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No Matter What Your Educational Goal is, Be Deliberate
If you have had a chance to read the last blog entry “Choosing College, A Hierarchy” and have had a chance to look over the flow chart, hopefully one of the conclusions you came to was: You have to take ownership of not only your education but your future too.
Teaching English at the university level, I have met hundreds of students—all with varied goals and aspirations. I saw a lot. I met students who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives and how a college education fit into that vision. I met students who thought the goal of life was to get a college degree. I also met students who had no idea what the goal of their life was, but they thought they should be in college because they thought somehow they would figure out life simply by being in proximity of those who had a firm handle on their own life vision.
One truth I can tell you is this: you have to manage your educational pursuits yourself. Let me reword this three different ways—I feel extremely passionate about this issue and I want to reach as many individuals who do not quite have a vision as possible. You are in charge of your life and thus the things you will or will not do. God has given you life and free will—outline and live a lifestyle that will bring glory to God. Even if you do not believe in God, this makes your life—your limited amount of time here on earth—that much more sacred, do not waste it thinking that you cannot do the things you want to do—spend your life chasing after the worthwhile pursuits you want to do and even if you come up short in the end, no one will ever say you wasted your life, because you tried.
So, this business of choosing what type of education you will pursue is tied intimately in with the overall goal you have as a human being. Do not go to college unless you know what your goal is. Abstain from enrolling in a university until you know what you wish to do with your life. Avoid institutions of higher learning unless you have a vision of your life. If you know what you want to do, say you want to be a doctor, then find a mentor to help you choose the path that makes the most sense and pray on it before you start the admissions ball rolling.
What if I have no idea what to do with my life? The one thing I can tell you is not to go to college—and here’s why. If you were given a package by a friend and they said they needed you to deliver it to a location for them, but they would call and give you the directions later in the day, you surely would not get in your car and start driving anywhere beyond your driveway. You would have no idea where to take the package and you might end up driving for miles in the opposite direction. True, you might end up going in the right direction, but this is not an either or scenario. A compass has 360 degrees of choices: your life has infinitely more than that and you have to decide where you will go—don’t let your friends decide for you.
So what should I do? Sign up to see the world. Volunteer to serve the underserved. Get a job in a car factory. Sign up with your church or local humanitarian organization and dig wells for families in Central America, South America, Africa, and/or Asia. Go see the world. Go see something strange. Go do something ordinary. Go do something unordinary. I am certain when you return, you will know a lot of things that you do not want to do, as well as a few things you do want to do. If you decide you need to go to college after your service, you will be much more engaged and interested in your studies than the majority of your classmates.
But if I don’t go to college right after high school or if I don’t choose the life path my friends and family want me to pursue I’ll be considered a failure. Not true. Would you consider anyone who, during WWII, graduated high school and immediately served over seas and went to college afterward? Not immediately going to college after high school does not disqualify you from ever going to college—bad choices after high school disqualify you from college. I have not met too many high school graduates who did not know what they wanted to do with their life and who also acted completely responsible while attending college and “figuring out” life. These students were idle. They had no group of fellow majors to collaborate with—they were also much less likely to join clubs and other social organizations. What usually happened to these students? They joined a collection of idle or delinquent students who also had no vision for their future and together they simply existed on campus. They participated in activities that I label “Time Travel” activities: e.g., smoking, drinking, drugs, sex, video games, etc.
In moderation and for recreation—when you’ve earned it—some (some is the key word here) of these activities are fine to indulge in (taking into account state and federal laws as well as respect for women and the sacredness of marriage). But, let’s be honest, none of these activities will lead to a successful life or career that fulfills what God calls us to do with our lives (and maybe you want to start a ministry through video games, okay, but you will have to complete a host of other activities to achieve this—playing video games 24/7 will not bring your vision to fulfillment). “Time Travel” activities are available to individuals whether they are in college or taking a year off before starting college. Their temptation is real and it is strong if you do not have a vision for your life. Like driving around with the package in your car waiting for your friend to call, it is tempting to stop at the local tavern and get a burger and a beer—who knows how long it will be before you hear from your friend. The worst occurrence, that I’ve seen happen too often, is an individual realizing their vision for their life, but they have dug themselves into a hole that overwhelms them with despair and they never attempt to realize their vision for their life. They adopt a lesser one, call it their life vision, and in ten to twenty years become disillusioned and claim that the whole life vision thing is a lie—well, if it isn’t your first choice, it is a lie.
