On the Public Educational System

I admit to being a bit odd in high school–I talked to my fellow students about the theory of relativity.  I was planning on being a theoretical physicist, a computer scientist, or an engineer.  I was actually interested some books that were in the library (yes High Schools have libraries).  I lived in the sticks, so there were only about 10 rows.  I didn’t find much of interest int he school library.  However, when I was 16, I took a computer science class at a local community college.  After attending the first few classes, the instructor told me that it was useless for me to attend further except on exam dates.  After the first exam, he told me that my grade would only be based on my class project and that I did not have to attend further unless I wanted to.  My class project ended up being the class project.  And for the next 8 years, students were assigned sections of computer code that I had written and were required to provide an explanation for what the code did.

Thus, I deemed computer science to be rather useless as an educational pursuit.  However, while in the college, I did numerous searches in the college library system.  I read numerous books where Einstein and Freud were the topics, as well as one book that was a collection of correspondences between Einstein and Freud.  I read about cosmology.  I read about theoretical physics.  But when you get right down to it, I was interested in the “ultimate questions.”  Why are we here?  How did we get here?  How did the universe begin?  What is the nature of the universe?  And so forth.

What did I discover?   From a naturalistic perspective, I discovered nothing more than fairy tales.  Einstein believed in some kind of God, but because of a conversation with an uniformed priest, continued believing in an uninvolved god.  Freud was an atheist, despite admitting several personal aspects that led to his atheism.

So, what was to be concluded with my early experience with the public educational system?  What I ended up concluding was that the ultimate questions come down to issues of faith, and are very personal.  Since that time, 17 years ago, I have not found anything to contradict my earlier conclusions.