I
spend most of my days right now thinking, writing, talking and musing on many
issues surrounding education and development. Many of my thoughts are discussed
in my book, but I also enjoy challenging my own thoughts by sharing and
discussing with others. Thus here are a few blog-posts of my current thoughts
on a few topics to share with you all. Comments, ideas, questions back are
greatly encouraged J
...On Education
What is an educated person? Is it somebody that
has a degree? Is it somebody that has been to school? Is it somebody that has a
skill or something of value to offer the world? Is it somebody that can think?
The value of education is something I
consider a great deal, as more and more we are being led to believe that only
if someone has jumped through the hoops and spent time in an educational institution
are they Educated. By this rationale, we are calling half of the world “uneducated”.
Absurd as a notion and failing to recognise how much value there is in an
education system outside of school.
Here’s a little clip to demonstrate.
Formalised education systems
are hierarchical – there are many reasons for this (and the history of formal
schooling shows how this structure has evolved), yet we now seem to have an
elitist system within our societies that brands “an educated person” above “a
non-educated person” (the former meaning somebody who has been given the golden
tickets gained through the process of formal education).
Yet why are we being told to
see someone with a degree as “better educated” than someone who has, for
example, never had formal schooling, but has learned valuable
skills through experience and informal educators? (for example, somebody that
has learned to grow their own food, build their own house, make their own
clothes, tend their own crops and animals etc.)
Within formal schooling systems
themselves exists a hierarchy that values people’s brains over their bodies.
For example, if you have been educated in a “brain subject” you are
systematically deemed as being “better educated” by our society than someone
who has perhaps learned a craft or a skill. Why is this? Why do we think that educating
the brain is somehow better, more
valuable, more worthy than educating the body? Why is vocational training so
often seen as inferior to academic training? After all, the world only works
with a balance (in fact, our world would simply fail to work without skilled
workers, but would manage to sustain itself readily enough without academics).
There is also now an inherent
global belief or faith that education is the solution to the world’s problems
(albeit causing many more problems in its current structure, about which I’ll write
another time) whilst “fighting poverty through education” is a maxim bandied
around the modern psyche. But what is the real value of education? If somebody
spends six, nine, twelve, sixteen years within an education system that trains
them how to think in a particular way (national systems are, after all, being
channeled and chosen by a higher power; the material within curriculums
processing a particular view of the world), are they “better educated” than someone who
has acquired their own knowledge through myriad of self-directed systems and
has learned to critically think as an independent, creative self?
What, fundamentally, is
Education? Is Education thinking? Is Education Wisdom? Is Education knowledge?
Is Education Information? Is any sort of formal school education categorically
better than no education? (By no education, I mean someone not going to a
school).
What is the value of education?
