Carpe Diem

It's difficult to carpe diem (seize the day) when you've got essay and exam overload.

Now I'm back at uni I'm surrounded by student zombies whose lives have been reduced to eating, *occasionally* sleeping and revising, revising, revising. It's a life that is so focused upon the short term gains that it becomes difficult to remember a world outside your designated revision area. Hence the lack of day-seizing.

It's tradition with me to sit down with whoever's close by when coming to exam time and complain about the approach to education that we currently have in place. Seeing as no-one is around at the moment, I thought that my blog would be the ideal place this year.

I'm standing back and having to witness a system which merely encourages us all to study to pass exams, rather than study for knowledge. There's no value left in education nowadays, and it disgusts me that I'm abiding by such a system which day-by-day is destroying the potential that lurks behind my mind and the minds of so many around me.

I didn't start thinking like this for no reason. It has a cause: Secondary school (or, "high school" as the Americans call it.) During my time at school I came across the so called "academically outstanding" girls who, for example, were studying Biology up to their A-Levels. Yet regardless of the "knowledge" that they had acquired, they still chose to participate in destructive activities such as smoking, drinking excessively etc. Everything that they were learning was going in through one ear and out the other. What was the point in learning what they weren't going to put into practice? Why learn something that has absolutely no effect on your own life? They were great at getting As in their exams, but when it came to practicing what they had learnt, they failed miserably.

At uni things aren't really as bad. A lot of the people I've come across are feeling a similar sense of frustration towards a system that solely takes into account the final grade of a student rather than their effort all year round, or even the knowledge that they've put into practice.

But during exam time even the ones who are frustrated with the system, including myself, suddenly have to close their minds to the rest of the world. The problem is, the more we end up focusing on one aspect of our life, the more we forget how valuable the rest of our life is. For "Carpe diem" is just another way of saying live each day as your last: Every second that ticks by is a step closer to death. (I recommend the film "Dead Poets Society" to illustrate my point.)

Unfortunately until the system changes, I'm going to have to be a part-time sheep and conform. The best I can do is repeat over and over in my head the following words:

"If you study to remember you will forget. But, if you study to understand you will remember."

*Sigh* Back to revision.