MICHELLE HARWELL MFT

We grew up and saw our mom day in and day out, something we took for granted. As infants, we depended fully on her for our physical needs — milk, changing diapers, love, and comfort. That emotional bonding started with her hugs and kisses and unwavering trust. If trust was not given early on as Erickson, a developmental psychologist says, we seek it in our growing years.
As a toddler, our mom taught us our first words. She seemed to be very patient at it and even found our babbling amusing.
Growing up as a preschooler and that first step into a new environment, which is school, showed how much independence a mom gives her child. There were moms who needlessly worried about leaving their 5-year-old at the new school. Both had to learn to “let go” to enable them to experience what adjustment is. For life is full of adjustments:
new friends, new concepts, new places.
Then, as a preschooler, mom was our mentor, snack fixer, and untiring attendee at PTA meetings. She would worry when we got sick or did not feel like participating in a school activity. She was the cheerleader and the best mentor.

Let’s face it. If your objective is just to get top honors rather than realize what school is for, you may be off-tangent. You may be expending efforts in the wrong direction or for the wrong end. You are in school to earn an education. Being on top of your class and getting honors and praises for it are merely incidental.

Education, in the authentic sense, is not just storing knowledge for vanity, future employment or business. It is much broader and deeper than that. Education is meant to make you a rounded individual who can bring himself to the highest level of his total potential for his own happiness and the good of human society. Someone said that education really means fitting man for living. You are in school for a reason no less dignified and dignifying than this.

Are you in school because you want to be admired as the best in class? Or only to insulate yourself from the pain of failure? To get easy employment later? Or are you in school because you want to learn as much as you can, realizing that knowledge is an excellent possession? If you have other objectives, look inside you and assess these objectives.

Without a fixed destination, you will drift. You will be aimless, and aimlessness cannot produce success. you must work less, and aimlessness cannot produce success. You must work hard for it, paddle with your aim as the only direction and in the process you take chances and risks. But because you are inspired and guided by a destination, risk and sufferings are too week to beat you down. You even improvise methods of attaining your objectives faster, easier an more accurately.

I grew up a witness to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work. Such work put food on our table, gave shape to stories of affliction and ability, framed how I saw the world. I come from a family of immigrants who, with two exceptions, did not finish high school, and who worked in blue-collar or service jobs all their lives.
I did not do so well in school myself, spent several years in the vocational track, and squeaked my way into a small college on probation—the first in the family to go beyond high school. Measures of intellectual ability and assumptions about it are woven throughout this history. So I’ve been thinking about this business of intelligence for a long time: the way we decide who’s smart and who isn’t, the way the work someone does feeds into that judgment, and the effect such judgment has on our sense of who we are and what we can do.