The Extent of Education

I’m not really sure what made me think about it today, but my head was spinning around the idea of education and the process of learning. You start out in primary school learning the absolute basics, and things get a bit more complicated in high school. At the end of high school, you decide what interests you and what you want for a career. Let’s say you want to learn about cancer…

Well, then you go to the Harvard of the Midwest and you get a biology degree, taking classes that will teach you about general science, but also a little bit about cancer. Assuming you still love cancer (well, learning about it…), then you go to graduate school to concentrate only on cancer…

…here’s the dicey part… Eventually, you reach the end of education…as in…all education as you’ve known it for the previous 20 years… Because now, you realize that, hey, this stuff I’m learning isn’t in textbooks. The answers to a given question aren’t so easy to look up and find anymore… You can’t ask your parents or teacher a question and have them reply: “why don’t you go look it up?”

Why is this? Because no one knows… By the time you hit graduate school, you’re really hitting the “nitty gritty” of the extent of all human knowledge in that specific subject that you were interested in back in late-high school. There is no more that you can learn from a person, a textbook, or even a primary research article… That’s it.

I dunno…it’s just kinda weird knowing that you could be asked a question and it isn’t simply a issue of not knowing the answer: it’s not knowing the answer because the answer hasn’t been discovered yet by anyone on Earth. Once in graduate school, you’re really at the “final frontier” (insert Star Trek reference here…) of human knowledge on a given subject. So when you’re called an “expert on cancer,” it’s really true because you’ve learned just about 95-99% of everything that can be learned about it.

These are the thoughts I have when studying for exams… 😛