The Knowledge of the Universe

I have some pretty cool courses this semester, seeing as how the majority of them are non-mathematical and, well, I don't like maths. And with cool courses come cool lecturers. One of the particularly cool ones goes by the name Dr. Ruel Ellis. He was born and grew up in Trinidad, but he's gone on to study all over the world. The course he teaches is called "Database Design" and I must say, the guy makes me want to learn. For example, when most lecturers have a tutorial class, they usually just scrawl some stuff on the white board and walk off. Dr. Ellis, on the other hand walks into the class, sits in the back, and makes us scrawl stuff on the whiteboard, correcting us where we go wrong. This guy doesn't just teach stuff from a book or slides. He makes us learn the stuff ourselves. He's more of a guide than a teacher.

Today, he was explaining the reason behind his teaching methods to us. You see, the word "education" comes from the Latin word educere, which means "to bring out". For some reason, what we consider as education these days only has to do with putting in, and regurgitating it back onto an exam paper. We store and expel, ending up with nothing in the end, no futher from where we started. Real education is supposed to bring out the knowledge that is already inside of you.

But what knowledge would that be? How can we learn something that we never knew before? Well, I love the way Dr. Ellis said it. "At the moment of our conception the knowledge of the universe is written onto our DNA. All I do here is stimulate that knowledge to make sure it rises to the surface." At first it may sound weird and mystical, but think about it for a second. Every single thing we ever learned at school, where did it come from? It came from people who knew it before us, right? And where did they get it from? The people before them, and so on and so forth. With the exception of God's imparting of the scriptures to us, every single thing we have known, do know, and will ever know, would come from within humanity itself. We already have all the answers. We just need to figure out how to reach them.

To think that we have to knowledge of the universe in our hands is quite an amazing thing. For me, personally it makes me what to learn more, research more, do more. There is a world of knowledge waiting for me that is mine for the taking.

And I don't even need to leave my room