Good Morning: Classrooms intended for more than memorizing data
In recent years, Franklin College has increased its efforts to offer service opportunities to its students.
Just this week, Franklin held a Greek Day of Service – helping causes throughout the community – and hosted a program for Invisible Children, an organization that reaches out for aid for abducted children forced to fight in the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda.
These events have brought to light that the college experience, especially at a liberal arts school, seems to always be teaching several contradictory things at once. We are encouraged to open our minds and hearts, broaden our horizons and take a stand in the world today through studying other cultures and supporting various causes.
Then, we are told how the real world works, that it’s a big scary place with few jobs for worse pay these days and how we are to take care of ourselves in this climate.
Is it possible that only in college are we able to entertain both ideals at the same time? Are worldly, generous service and cold, realistic logic mutually exclusive? If so, should we accept this? Do we have a choice?
When your friend’s hippy parents go on at length about the old days when the youth movement was passionate and active, maybe this is what they’re talking about. When they stare at nothing in particular and mutter about "sell outs", maybe they know that you can’t really have it both ways.
Certainly, the plights and hardships of people the world round can be neither denied nor ignored. And it is true that right now there are numerous opportunities – especially here at Franklin – for us to reach out to the world through service. Many students choose to take advantage of these service opportunities and plan to continue to do so in the future. Maybe they will; maybe they won’t.
There is another group of students who choose to abstain. They are here for an education and a degree. They are, and have every right to be, concerned with their future first. They believe that this is the age of the individual and their realistic approach will bring success.
These are clearly the two extremes of the situation and I, along with most of my peers I would assume, reside somewhere between the two. College life is full of contradictions. Every road forks and decisions must be made. In this case, lives other than our own will be changed for the better or worse depending on the path we choose.
Maybe that is what they’re really teaching us amidst the lectures, discussions and those odious group projects. We determine who we are as people through the decisions we make, or if it comes down to it: heads or tails.
