What Does School Do?

In my previous post, I mentioned the ad copy I found in a restaurant and how good of an example it was.  It occurred to me that there really is no need to go to school for this kind of thing.  Writing surrounds you, everywhere you go, everything you do.  There is great writing and there is awful writing, both of which you can learn tremendous amounts from.  What does school do?

Then I realized I wasn't being fair.  I've already had the luxury of going through school.  It's easy to have my abilities and forget what it was like to not have them, and to forget how I got them.  The reality is that school taught me a great deal of writing ability, just not in the way we usually think of.

So much of academia is memorization and recitation.  It is no measure of knowledge, merely of how good at being a parrot you are.  In the field of writing and rhetoric, there are volumes of terminology and theory that can be studied and memorized.  If you memorized all of them, that may be useful, but it is also something you can do without spending tens of thousands of dollars on education.

What education should be is teaching you how to open your eyes and be aware of everything around you.  All of us pass by thousands of words every day, even when you aren't trying.  But how many of us pay attention to them, study them, learn from them?  How many of us can identify really good or really bad copy?  How many of us can specify what makes it so good or bad?

We need to learn how to learn.  Gaining an awareness and an ability to understand and specify is all we really need.  After that, it's just a matter of going out, noticing the examples that are all around us, and learning as much as you can from them.

Of course, this could also be learned without formal education.  It's just that it may be worth the price of formal education.