After a year and a half of living life under provincial regulations put in place to keep us all safe, healthy, and functioning as best as we can, it’s hard to believe, but Monday—when the provincial government announced that we were moving into stage two of its restart plan—was a reminder that things will get back to normal.
What this means in the long term for post-secondary students and institutions remains to be seen, but the basics of post-secondary education will remain the same.
Post-secondary teaches a person how to think and what to pay attention to. These words have been sustenance to me that I’ve hung my hat on many times throughout the pandemic, and I can’t, at least at the moment, think of any sentence that means more to me.
Knowing what to pay attention to and how to think—with humility, skepticism, and curiosity—is invaluable, especially in the world of incessant and idiotic social media threads that make you want to pluck your eyeballs out with a plastic fork and toss them into a fire pit. More stimuli are available at any given second than we can actually process, so now more than ever is when we need to do nothing but think. Think about what we’ve learned over the last year, what we crave, what we miss, what we need but could get elsewhere, and, most of all, what the true value of education is.
I may be able to get a better grade online, have a bit more of a laid-back day and eat chocolate chip banana pancakes on a Wednesday. I can run 10 clicks before work and play fetch with the cats on my lunch break, but I’m only retaining about 50 percent of what I retain when learning in person. I’m watching old connections I made around the college wither and wilt, and all the while wondering why it still has to feel so strange, after this many months.
When each student, staffer, custodian, and parent thinks about what they actually want for the fall, remember to think the way that your education has taught you to, and remember that it’s about more than grades and textbooks. It’s about learning how to think.
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