What do you know

I've only just begun my junior year at college, and I'm already being confronted with interesting ideas. One that I can't seem to get out of my mind was first introduced by a professor of mine. She teaches one of my upper level English classes and was lecturing us on how no one in our generation knows anything. She was saying that the way we are taught has too many holes in its explanation of something for us to actually understand it. Therefore, we are a generation (and a class) who is coasting through life unable to attain the knowledge we need to thrive. Now this claim seems a bit extreme to me. If anything we are intelligent and we are given a system that teaches us we are just lacking a serious drive and motivation. But, like I said, I couldn't get rid of this idea, and as I continued to think about it, I noticed how this idea was recurring in my everyday life.

I've been discovering that my generation has a paradoxical balance of living. Maybe it is true that we don't know anything. I've noticed that people need a lot of prompting to act on most anything, they need help to get things started, they need company in action. Not that I'm trying to say this is wrong or even detrimental. It's a good idea to understand that you need help in something. But here comes the first paradox. People don't actually want help. They somehow work their way into getting help without accepting the fact that they need it or even want it. We live in a society thriving on believed individualism, but in reality, group dynamics and support.

Beyond this, we live in a world where people want to know and share everything (ie facebook, twitter, blogs). Yet I'm quickly finding most people don't say anything. As I listen to people talk for hours or just minutes I find myself wondering what it is they are saying that has to do with something they know or believe or that is even fundamentally part of their person. I don't mean to say that every conversation has to be serious and thoughtful, but people have become experts at shallow sharing; thus the second paradox. It is our nature to seek relationships and to share and understand with others; I think its also human nature to try to avoid embarrassment and uncomfortable situations. So instead of confronting the problem of letting another person know us deeply, we've constructed the facade of openness by inverting ourselves further within.

So, I've got to ask, What do you know?