One Leads to Another

Two very interesting things happened to me this week, and both have been interesting because they have shown to me what happens to a person when they get a college education, particularly in Political Science classes. The first is that I ran into my good friend and old roommate Nathan J. He's married now and we don't see each other very often at all so we stopped to catch up. To give some background Nathan and I always disagreed when it came to politics. He was very conservative and hated the U.N. and the British nation, two things that I held dear. I was pretty liberal and loved international establishments and did not have a very pro-America viewpoint. Yet somehow he and I were still friends and just moved around our political differences. Since then much has happened and he and I have become much more educated in the political realm. As we talked the other day we realized that much of our current political beliefs are in line with each other. I think this just testifies of the fact that good education on a certain subject tends to mellow out extremist views and bring people more to the middle of the road. I would have never believed that he and I would find so much common ground but we have. I think we have just both learned a lot about the real nature of party politics and have fallen in the moderate zone.

However, education can also lead us to become more active and interested in certain things. My international politics class has caused me to feel quite differently about certain issues, the most striking being AIDS/HIV in Africa. Like many people who have/had a limited knowledge of this subject, I thought that it was a sad problem but hardly a pandemic or humanitarian issue I needed to know about. However after an in depth lesson and reading i have learned some very sad truths about this issue and have become incensed by the behaviours of certain parties. My history class has forced me to look more discerningly about England and other cultures and empires that I have liked so much and now see their true flaws. I think it is really interesting that education can diminish extremism in some cases and cause indignation and desire for action in others. I think it is possible that part of this is maturing and becoming more of an adult as well, but I think that education takes most of the credit, and I have come to realize that education means more than just memorized facts and tests but also the development of personal ideologies and philosophies.