Last week we had to outline our plan for our final essay in Swedish Society and Everyday Life. Explain what we intended to do with fieldwork and what we hoped to accomplish. My thing is that I want to see how Swedish culture is created in high school. One of the premises I've based my fieldwork on is that high school is where you really become the person you are going to be for the rest of your life. Not to say younger childhood years aren't important but by and large little kids are kind of the same (i.e. no cliques or social classes). Basic knowledge and common courtesies are taught when you're younger, I'm told Swedish children are actually made to practice standing in line, how to do it "the right way."
Anyway, I told the people in my group about my outlook on when a person becomes who they will be and one girl disagreed. She thought that you become the person you will be for life in college. She cited her own life as an example; how she was such a good student in high school and didn't go out partying, and now she's a sorority girl partying it up every night and not all that worried about grades. I've seen similar things happen to people I knew from high school too, they just went wild once they hit college. But as striking a contrast as their behavior was, it didn't really come as a shock. The potential seemed there all along, just suppressed by the nature of high school and living with your parents all the time.
I thought about it some more and realized I didn't become interested in anthropology until my freshman year of college, and now it's my major. On the other hand I have been interested in archaeology/Egyptology since forever so maybe that isn't really such a big surprise. It also kind of fits with a general trend since middle school that wherever I saw myself in four years it was never where I actually ended up. And yet I can look back on all of the unplanned routes I took and come up with explanations for why they weren't really surprising.
So with plenty of my readers being college graduates and a few who are still working towards it, what do you think? Does college make you into the person you will be for the rest of your life or does it just fine tune what was made in high school? Or, is your lifelong self created even earlier?
6 comments:
Personally, I'm of the belief that you don't come who you will be until well into your 20's (26+). The situations and influences in school (of any sort) aren't the same as those of the 'real world' and that certainly influences what happens to a person. I'll give an example...from speaking with my friends, many of the couples they know who married quite young changed quite a bit over time. To the point where they got divorced because they didn't even really know each other anymore. Many of the older couples knew who they were before-hand. Not to say there isn't divorce of older couples or happy marriages of younger.
I think you change in college, quite definitely, but it isn't the person who you will become. That girl who parties all the time now will probably be totally different in 10 years. How many of us had parents who were kind of hippies back in the day and who are the opposite of that now?
Personally, I'm of the belief that you don't come who you will be until well into your 20's (26+). The situations and influences in school (of any sort) aren't the same as those of the 'real world' and that certainly influences what happens to a person. I'll give an example...from speaking with my friends, many of the couples they know who married quite young changed quite a bit over time. To the point where they got divorced because they didn't even really know each other anymore. Many of the older couples knew who they were before-hand. Not to say there isn't divorce of older couples or happy marriages of younger.
I think you change in college, quite definitely, but it isn't the person who you will become. That girl who parties all the time now will probably be totally different in 10 years. How many of us had parents who were kind of hippies back in the day and who are the opposite of that now?
Well, obviously the bout of partying one goes through in one's college years isn't what one will be like for the rest of one's life. Heaven forbid, we'd never get anything done!
And what I am trying to get at is when does one's personality set in? Of course, people change over time; experience brings wisdom and maturity which changes how people view the world. But are you a different person for learning something? Who you are is what dictates how you react to experiences and consequently how you grow because of them. The divorces you mentioned are not a result of (I don't think) a fundamental change in those people's personalities but rather they learned something about themselves that made them realize that they weren't right for one another. The big decisions I've made since I started college weren't things I would have seen coming but I think they were pretty consistent with my personality. But were they consistent with my personality in middle school or elementary school?
Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here but I don't think so. Think of your self like a building; when it's being constructed, its final outcome is unknown and can be altered. But once the building is finished, you can paint it different colors, make it an office or a store or a restaurant, but the building is still fundamentally the same.
This kind of makes me reference an issue we ran into when I took existential philosophy - what really is your 'identity'? Like, if you're changing moment to moment, and every new memory gained changes you, then your identity is forever shifting and unstable, but can that really be called an 'identity,' an 'I,' in its ephemeral-ness?
Now, the yoga stuff I've been reading more recently might say that there is some hard-to-define 'essence,' some 'Self' that is your core identity....and any 'change' that occurs in your personality is simply something added onto that essence - experience or emotional wound, whatever. So there's this inherent 'I' that's unchanging, but rather that is obscured by the accumulated detritus of experience and habit...eh, I'm not sure if any of that maybe provides a differnt angle...
I still go with the 'always changing' or later in life view. There's a nature vs nurture argument here. And the truth is the self you have that is 'nature' is established pretty early, even in the early elementary type years. And that builds and changes to an extent, but that's your core. However, there's still the nurture part that's influenced by the rest of the world and your surroundings.
That *does* influence and change you. Quite drastically. There's a certain loss of naivety that changes you. A real-world version of the 'fall from grace.' And that's not necessarily something sexual in any way and it doesn't always happen when you're in school. There are attitudes that younger people have that they consider very core to themselves. And you can argue that maybe they just aren't recognizing their core self...but I think the capability to recognize that core is really when the core takes effect. Until you actually see yourself, you don't know yourself at all.
The most critical years of personal development are the first ones. You are who you are by age 6. The house is built by then; everything after that is just rearranging the furniture inside.
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