My friend Katharine is really smart. Often she will say something in passing that sticks in my head and ends up in a blog post. This is one of those posts.
Katharine is in high school and she recently told me about a paper she wrote (I think it was for her English class), in which she argued her desire to “claim knowledge for myself as opposed to recounting knowledge on an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper.”
I’m pretty sure I made it through most of high school and certainly college focused on recounting knowledge rather than claiming it. (Although I didn’t have the wisdom or insight for those categories at the time.) In grad school, however, I’m finding myself really (actually) wanting to learn. Wanting to claim knowledge, not in order to pass a test or get a good grade, but for the sake of something deeper and bigger than a piece of lined notebook paper.
All of life is learning. The choice is what you do with the knowledge that your life is uncovering.
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