My Purpose for attending College

Many moons, years, or what seems eons ago, after graduating from high school, I swore off college or any other institution for higher learning.  Looking back on my scholastic experience from kindergarten through high school, there were pivotal events that inadvertently impacted my otherwise less than stellar academic inclination.  In short, school was the bane of my existence largely due to being pigeonholed with a learning disability.  As cynical as it sounds, school was a useless institution and nothing more than a babysitting service for parents.  Though at the time I did not cling to this attitude, later I would gravitate to the false belief that society used public schools as a babysitting service.  It was free!  What else could a parent hope for?!  As I moved from grade school to elementary, I found myself transferred out of public school to a special education curriculum.  Unknown to me at the time, I had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyper Disorder, or ADHD.  From then on, elementary school, middle school, and intermediate became a surreal experience wherein my education took a backseat as the teachers focused on behavioral modification.  My cynicism, another attitude that grew out of ignorance to the terminology, nonetheless, became a ruler by which I measured my success each year.  How much could I get away with, and still pass the class by doing literally nothing to achieve that grade?  This question became a dogma, that while in 'special ed', often enough I discovered, and trained myself to polish, a skill at circumventing the system.  In the final analysis, as the end of my high school approached, I had become a skilled con, learning the bare necessity, and often was the case, sensitizing the teacher to granting a passing grade.  Regardless of how far I had fallen below a D-grade, I managed to persuade a passing score.  As my life continued into the military, my first of success with superior academic excellence came in the form of self-motivation in a occupation that I was enamored with-electronics and mechanical systems.  Unaware of my scholastic level, not only did I ace every exam, I graduated in the top 5 percent of my class-with honors!  It would be the catalyst that would eventually overturn my cynical views.  However, I did manage to excel on my on-the-job training accolades for a couple decades, avoiding the college bullet.  As with anything, this too would run its course and I found experience in this recession was not going to get me a paycheck-Not anymore.  Unconsciously, I thought I could not succeed in college; more so, I could not succeed academically.  With my benefits and unemployment drying up, and being either over- or under-qualified to work, I tossed my hat into the collegiate hat, per say.  After 20+ years of creating some resemblance of common sense, I found myself taking a hard look at my greatest fear of attending school.  Here was an opportunity to practice my own guidance to other would-be commercial drivers that wanted to succeed as owner-operators.  Here, I had to knuckle-down and throw off my own resistance to change, and face the cynical views once and for all.  As I stepped into the Lane Community College advisory office, there were many instances of fear, dread, apprehension, and self-defeating thoughts.  However, I pushed threw the fog of looming failure, focused on those counselors, their input and advice, and found myself emerging out of a well-worn excuse of denial.  My purpose for attending college began to take shape, not in the final grade or piece of paper on which a degree would be printed; nor was it because of a presumed 5- or 6-figure income.  It was simply to shed, once and for all, the attitude that 'I can't', for 'I can.'  With nearly four semesters completed, I have revisited my old self-defeating patterns less and less, that through a certain amount of self-pep talk, I have managed to maintain a high GPA.  And at 3.922, considering the post-shameful GPA that I dare not mention, my other purpose for college is demonstrating to myself, and my children, that success is not just a measure of grades and accolades, but that it is a journey from self-doubt into a higher plane of self-worth.  As it turns out, swearing off any education is just senseless, and can be detrimental to a person's gainful employment, not to mention, to their own identity.