The Four Walls

When I was a little kid and I heard my dad telling my siblings that going to school (the university) would teach us a lot and open our eyes, I always thought he meant the school itself would teach us these things. But one thing I eventually got to understand is that the most important lessons, and mostly the ones my dad was talking about, are actually taught outside of the four walls of the university.

_{photo by Redd Francisco}

Experience taught me that things that happen in lecture halls has little to nothing to do with the kind of training our parents always talk about when they say that we will know better when we go to school. Because in as much as they want us to pay attention to our studies and hopefully get a better career with the degrees we end up getting, they're also hoping that the things that happen to us outside of school helps to shape us into someone better than we already are, because whether we agree or not, these things matters a lot more than the things we do in those University walls.

Now I might be wrong but outside those walls is where you get to meet different kind of people, people with different stories, characters and impacts in your life. It is those people that you meet, those people you interact with and the lessons learnt from those interactions and encounters that makes and shapes you.

They're what turns you into a woman or a man, and honestly, I hope that more parents will learn to be more specific when they tell their kids the whole "going to school will teach you a lot blah blah blah" because most of them (like I did) might end up thinking that you're talking about just the things they would learn in class, not knowing that everyday they wake up is a brand new day for brand new lessons, and most of these lessons they will have to learn without having a note to jot it down like we normally would do in class.