K Bechtel

Is getting an education the same thing as learning?  This question has been brought up this semester and I think about it often.  I tell my students regularly about how important it is to get an education so they can get a good job.  Reality tells me otherwise though.  After my husband graduated with an associate degree in business management and a bachelor’s degree in business administration, the best job he could find was at the local hospital making minimum wage as a pharmacy tech.  I began working upon graduating with a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences/math at a bank in the loan department at minimum wage.  So we both have this education and where did it get us?  Well, in the process of being educated we learned a whole lot.  We learned how to solve problems, how to manage our time, our to meet deadlines, how to budget our resources, and how to complete tasks.  We learned responsibility and coping strategies to deal with a full-time schedule of classes with requirements we thought we’d never complete, a job sometimes two, and playing college basketball.  Learning to do all that was enough for a bank and a hospital to hire us.  After being hired, we then learned how to do the job.  Once we proved ourselves, we were able to work our way up the ladder.  Now I am no longer at a bank of course, I am a teacher.  But the idea is that we get jobs not because we know a lot.  We get jobs because of our work habits and academic backgrounds.  We keep our jobs because we learn how to do them well through experience.  Our experiences allow us to learn in a way that education cannot and will not ever provide.