In Years To Come

*part of series of writing (end)

This will be the last part of my series of writing. Let's continue the topics upon literacy, and how can we get literated in the relevancy of our society, of the zeitgeist and mainstream? How can it be done? All in all, it was the means of every education in this world. Schools and teachers alike, tried their best to transferring their knowledge so that the students can pass it beyond than just some paperwork for the thesis or exam sheets in standardized test. So that the student may get the proper literacy to face the real world. Yet, nothing in the classroom had prepared us to face what's outside the school wall, not while the students knew school only for the homework and lab experiment, without ever facing the actual battlefield.

An art student who master in traditional paintings, graduated as the brightest pupil in his year. He may be appreciated best in his field, but now that he went out of his school wall and seeing the real world with his own two eyes, he saw people no longer interested in traditional painting. No art gallery hung up classic canvas in beautiful frame on their walls anymore, everything went digital. Oil colors replaced by Photoshop palette, while charcoal pencil replaced by vector tool. The art student, who master only traditional ways, now became confused. The times they are a changing. He drowned and sink deep in this digital sea.

In years to come, everything will be shift. Directions had been set from years ago. Our entire life had been mapped from the beginning, and it's time to draw some lines upon the paper so that the dots will be connected and the larger image appeared. The topography map had been laid out in front of our eyes, yet still we always failed to read it. And usually, the reason was because many people failed to see beyond the maps. What they knew was that the topography map was fixed, while in reality it was fluid and constantly changing according to the architect's hands who drawn it. Graduate education doesn't guarantee anything except 'learning about', and when they proceeds to the real world, that's when the 'learning to be' took place. But that doesn't mean we can't accelerate the pace, we can. My friend the pianist had 'learning to be' a musician ever since she was a child, and so do I. When talking about dedication and passion, it's not about apprentice and master, or newbie and expert, it's about curiousity. The will to explore and dig in further.

Nowadays, information are easily accessible. Social media had extensively grown and keep grown each day, it provides not only a large amount of learning places, it also means the expansion of access. Yes, access so that we can meet a variety of people, communities and society who had distinct understanding of knowledge. And what good does meeting with those people would do? It good to expanding our already established knowledge, add it up with new information, filtering out the unnecessary ones. Frankly, school curriculum had also tried these attempts, by committing students to learning many subject at a time: remember the day when we taught of chemistry, physics, sociology and art in one day? That was the day when the information crammed up inside us, attempts should not be given repeatedly without any good quality times to reflect back upon them. Repeated attempts tend to fall into routines, which iron out the improvisation and exploration.

From the visual media examines to the philosophy of life, I hope you can extract something out of these writings. I'm. Just. Hoping.

 

 

AFTERWORDS

But that was merely the tip of the iceberg, many can be pointed out as flaws in our education, cultural and social environment--but we won't go further into the subject of school and means of education, let's stay on the track--I'm deeply sorry if my writings here tend to overlook human as 'information sponges' who have the absorptive capacity, I may overgeneralized, at least from my point of view as a quick learner (I easily understand many things). Thanks for reading.