Removing yourself from the current American culture is a great way to stimulate deep thoughts about your life, the world, and your place in it. “Time Travel” activities most often deny you deeply reflective moments and deliver you into the future unchanged and uneducated—you have in essence simply hit the skip button for a portion of your life. You will never get that time back. Do not listen to popular culture. You are not a loser or a failure if you decide to go and serve in an underdeveloped country for eight months after high school. Failure is not taking the time to envision your life. Failure is never planning a path to bring about your life’s vision. Failure is never starting in on your life’s vision and purpose because you voluntarily gave up your God-given free will to the culture you live in—a culture that will never truly love you they way you wish to be loved and will never sustain your soul in the way you hunger for it to be sustained. A college degree, in and of itself, will not make you happy.
A college degree is not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A college degree, when you pursue your life’s purpose, is like a patch on a quilt. One square is not an overwhelmingly great reason to start a quilt nor will one square—by itself—complete the quilt. The square is a part of the quilt and is there to bring the vision of the quilt, that its maker had, into reality. When you pursue your vision, if you need a degree to bring it to fulfillment, you will earn a degree to help you along your path—but, it should only be done because it is necessary—if it is not necessary, you really are wasting your time and life. A typical undergraduate degree takes 4-5 years of your life. The average lifespan of an American is 80 years (I rounded up from 78.7). That is 5% of your life. That’s not a big deal. Oh no? Add that to the 18 years of your life you must pay until you are recognized as an adult and you are out 27.5% of your life. Deciding to invest 5% of your life into something is a big decision—even bigger if you are considering graduate school.
If you are having trouble getting yourself ready to apply the flow chart to your life and plan a path to reach your vision, I’ll finish this post off with a few activities that can help you generate ideas and get you thinking about what you might like to spend your life doing.
- Figure Out How You Like to Help Others
If you look at great leaders like Jesus, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa, what we notice right away is their devotion to others. You hear it all the time from people who have gotten out there and served—it makes them feel satisfied, fulfilled, content. It is not just a bunch of bull that people are trying to get you to believe. Get out there and do some service. Sign yourself up for a whole bunch of different things in your community—small and large. It is extremely unlikely that after a few service missions you will feel the same as before you started. Keep this in mind too, even mentally impaired individuals enjoy helping others—it is simply part of our DNA. It’s who we are, we are helpers.
- What Careers Would Enable You To Do the Service You Enjoy the Most
Reflect back to your service and think about which types of service you enjoyed the most and why. Not everyone likes working with people one-on-one. Some feel best working behind the scenes and remaining anonymous. You have to be honest with yourself what you prefer. Make a list of possible vocations that would enable you to pursue your service preference.
III. Have the Hard Heart-to-Heart With Yourself
Subtract everything—as best you can—from your life vision but you and God. Narrow down your career choices to three. Imagine you develop a rare disease, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), and you know that your body is going to slowly deteriorate and you will lose motor function. What career would you choose despite this physical handicap?
The truth is, if you chose wisely, you don’t have to stop pursuing your passion at 65. If you want to serve through teaching—you can teach for a long time. One of my oldest professors in college was a 90 year-old woman—and she was sharp as a tack. The point is, you are planning for the long haul, so keep in mind, if you are young, feeling all the strong feelings that come with being in your prime, that is great, but it will fade as you get older and you will want to take this into account. There is nothing that breaks my heart more than when an athlete retires and their life is over. Be practical and realistic about what type of service you will be able to continue to do over the course of your lifetime.
Thank you for reading. My name is Joshua R. Franklin. I am a Christian and a writer. Currently I am working toward a Doctorate in Biblical Studies at Colorado Theological Seminary. If you think I’m smart, you can be too, check out where I am getting my Christian education: http://www.seminary.ws.
Brick & Mortar or Online: The Better Conversation
The conversation of “brick and mortar” versus online has been going on since at least the 1970’s. Getting educated through a computer network seemed like a crazy idea. As crazy as it seemed, many educators and former students felt that online education was a threat to the real education, the kind that can only take place at a “brick and mortar” location. Many set out to make sure everyone knew that one was clearly better than the other.
But, what exactly is meant when someone says one is “better” than the other? They actually mean a few different things, and you have to really examine what is being said to determine what they likely intend.
