I first heard this pronouncement fourteen years ago when my then twelve year old tried desperately to get me to lessen the pressure I was applying to get him to focus more on his schoolwork.
In my mind I felt this was one of the duties of my role as a father, to demand the best and to insist that my children give no less. Usually you pray that your children never inherit the characteristics of which you are least proud, but as fate would have it my second son came with all the flaws that have made me choose the difficult road in life to acquire the modicum of success that I’ve earned.
So my challenge was always to prod him to make the better decision and seek the path of least resistance in his journey to adulthood. In one of those early character-defining sessions, I was admonishing him for not delivering what I expected in one of his class assignments. He stared at me in a benign droopy way and responded that he didn’t understand why I needed to pressure him like this because “all this education thing is over-rated.”
As my anger boiled and I’m seconds away from putting him out of his misery, I had to ask one final question, how did he arrive at that conclusion at such an innocent age. In a profound way he explained to me how most educated people were out of sync with the feelings of ordinary people, they seem aloof to the plight of the everyday person. Their ethos was not dedicated to the upliftment of the ordinary man. They were usually more concerned about their station in life and about the imprints of personal success that they needed to make on the human landscape. It appeared that educated people had no dying urge to change adverse situations immediately, they were more interested in pontification and theorizing as to the reason why these situations exist, and offering advice to the aggrieved as to ways to find relief.
Its almost like they needed to show that all that education made them better able to dissect and disseminate the complexities of the everyday man’s problem, yet they were in no hurry to change them. Well, I must have worn him down with arguments attesting to the relevance of education, because he didn’t present me with that kind of reasoning anymore and we had a good laugh about it this past spring when he graduated with his engineering degree.
To limit this discussion, I’m going to confine “education or being educated” to the successful attainment of a tertiary level education.
Retrospection.
Lately I find myself re-examining that perspective and wondering about the existence of millions of people with their boatloads of degrees and asking is society getting the most from their contribution, furthermore does the number of degrees and the kind of degrees determine an individual’s degree of contribution to alleviating human misery.
Looking at our little Island, constantly engrossed in the struggle of the educated against the academically challenged, the latter trying desperately to succeed and prove they can do it without the requisite ‘education’, thus the glorification of the “hustler” while the former struggles to put distance between themselves and the latter group, aloofly showing strains of elitism in the process. The strains of elitism are vehemently denied because the remnants of a previous government’s socialist policies deem such tendencies as politically incorrect. Undoubtedly the educated class seems to distance themselves from the inherent responsibility that comes with being the leaders of the uneducated. They shun the maxim “much is expected from whom much is given”
It depends on where you were educated
Looking even closer one sees a stark difference between the ones educated in the UK, the seat of the colonialist masters and the ones educated in America, the seat of the Capitalist Icons and the culture most emulated in the free world. What this tells us is that education is a derivative of the culture in which one is educated and the prevailing pathos in the country where one is educated usually determines how one views himself in relation to those around him. The American “can do” spirit is stoutly reflected in the academic preparation of its students, while the British more stoic theory-based approach is given to administration and bureaucracy.
Further observation will reveal that citizens returning with a UK education tend to gravitate towards little groups of polished or scholarly technocrats eschewing the elitist label. Those returning with an American education or even an extended stay will display a more aggressive, success-at-all-cost attitude. They feel that a US education has given them a leg up on the stay-at-home person and financial and personal success becomes the over-riding motivational factor. Neither group displays a deep sympathy or passion for the under-class. However, they seem to demand more from the underclass, unlike those who were trained in the West Indies and never left. The latter group’s concept of the underclass is one of helplessness, they are more geared to being led and their cultural and educational inadequacies are explained away as natural disposition of their abilities.
Social responsibility of Education
One must argue that there is a social responsibility to education. Society spends an enormous amount of its resources on education in the hope that those who become educated will contribute handsomely to the enrichment of all mankind along with their own personal advancement. While personal advancement includes building wealth and making a contribution to your company or institution’s growth, it should also be tied to some contribution to reduce human suffering. Humanitarian organizations the world over are depended on in less popular corners of the world to help alleviate misery. The Peace Corps is one such commendable organization. Not all graduates would be expected to join such an organization, but they should be expected to make some contribution to reducing human misery. Teach entrepreneurship, create a job, assist with a literacy class, engage in mentoring, and get involved in any number of activities that act toward the improvement of the human condition. This ought to be a goal of every tertiary level educational program, and without the graduate achieving it they should not be recognized as having satisfied their debt to society. This will make the achievement of an education more valuable to society as a whole and less of a polarization tool that exacerbates differences.
It is evident that education is invaluable, but society can and should get more from its educated. Those with the capacity to formulate ideas and introduce actions that reduce human suffering should be fervently encouraged to do so. One knows countless people who are graduates of tertiary institutions who are either unemployed or under-employed. In addition to being underutilized their education did not even guarantee them personal success. There needs to be a holistic approach to education where its attainment will directly contribute to the reduction of human suffering, and bring out the best in each person that is educated. When this is achieved then education could truly be looked upon as an indispensable factor in improving all facets of social elevation and vital to reducing human misery.
