Spring Break
Battling on Facebook
Education is key to informed debates
Steve Markley
Issue date: 4/18/06 Section: OpEd Page
The point of this story is not to single out this one guy (although if you've read some of his other Facebook work, most of you would agree he certainly deserves it). The point is to leave you a little advice. We'll call it a Markley public service message. Here's the deal: I've been at Miami for four years now and probably the best thing I've learned is that there is a big difference between "learning" and learning.
People like Jasmine take their classes, they have majors and they're all getting degrees, but they haven't learned anything the way some people I know have. I have a friend who went to Nicaragua where banana and sugar cane workers protest a dangerous work environment by threatening to kill themselves because nothing else gets anyone's attention. He's learned something and it's something a lot more god damn profound than anything I can claim.
But you don't have to go to Nicaragua for that. You can read a newspaper and understand that there are things going on in this world where words like "injustice" don't really do the job. Read a Rolling Stone article about the reconstruction of New Orleans (the issue's got Jack Bauer on the cover and I won't deny that I read about him first). Read this book called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, and trust me, it'll blow your damn mind into separate blood-soaked halves with skull fragments still dangling from your scalp.
This is not about ideology either. It's much more challenging to listen to those who disagree with you when developing your own ideas. I spent a year doing this at The Miami Student with my co-editor, Chris Gardner. Chris and I have virtually no common political opinions, yet listening to my own ideas challenged during editorial board helped me discover ways to defend my own world view. It made me a stronger thinker, and as hard as it may be to believe, a better person (I quickly negated this "better person" nonsense when I got into a fist fight with an elderly leukemia patient and broke his clavicle in four places; I won't go into the details, but that son of a bitch had it coming).
People like Jasmine take their classes, they have majors and they're all getting degrees, but they haven't learned anything the way some people I know have. I have a friend who went to Nicaragua where banana and sugar cane workers protest a dangerous work environment by threatening to kill themselves because nothing else gets anyone's attention. He's learned something and it's something a lot more god damn profound than anything I can claim.
But you don't have to go to Nicaragua for that. You can read a newspaper and understand that there are things going on in this world where words like "injustice" don't really do the job. Read a Rolling Stone article about the reconstruction of New Orleans (the issue's got Jack Bauer on the cover and I won't deny that I read about him first). Read this book called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, and trust me, it'll blow your damn mind into separate blood-soaked halves with skull fragments still dangling from your scalp.
This is not about ideology either. It's much more challenging to listen to those who disagree with you when developing your own ideas. I spent a year doing this at The Miami Student with my co-editor, Chris Gardner. Chris and I have virtually no common political opinions, yet listening to my own ideas challenged during editorial board helped me discover ways to defend my own world view. It made me a stronger thinker, and as hard as it may be to believe, a better person (I quickly negated this "better person" nonsense when I got into a fist fight with an elderly leukemia patient and broke his clavicle in four places; I won't go into the details, but that son of a bitch had it coming).
