Quest Received: Knowledge
Avash Islam, English 12 AP, Block C

As students, our profession is to learn. We are, in essence, in the pursuit of knowledge. Strange, then, that so few of us concern ourselves with what knowledge actually is. We learn of skepticism in Grade 8 Science, but it seems that none of us ever (rightfully) apply it. We blindly follow the assumption that what is true is true; that a fact is a fact. We accept the authority of our teachers, work within the assigned rubric, and do not question it.

Somewhere among the numbers and letters of high school, the quest for knowledge was lost. The curiosity of the persistently inquisitive child, constantly questioning “why?” engaging in the purest form of philosophical inquiry and revelling in that simple of joy of discovery disappears to be replaced by a stale and weary routine, an adopted and tiresome application. My high school career has been comprised solely of ‘cowing’ and ‘bulling’: My Sciences and Mathematics, have all been cowed to completion, whereas most everything I have done so far in my Humanities courses has been complete and utter bull. If the role of education is to prepare us for life, our school system trains us to be the masses of appliers, repeaters of rhetoric and data, or cynical bullsters surviving on the pile of ironic falsities they’ve constructed. None are individuals that contribute to society; we are trained to follow, or we grow disillusioned and learned to destroy. Nowhere have we been taught how to think, how to create. Never has it occurred for us to mix our ‘cow’ and ‘bull’ to create something new, even in the experimental fashion of that aforementioned curious child. Our palates have become so accustomed to ‘cow’ or ‘bull’ that we’ve become deadened to thought, and insensate to the pleasures thereof. In this way, we’ve kept ourselves from true thought; the application of raw data with contextual inquiry to create something new. As Perry states “The student who merely cows robs himself, without knowing it, of his education and his soul. The student who only bulls robs-himself, as he knows full well, of the joys of inductive discovery, - that is, of engagement.” (Perry 193)

This, I feel, is the reason for the inclusion of this essay in our reading list. Its complexity reinforces its purpose; to re-open our mind to learning. The themes, the verbiage, challenge our preconceived notions and opens up new avenues of study. This essay, along with “Thinking as a Hobby” and “The Brown Wasps” all tie together: they serve to re-introduce us to the concept of thinking, and give us impetus to fulfill not only our goal as students to learn, but our obligation as thinking individuals to fill our life with knowledge; to not rob ourselves of the joys of thinking and discovery; to question and have original thoughts; to contribute something; to learn to live to our fullest extent as people.