Education

A friend of mine wrote that life can be divided into seven stages:

1) What is that?

2) I know that!

3) I thought I knew that.

4) Who am I kidding?

5) How did I manage to miss that?

6) Was this my journey?

7) I don't get it.

Getting your degree is the beginning of the end for stage two.

My mother graduated with a Masters in English from Otago in 1960. I got my Masters from Vic in 1998. It was while I was doing my Masters that I began to learn things. I learned that if you go far enough in academic study you tend to end up in a very small (intellectually speaking) room that you fiercely defend against people in different rooms. There might be someone in a different room, for example, that says the wallpaper colour is double Spanish white, while you maintain that it is only Spanish white. Particularly annoying people in rooms down the hallway might even argue that the room doesn't exist at all, that it is merely a cultural construction.

I also began to suspect that most of what you need to know is learned the hard way which is, generally speaking, not to be found in a lecture hall on a power point slide.