by Gregor Arkady

Created on: March 30, 2009

I am a first year student at a fairly prestigious school in Canada, and I have noticed a glaring disparity in the attitudes and behaviours of some of the students. I did a "victory lap", or extra year, of high school so that I could bring up my average and work to pay for my tuition, and so I was fortunately enough to get some real world exposure before entering university. In addition, I was somehow able to luck into teachers that emphasized the real world skills we would need, such as intelligent argument, unbiased observation and social interaction skills, instead of focussing solely on the academics. However, once I got to university, I was truly shocked by what I saw.

Instead of the intelligent and well-spoken figures I had always envisioned, instead I was greeted by mewling masses with no real ability to function outside of a strictly regimented system. Students who were asked to fulfill even the simplest of tasks without step-by-step instructions more often than not failed, and their abilities to function outside of the bubble of our university were almost non-existent. For example, I was responsible for hustling a few of my floor mates out of a bar they decided to go into, failing to realize that this was not the kind of place that would take kindly to rich and spoiled university students. Instead of behaving like intelligent and mature individuals, they decided it would be fun to pretend to be what they thought was "blue-collar", and proceeded to offend and insult every patron there with either their strange ideas of what constituted a working-class identity or their downright inconsiderate yelling and screaming in drunken stupor.

See, it's not just that they were idiots, it's that they truly didn't know any better. They had never had to look after themselves, or think for themselves, and instead had heavily relied on those in positions of authority to simply lay out the steps for them to follow. Their teachers had apparently been more concerned with spoon-feeding them the required material to bother instructing them on real life, and as such, they evidently never faced any real danger or threat that couldn't be solved with a sternly worded letter from their parents.

I consider the greatest part of my high school education to have been the skills I learned when not in class. I have fond memories of spending hours sitting in my teachers' offices and just shooting the breeze with them, or discussing my views on the course material and bouncing ideas for essays off of them. I'm still quite close with some of my high school teachers, and have gone out for beer with some and even spent an evening at a punk show with one. The lessons they really taught me weren't taught in the classroom, but instead were more subtly introduced to me. Lessons about how to survive and behave like something approaching an adult, or how to read between the lines of a conversation. The most important part of my high school experience was what I learned when I wasn't in the classroom.

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