Many mean a higher quality education when they say one is better than the other. I would say that this is something that you would absolutely want to find out if you were checking out various schools, online and onsite. Quality is a big deal. Early online academic programs may not have benefitted from the same types of resources that onsite schools had, but fast-forward to today and things are a bit different than they were 40 years ago. Onsite schools are tripping over themselves to make online education available for their students.
Another interpretation of better could be related to the available social support that accompanies each—but, depending upon your lifestyle, one will have the advantage over the other: e.g., a single parent isn’t likely to be impressed with a school that makes all first years students live in campus housing for their first year; likewise, a theater student attending classes online is going to have a tough time putting together a play when his/her classmates live all over the world. Nevertheless, the social element of education is important and some students make the mistake of prioritizing it above all other factors.
The last interpretation that I am going to mention (and there are others) is prestige—that Harvard is better than any online school. It is also often implied that no online school could ever equal a brick and mortar institution. Prestige comes from reputation and reputations are built over time. Harvard and its Ivy League friends have a few hundred years head start on all online colleges. But, if you are a student who knows that you will need the prestige of a school to get your foot in the door and make your career happen, then you know where you have to go. However, existing physically does not automatically grant an institution prestige nor does it validate the school’s educational programs as quality ones.
If prestige is not a factor in your future career and life, and you are the master of your ego, then you are free to choose a school that meets the educational preparations that you require, first. Once you have narrowed your list down to only the schools that will adequately prepare you to live your life, filter out the schools that will not meet your social needs. This is an important hierarchy to observe because getting an education isn’t a party; it is a preparation for your life to come.
It is more to a person’s advantage to select a school that meets their educational needs and not so much their social preferences than a school in which the student feels right at home but isn’t getting the education they will need. The time it takes to earn a degree is short. A student will soon find him or herself out in the post-college world and lament their waste of time. Often you will hear them claiming and telling all who will listen that college is one big scam.
So what is the difference? If the school adequately prepares you to start your career and live your life fruitfully, you won’t notice a difference. Both settings can provide students with the resources, mentorship, and the technology to receive a quality education. A brick and mortar school may have its own private archives that only its students have access to, but an online student is not bound to a physical location to meet attendance requirements and could feasibly (if finances allow) travel to a museum or adequately comparable location as the private archive. Each could give a rich learning experience.
That a school exists at a physical location does not constitute as valid evidence to support the claim that brick and mortar is better than online—the inverse of this is also false, online is not better than brick and mortar. It is people that make education, no matter the location, better. Quality teachers and quality students trump resources and location every time. Jesus sure didn’t have a physical location that he arrived at every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at ten o’clock sharp. One could make the argument that he was promoting distance education by physically doing the legwork that the Internet can do for us today.
The only difference between brick and mortar and online education is that for some one is better for them and for others the other is better. It depends on the student taking charge and identifying their current and future needs: when this happens, a student has found the path toward excellence. My prediction is that as more and more schools add an online option to their curriculum, this debate of which is better will fade away, as even Harvard offers educational programs online, and the conversation will return to where can a person get the quality education they need to be successful in their future.
Thank you for reading. My name is Joshua R. Franklin. I am a Christian and a writer. Currently I am working toward a Doctorate in Biblical Studies at Colorado Theological Seminary. If you think I’m smart, you can be too, check out where I am getting my Christian education: http://www.seminary.ws.
Education Today Has Changed?
Education clearly has changed, hasn’t it? We no longer push our children to select a college or university based upon the exclusive book collections that it houses inside its libraries. The academy no longer has a stranglehold on textbooks and thus your access to textbooks is not determined by access to a specific academy. You no longer have to go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, unless you absolutely have to see it in person, that is. Students do not even need to go to the bookstore anymore, they can rent their books from their dorm room. But, I am getting ahead of myself, I am writing under the assumption that education means a college education, but this is a large and not completely accurate assumption.
Education, many of us know all too well, is not a piece of paper. It is not a credential. It is not a rite of passage. It is not training. It is not neutered knowledge. And, when done correctly, education is not a scam and does not feel like one. Education cannot be a piece of paper simply because you can buy paper–many have–and they are none the wiser for it. Furthermore, there are too many people who have lived and educated others, yet they had no piece of paper or credential: take Jesus, for example. Education cannot only be training because if this were the case, wouldn’t we have trained ourselves into an intellectual utopia by now? We are very good in the modern day at mass-producing things, why not education? We can’t mass-produce education, because neutered knowledge will only get you a computer and not an educated individual.
