How do you get the education you should have gotten in high school and college?
I'm just now coming out of a 20-year depression in which I typically ignored most of the world and did the least amount possible to fulfill various obligations, including education. I shortchanged myself in a lot of ways, don't have the education my degrees represent, and want to correct that somehow. I don't know where or how to start.
I have a number of questions related to wanting to get the education I should already have.
Is there a list somewhere of U.S. states' educational requirements for a high school degree? Most stringent? Least stringent? Most common (the things every high school graduate should know, regardless of field)? What is the most efficient and least costly way to go about learning all of that--I imagine the library will play a part here, but which books would give the most bang for the buck, so to speak? Low-cost or free programs to serve as a refresher course? Most of what I learned in high school is long forgotten, sometimes as soon as the test was turned in.
What about college requirements? As a former English major, I'm shamefully ignorant of Shakespeare, but there are also broader areas I missed or skimped on: history, religion, politics, science....
What are the things that every college graduate should know? Is there a list somewhere, maybe resulting from a study, or some general overview from one commission or another addressing minimum expectations and best-case scenarios?
And again, short of returning to college, what would be the most efficient way to gain this knowledge? I've thought of test preps, but those typically cover English, math, and sometimes logic. Those would be a good start, but what other resources are available, and which are the best investment for time spent?
Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
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Don't worry, everyone else did the exact same thing. Other than some basic geometrical formulas that I still use almost every day (areas of shapes, mostly), I can't actually think of anything I actually retained from high school. If you learned enough at the time to get yourself into college, that is good enough.
In terms of regaining what you "should" have learned in college, I'd suggest picking one of the versions of the "canon" (aka the great books) and selectively reading your way through it. Make sure it is a list that includes the greats of scientific thinking, not just literature, because you are coming into this with broad interests. What that canon should and should not include is the subject of hot debate, and it has come up a few times on AskMe -- I honestly think that it doesn't really matter which exact list (or combinations of lists) you work through, as long as you are doing it. Googling "great books canon" turns up a bunch; here is the wikipedia page on the Western Canon. I want to emphasize that I am suggesting a selective reading -- picking the authors and texts whose writings speak to you, or whose writings are foundational to the things you find interesting.
That will get you the deep foundations of an education, but as many liberal arts graduates have discovered it doesn't exactly translate into immediate real-world applicability. For that you will want to specialize, and although you can do so on your own if you have a good library, the normal way to do that is "graduate school." Autodidacts can be really impressive people, but there are a lot of efficiencies and social reasons for engaging in education as a collective enterprise.
And some things that (in the ideal world) you would have learned in college, like how to be an excellent writer, are much more difficult to learn on your own, without the benefit of critical readers and evaluators. (This is why you see so many online and real-life writers' groups, because something is gained by the sharing and critiquing of one's work that can't be replicated in solitude.)
posted by Forktine at 8:12 AM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]