Prelude

The education system of America seems to favor the idea of creating “Renaissance Men” of all of us. Well rounded educated individuals that have vast collections of knowledge that have a wide enough berth of information for us to be able to access via our memories from the common 12 years spent juggling the absurdity of such a system. I think that 12 years of education is a good thing, and that it helps expose students to many different areas of knowledge. However the system is flawed in many ways, I will not be sharing all my opinions in this post, but be on the lookout for a post about such in the future. My education throughout has always been interesting and multifaceted. Which has been wonderful, except that I have a lot of pent up energy and ADHD. So there’s like 10,000 ways my brain can and will go. I explore all the things and try to learn as much as possible about all of them. It is a blessing and a curse sometimes, however it has allowed me to explore an impressive number of things. The idea of public education is to make “Renaissance Men” and to give exposure to many things and the continuation in higher education is to do such and continue to such until you classify into something very specific. Essentially it’s like making a sword, you have to grind off the edges till you have a rough outline of a sharp edge then hone it until it’s razor sharp. In this case, it’s doing such with information and knowledge. This is good, but in the world of gaming we call someone that can only do one type of thing really well a “one trick pony”. Sure a one trick pony might be able to understand and use other mechanics in a pinch but they aren’t good at it. Our education system builds “Renaissance Men” with broad understandings, then overtime erodes the broad understandings away until it creates one trick ponies. I find this increasingly frustrating as the way this system and society has raised these ponies, it often leaves them dull in conversation as they only know how to talk about their one trick. Of course, there are always outliers to this equation; unicorns if you will. Those special unicorns that play the education game but remain interested in other things as well are my favorite types of individuals.

Relevance?

Why is this relevant you might be asking? Well it’s the prelude to my outlook on things. I believe it is better to develop multiple skills, of course this is a way of coping with my ADHD but it’s also to do with the fact that I don’t want to be a one trick pony. Hell that’s the reason this website is named the way it is. “Knowledge Jack” is the two words that best express my reasons for this website. I love knowledge, and I think it should be free; thus the genesis of this website on the internet. And I believe in the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none, better than one.” Also my favorite playing card is the Jack of Hearts, so in the end it all works out haha. That phrase is something I’ve kept with me, it’s something that I accidentally picked and hyper fixated on and unintentionally made it a big part of who I am. I have so many different interests that it seems like I am all over the place with stuff, but that’s because I want to learn all the things. I feel that I really resonate with the phrase “student of life” because that is what I am. Experiences outside of the fundamentals teach a vast variety of things that an education system, a textbook, or a certification course could never hope to teach. So I strive to learn and develop many different skills beyond the scope of my “traditional education”. 

Examples!!!

For instance, I am a computer guy. I can program, build, fix, use, and do all sorts of things with computers. Only a small portion of the information I know about computers comes from traditional education. But it’s my focus in higher education; I am an Information Technology major. I sit in classes right now and am bored out of my mind because I understand more about computers than the majority of the people in my classes. So instead of wasting my time on relearning something I am already certified on I’ve been learning how to garden, I’ve been learning how to knit, I’ve been learning how to cook, and I’ve been learning how to build stuff. For instance, I got bored one day and built a dehydrator from scratch. I believe that since I have so much free time I should be using it to augment my traditional education and learn as many things as I possibly can. The craving to want to know how things work is something that plagues me, and I want to be able to make those kinds of things work with other things. Specializing in computers is what I am doing, but in my free time I am going and having other experiences outside of just the screen of my computer. I love to write, so I’m starting to write this blog and starting to write books to hopefully eventually be published. I love to learn new things and to do all the things. There are too many interests in the world; if I was immortal I wouldn’t go a day being bored. 

Randomly I start to learn things, much like starting to learning Spanish randomly last night. I want to be able to understand the local Spanish radio stations, eavesdrop on conversations, connect with my grandmother that use to be a Spanish teacher more, be more likely to get a job by being bilingual, be able to read and write things in Spanish and have proper grammar, and well I have to be honest; I find infinite amusement of being able to craft jokes and insults in other languages but I pride myself with said jokes and whatnot being grammatically correct. That last part is something that definitely got me interested in many languages, such as German and Russian. But my interest stems from many things with Spanish. One of which is a frustration with the education system. I took 2 different classes on Spanish and don’t remember anything other than a few phrases. I am frustrated that I didn’t learn more, and I wish to course correct that. Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages, there’s a crap ton of statistics saying it is one of the most common ones. If I learn it I can better understand the people of the world and be able to communicate and learn from them. I develop so many niche skills so that I can learn more and more.

I crave learning and knowledge, that is why I develop many skills. It’s something I do because it’s who I am. I think others should do this as well. 🙂

Thank you for reading,

-Ben