So what is education? It is knowing the truth, but also applying it to the world around you in a way that is good. Only by applying the truth for the good can we thrive, which is what God wants for us–if you are uncomfortable at this point in your journey with using God’s wisdom as your guiding light, simply look to nature. Nature’s goal is to flourish and thrive–I believe it does this because it reflects God’s will to us–either way, God’s way or the “natural way,” the point is to prosper. To be truly educated means you are thinking about the good and the good of not only today, but the big picture.
If you want to do what is good here on earth, there is a bit of sacrifice you will have to endure. Whether is is signing your life away to an institution of higher learning for a few years, seeking the wisdom of the elders in your life, spending hours in the library, or praying, you will be investing time into an activity (or activities) that do not always give an instantaneous reward. But you do it because you know that it is for the good of your overall life.
So we return to the question, has education changed today? No and yes. Yes, education has changed in that one can have access to information in volume and multitude in a way that those before us never had access. I can access the same information and texts in rural Alaska–as long as I have current or prior internet access–as a student at a top tier university. So, yes, how we access information has changed and thus education has changed in that it has added a new road that one can get to it–it would seem that even education seeks to thrive.
But, education in its most simplistic sense has not changed. If I am to learn–for example–how to perform a medical procedure such as setting a broken leg and putting it in a cast, I need accurate information. This has been a staple of education that we could trace back beyond Plato and Aristotle. Some might argue that it is not completely necessary that a student have a steward or teacher present for the student to educate themself–they just need correct information–but a teacher is necessary. I once taught myself how to type using the free tutorials I found on a website. I did not have an active mentor–but I did have an inactive one, the generous individual who created the tutorials. The mentor, steward, teacher, facilitator, or whatever you want to call that person who helps you come to know and do what you could not and did not previously know and do is impossible to remove from the education equation.
In today’s electronic educational landscape, the teacher has not gone away and will never go away–you cannot become educated without a teacher in your life. We can trace any education you have back to a source, a teacher. So, education has not changed, only the way we can come to be educated has, through expansion of means to get it.
This new avenue, online education, is becoming increasingly popular in the formal education sector: i.e., the academy. 32% of all enrolled college students have taken at least one online course, this percentage has been on the rise consistently year after year for the past ten years. And the remarkable thing, we still find a human being on the other end of the computer for subjects that want students to do more than rote memorization–because education is a little more than simply knowing.
So what has really changed about education? We haven’t gotten rid of the need for accurate information, learning, the teacher, or application of correct information. I suppose the world’s perception of what is an acceptable way to become educated has and is still changing–and it will continue to do so for awhile. Online education, as the avenue to becoming educated, could deliver us to the intellectual utopia I made light of earlier. If knowing the correct information and being able to do the correct things with that information is all that matters, then the academy will be changing in the next couple of years. Sounds crazy you say? Well, the no-pay MBA already exists. The world of business is just one profession in which the embossed piece of paper you paid for that has your name and an institution’s name on it matters less that what you know and what you can do.
Online education is attempting to bring education and people to what is actually important: what you know and what you can do. After all, isn’t that what is most important in a business transaction where you could lose everything? Or if you were a first time parent and wanted to give your baby something sweet, but all you had was honey. Maybe you wanted to try your hand at hunting mushrooms during spring season. These are practical matters, but they can truly change your life if you do not have the right information and do not apply it correctly. But what about matters of the heart, spirit, and soul? Again, what matters is the knowing what is true about God and how to do correctly what it is you are supposed to do–trust me, education from the armchair sounds much easier than it is, and that notion, like education, hasn’t really changed. You can’t fake being educated, when tested, and receiving your education via electronic methods can be as successful for you as non-electronic methods: you just have to have those three things I mentioned before: correct information, a teacher, and apply the correct information in the correct way.
Thank you for reading. My name is Joshua R. Franklin. I am a Christian and a writer. Currently I am working toward a Doctorate in Biblical Studies at Colorado Theological Seminary. If you think I’m smart, you can be too, check out where I am getting my Christian education: http://www.seminary.ws.
Colorado Theological Seminary 