What is knowledge? Who decides what knowledge is? How does
the socio-cultural conditioning of the one who constructs it determine the
nature of knowledge? I do not know the answers to these seemingly abstract
questions, but I am sure I will know them someday. And very soon! However, what
I know is that learning in any form makes me happy, be it technical,
historical, social, information-based, or even understanding of knowledge as a
concept.
But what has this to do with goose-bumps? Well the story
which follows answers this question. Having a terrible day with respect to
comprehending the lecture (Numerical Analysis & Software) today, I was
looking for courses which I could pick up if I decide to drop the mathematics
course (Gosh! I suck at mathematics!). And
then I decided to randomly browse the courses from each department till I
stumbled upon the course “Constructivism and Knowledge”. I saw the course
listed at 6:40 pm with one seat still left in the class. Interestingly the
first lecture for the course was to start exactly 20 minutes later. I quickly
decided that I was going to attend it: I looked for the location of the
classroom and ran for the bus only to realize that I was late. The bus had
already left, but luckily (for me), there was a road accident a few minutes
back leading to a road block, which helped me catching the bus after a few
minutes of running. As I got down from the bus, incessant rains welcomed me. I
had to run again, this time to prevent myself from entering the classroom in
rain-soaked cloths.
It is said that “what man proposes, God disposes.” But what
I think is if man keeps on proposing, he entire cosmos conspires and forces God
to accept the proposal. I reached the class on time, just on time. And this is
when it began. Two hours of absolute fun, talking about knowledge, its nature
and construction, and then how the learning about knowledge would be accessed
by the professor. The class has people from six different nationalities, each
having a different reason to take the course. It was fun to see how a skiing
instructor who wanted to teach in high school was sitting with someone who just
wanted to know something about constructivism and analyze it as a concept.
However, I have my concerns about taking the course. There
are issues of getting a good grade in a non-technical course, taking a course
which is completely out of sync with my major, pressure of making sure that my
actions do not have any negative repercussions on my future and other such
worries. But the joy which I got in a single class is incomparable. I wish each
class had a similar feeling to it, a similar joy associated with it.
One thing I am extremely happy about is the fact that I
broke the inhibition and went ahead to attend the class. To learn whatever I want
to is the only reason that I wanted to go to grad school. To study and acquire
knowledge without being constrained by factors like grades and funding gives me
a joy unparalleled to anything else in the world. Not that I have become fully
free from these entanglement (and I believe that one cannot ever be free from
such restraining factors)but those few hours of boundary-less leaning made me
suck the marrow out of life every moment. And hence the goose bumps!
