the epitome of everything that is society's worst nightmare for much of recorded history. Africa shifted from "most interesting place ever" to "no-go zone" for me. As for serving this country in the FBI or the CIA (or any other government agency); they say you are what you serve, and I do not plan on becoming an over-bearing and belligerent asshole anytime soon, so I'm not serving the cause that exemplifies such things. With wisdom comes cynicism, as in it's contemporary definition. When you see a beautiful woman in a tight red dress, heels, makeup, in low light, while you're in a social setting, drinking some fine wine, that experience is dramatically different from when you wake up the next morning next to her, makeup now gone, slimming dress gone, heels now discarded across the room, when you're wondering what you just got yourself into. Seeing her at the party you think "This is great!" When you talk to her you either think "This is even better!" or "I hate her laugh, but I can deal with it, so I'll keep talking to her." Seeing her the next morning you might think "Night well spent, sir." or "Wow, she has big gums." Not knowing anything was great, much of the fun was in the pursuit of what you thought you were chasing, less of the fun is in capturing that which you thought you were chasing, and the least amount of fun is in having captured that, and then realizing it wasn't everything you thought it was. If you do chase what you think you're chasing, capture exactly that, and then realize it was even better than you had thought, that my friend is the ultimate experience, and a wonderful thing, as well as a rare thing.

I realize I'm taking the long way around to relate statistics to education, to relate education to self-actualization. We know that school is a learning experience, both academically as well as morally, emotionally, and socially. In school we focus the overwhelming majority of our attention on academics, and with that comes focus on grades, out of that comes pressure on students from administration and adults, out of that pressure the students becomes stressed, sometimes so much so they drop out, but if they don't, they generally think something along the lines of, "I have to do well in school or I won't do well in life, no matter what it is, no matter what plans I have for myself." Nowadays we want to send everyone to college, no matter their skill set or their aspirations, and we have raised the past few generations with the notion that a college degree guarantees your success and happiness in the world. With this attitude, that of the requirement of doing well in from the moment you walk into the first grade until you graduate college, we stress ratings, scores, marks, grades, certifications, awards and other useless filibustering material one uses to pad their resume. We never stress real world experience, we don't encourage our sons and daughters to travel (not until later in life, and even then it's thought of as vacation and not something essential to the development and advancement of someone, and is this day and age parents are so anal and worrysome that they don't allow their children to go anywhere other than those places overcrowded by other tourists), we never think to teach them how to give a good handshake, how to walk with such presence that fills the room with refreshing confidence, we, in essence, are teaching them to value bubbles filled in correctly over their own character. This sounds cynical, I realize. However, when I sit in such a privileged school with resources that other schools can only hope to attain, and see that students are taking the easy route, participating reluctantly or not at all in discussion, planning to go to a state college which even someone fresh out of prison with their GED could get into, cheating on homework, lying to their teachers, laughing at how badly they did on a test, and just generally driftng lazily through their education, I can't help but wonder what these people plan to do with the rest of their lives. I feel like many people nowadays have much too modest hopes. Too many people hope to have a comfortable income, a house, a wife, a normal life in American suburbia. They seem to think have a teetering glass structure that is their hopes and dreams, and seem to believe a slip-up in their studies is the toppling of this glass structure. Not enough people have true passion. True passion for something is what advances yourself as well as though around you, not only economically, socially, and politically, but metaphysically. I look around and I don't see true passion. I see a passion to do well enough as dictated by the aristocratic oligarchy of academia, which really isn't a passion at all.