Ignorance is Bliss

Monday marks the start of something very frightening for me: the beginning of graduate level classes. At orientation it was made quite clear that these would be much more demanding than undergraduate classes and that the first semester is going to be quite a gauntlet. However, though I'm frightened, I'm also hopefully and somehow looking forward to the experience.

There is a motif in the Great Conversation of two common expressions being at odds, these being "ignorance is bliss" and "knowledge is power." Up until now, in most of the courses I have taken, there has been a trend toward oversimplification. In fact, I can't simply limit it to classes. In most cases, people don't want specific information. When someone asks me how I'm doing in greeting, I'm moderately annoyed, because I know they just want me to respond with a greeting and not how I'm actually doing. When someone asks how we came to a conclusion, if we're completely precise about it, it's long and tedious, so we oversimplify the thought process.

Admittedly, this prevents us from receiving a slew of information we don't really care about. It seems to be polite to oversimplify things to save time and make things easier to understand. However, all too often, this line of thought transfers into our education system. Up until high school, we're mostly taught facts. If we're lucky, we learn how to properly derive new information from what we know. Everything was oversimplified, and I was hoping the next step in education would be more interesting. In college, I was expecting to actually have questions answered fully. Unfortunately, yet again, professors would often dodge questions if they had too complex an answer. I recall many times hearing a question asked and the professor responding that no one knows the answer and then learning the true answer in the next course. If the answer was really so complex, I would prefer to be told to come to office hours to discuss it rather than be lied to, which does me no favors.

At any rate, it is my sincere hope that professional school will be a better experience in this regard. Admittedly, this will make life far more complex because there is so much more to be concerned with, but I hope to come out of the experience in four years as a more competent professional than to have to pass on lies of understanding to my patients. Albeit, I know in advance that things have to be simplified to a fifth grade level for patients to understand according to what we were told at orientation, I hope to be able to do so with flying colors.