I am writing this in the final years of my Engineering degree. I have a fair amount of experience attending classes for nearly 15 years (from my 1st grade to my engineering final year). All these years I have maintained an above-average attendance in every class. So, I hope that I am eligible to write or talk about this.
Today May 28, 2022, I am in the college library with my laptop framing my thoughts. I do have a class, but I am not attending it. An important point to keep in mind before attending any of the classes: “Attend them and pay attention. If you are out of focus or if the person teaching you don’t understand the subject in depth then there is no point in attending any classes.”
For the sake of attendance, I have attended a very large number of classes which I must have skipped and invested those time. Your time plays a very important role on this planet Earth. Yes, I got a deeper understanding after several years. But, it’s totally fine for me because I am not getting any younger.
If you are not doing what you want as an individual, and just simply following the crowd, it doesn’t make any sense. Your skills matter more. If you don’t love what you are doing, it is impossible to enjoy your work.
Creativity is totally crushed inside a classroom. I have experienced this. What you need to study and how you need to study are all fixed by an institute or an organization. Which may be fairly biased, or there is room for a lot of errors. Giving freedom to learn what you want can increase your potential in that area of your choice in the long run.
There are many books that those organizations/people don’t recommend reading because very few people read them. There is an immense amount of wealth of information out there on the internet which is getting suppressed by the poor quality of content. You as an individual, need to find them and explore. At least, I have got to know many people whose skills and thoughts are extraordinary.
It’s not just about the information, it is about the inner experience and how you see this world through your lens. What you read matters in the long run. It will definitely change the way you are. Keeping a boundary is more harmful, which today’s classes are doing it.
You can’t convince the whole world to understand what you understand. It is impossible too. You can just spread the information, in the end, it is the people reading/listening to it decide what they want and in turn, they may spread it in a distorted way. So, finding the source of information & reading it, and then digesting it slowly can be effective. But, when a classroom teaches you something, there is no point of questioning at all. You have a prescribed textbook with pre-edited concepts which you and other thousands of students will be reading it. There is no diversity.
If you just simply look at nature, each and every animal is specialized in its own way. There are a variety of animals, plants, and insects that we humans aren’t able to keep a record of them or find them. There is no prescribed-text book or a concept. They adjust their body to the environment, learn and evolve. We humans may have a better intellectual capability than other animals but that doesn’t mean whatever we are doing is right. There is more first-order thinking in almost everything we have done, without understanding the consequences.