BY ANDREW KRUSZKA, STAFF WRITER
Here’s a quick question for you. Should we learn? What exactly is the benefit of learning, and what exactly are we trying to learn?
As a future educator, I get the question all of the time of why do students have to learn, do work and pass these classes that will mean absolutely nothing in the long run. For a second, I think that they actually do make sense when they ask this because if I’m being honest, why do my students really need to know about the fall of Rome, which is arguably the best Empire of all time. My best answer to this, if we do not learn history, we are bound to repeat it.
We as a culture have appeared to steer away from learning basic knowledge. For instance, is there such a thing as general knowledge anymore with Google being around? Most will argue for no because Google is the search engine that is here to help with everything, but I’m here to tell you that although technology has progressed us humans along the way, we still should learn and progress what is known as “general knowledge.”
What is general knowledge? For example, I would hope that everyone here in the United States knows and can immediately state that our President of the United States is Joseph Biden, and the first President of the United States was George Washington. With that being said, if you for some reason don’t know this, you can always just look it up on Google. To that end, I’ll say that we as a society are becoming too dependent on Google and search engines that tell us exactly everything that we need to know. Yes, we should use these search engines for our benefit, but we should also realize that they are not our whole lives.
We, as humans, need to learn. It’s a part of the way we grow, quite literally. A comment by onlinemaryville.edu writes on this issue; “a knowledge of human development can be invaluable to people personally as they continue to learn and grow throughout their lives and
professionally as they learn to apply what they’ve learned to their careers.” As we can see, we as humans need to learn to continue progressing forward as a society and as people.
Our brain grows, which is extremely healthy when we learn new things. That being said, you don’t have to be sitting in a classroom here at St. Bonaventure to be learning something. What we don’t realize as a society is that we learn things every single day. We just seem to be oblivious to it.
Therefore, as an educator, I want to challenge my students to stop looking at their phones, stop looking at Google and stop looking at all of the social media websites. If we don’t teach these students this now, how are they supposed to teach those who come after them these tactics? Who will progress society? Rome has already fallen, so who will progress society?
That’s why I truly believe it’s up to our generation of students who are in college now to save this. Sure, we’re just labeled Generation Z for the humans that come before us. But, in reality, we could be the generation of transitioning America into either a lazy age that tries to let the internet and Google run everything or to progress society forward as our ancestors before us have always done. It takes you. It takes me. As a society, we can grow, and we can learn together!
