11/2/2009 6:2

Obstacle Course

I have a friend with kids in school who sees high school primarily as an obstacle course on the path to life. (His attitude is colored by the obstacles his oldest son is experiencing.) I accused him of not being clear on what goal of life the realities of high school are obstacles to reaching.

If your goal is to get out of a burning room, all the tables and chairs are merely obstacles. But if the goal is to cooperate in planning a project, the tables and chairs are tools that help accomplish that. Same tables, chairs, and room; different obstacles.

If you want to avoid mathematics for the rest of your life, then algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus are all obstacles standing in your way. But if you want to be an engineer or a physicist, those studies are necessary building blocks. And for those whose desire is to be educated people, those courses can be tools to achieve breadth of vision and a clearer perception of the power of the human mind.

All well and good, but that doesn't mean that there are no obstacles to overcome. High school courses are taught in the most implausible situations. (Consider only the 53-minute schedule for example. How can teenagers be settled, informed, exercised, and evaluated within such a ridiculously short span of time?) High school textbooks often seem to be evaluated primarily by weight and sometimes by the use of colored inks; seldom do they exhibit either clarity or depth. High school teachers are notoriously shallow in subject knowledge and narrow in their approach to teaching; even partial exceptions may become recipients of public adulation if they are identified.

When we play the game without any strategy, every adverse event will seem to be nothing other than an obstacle. In actual reality most of us play that way much of the time; our only strategy is to be happy someday, somehow. "I want to pass high school Spanish so that I can get a college degree that has enough prestige to make enough money so that I don't have any obstacles to being happy." So we try to get past the stones on which we are constantly stubbing our toes and don't evaluate whether those stones might be the raw material of our success.

In contrast, a person might choose to learn Spanish strategically. "I want to speak Spanish because I want to market products to Mexico." Or, "I want to read Spanish so that I can enjoy Cervantes or perhaps Ortega y Gasset in their original form." Or, "I want to learn Spanish to broaden my understanding of human communication." Or, as my father said of learning calculus, "just for the sheer beauty of it."