During a TV show – „Garantat 100% cu sociologul Gelu Duminică” (@TVR1), Gelu Duminică said something like:
Rolul meu nu este să te învăț, rolul meu este să te provoc / I’m here to provoke you, not teach you something.
When I think of flaws in the educational system, most of the flaws refer to things that I didn’t learn well enough – „Oh, I wished I had more room to learn Mathematics better”. But that was not the purpose of the education system. It was, indeed, just put there to create a spark. To incite my curiosity.
When I look at the situation from this perspective, I find that I spent four years in college, and during that time I found out about NGOs, about having an Internet connection, about attending conferences, about spending time online writing (forums, Yahoo! Groups, later blogs), about promoting things. All of these evolved in my life, I did some things afterward.
There was no class in college for photography, we barely connected online for official purposes, NGOs were 100% optional, communicating online, and promoting things were mostly not part of the courses.
While I did learn some things in the actual classes, most of the things came from human interactions – to see a teacher devote her/him self to creating a wonderful experience, to meet people from NGOs, to see people at conferences, to put some passion in your work, to love to find out more. Things like these were not taught directly, but indirectly.
And I’m grateful for the college years, from this perspective.
Following that, I did three Master’s Degrees, had some professional experience, and did some things with NGOs / events / online.
I owe it, partially, to the educational system in college.
I used to be critical to some things in the educational system, I’m less now, after that I heard the speech above.
