Are We No Greater Than the Noise We Make?

Edwin Arlington Robinson's 1916 poem, "The Man Against the Sky," paints a portrait of utter illumination. Robinson speaks of man standing at the top of a hill perfectly elucidated by the sunset, starring into a distant 'light' attempt to grasp understanding from the "chaos and the glare" which surrounds him.  Essentially, the poem walks a journey questioning the reasons by which everyman chooses to live their life, the validity of those reasons, and if those reasons are of any value when earthy death claims our bodies to the soil, and our spirits to the unknown.

His poem cruxes upon the question, and the title of this post, "Are we no greater than the noise we make?" Man can create the fastest processors and build the tallest buildings which stand to assert the dominating ability of the human race!  A statue to our own ability.  Yet --- we will all die. Of course, generations will go on, if only in a futile effort to continue the race of men, but eventually the earth will come to close to the sun, or a natural disaster will strike us down. Eventually, the human race will perish.

So, what then, is the purpose of life? Are we only as good as how fast we can create? How much we can ignore that doomed end? How large we can build? We get so caught up in the precision of our own mansions manifesting into the claim "I EXIST!" Perhaps then, we are only as good as those how loud we can scream.

In The Green Monogahela, an essay by John Taylor Gatto [which can be found in Educational Foundations], the author makes note of the Difference between the paddle boats on the river that kept him, as a boy, in a perpetual state of aw "and the truly boring spacecraft of the past few decades, just flying junk without a purpose a boy can believe join," (9). Gatto pleads with his audience, "you can see the difference, can't you?"

While a boat travels the current of the river, always leading, eventually, out to the great ocean, an airplanes wishes to bypass the natural fabric of life --- speed. progress. efficiency. The human race serves a far greater purpose than these keywords seem to indicate. We are far greater than that noise.

Education, as a rule, is not meant to help the human race further itself from one goal to the next, it is instead meant to help those understand what is important, and to not get caught up in the noise, because there is a lot of it, and it is loud.  The foundation of the education I pursue, is one that will helps me, when I am standing against the sky facing my earthy passing, understand and accept my purpose was not simply to make more noise, and find validity in that concept.