Recently (as in an hour ago), I realized that while I may think that right now is the most important time of my life, I’m still in high school. There are tons of kids my age who are going out, getting drunk, having sex, or whatever, but we’re still in high school. We’re sixteen-seventeen year-olds who obviously do not know anything about the world but vainly try to assert otherwise.
Today was Part Two of a 2-day Presidential Cabinet Meeting simulation for APUSH. Mrs. Bryer was President Wilson, and the class, as representatives of the Department of the State in 1916, was supposed to convince the President on America’s projected course of action in World War I. So we were all dressed in our business suits, with our shirts, ties, and jackets, and we sat down in one of the high school library conference rooms to have a heated, thirty-minute discussion on WWI. We acted very professionally; we even had a secretary of sorts, some person that I don’t know who sat in on our meeting.
There was much debate on the issue at hand, and we all left the meeting feeling very satisfied on our performance and relieved that it was over. Yet when I was on the bus and reminiscing about the conference, I realized that the real State Department is made up of hundreds of forty, fifty, maybe sixty year-olds who are complete and utter experts on matters concerning the state. Who were we to think that we had any bearing on a real cabinet meeting? These people, these State Department heads, are some forty years older than us, and we even dared to think that we had the intelligence to match up with them? I think not.
This matter continues to perplex me an hour after I realized its presence, and it seems that such a different level of intelligence can only be countered with the fact that the world is changing. Education has undergone a huge development from forty or fifty years ago; high school students are learning classics of world literature, like Dante’s Inferno and Franz Kafka’s works; some even know Calculus by the age of sixteen. What are we supposed to learn for the next (hopefully) eighty years of our life? Is it mere experience? How are the men and women residing in the State Department different from what we were in our mock meeting?
I have no idea how to continue this mini-essay/rant, so I’ll just stop here.
–orange
