Nowadays, with the technological advancement, the public narrative about education is changing. Sadly, this change is not a positive one. Just yesterday, I saw a post on Waves. It was about a survey conducted by the National Centre for Social Research with a question: 'university education is not worth the amount of time and money it usually takes'. Answers resulted in, "Confidence in the value of a degree has plummeted". And being honest, it is the most authentic and organic response. We do live in a capitalist society, right? However, I have a simple question: is education only for the sake of earning? Of course, earning a capital is a basic need to survive, but still, it is just a meager part of a bigger picture.
Greeks were Insane
If education were only about the "money", then humanity made a terrible investment for thousands of years. Imagine walking up to the ancient Greeks and asking Socrates, "What is the salary package for all this questioning and thinking?" Judging by his nature, he would counter-question you and leave you more confused than before. The earliest scholars did not gather under a tree to calculate return on investments. They pursued knowledge because they were curious about the world, about peace, about betterment, about justice, even existence itself. Education, at its best, was a search for understanding long before it became few lines on a CV. Today's men might think of them as insane figures, because they were doing all this just for one thing - curiosity.
"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet". - Aristotle
Notice how Aristotle did not specify any return. It is the sweetness he is talking about. For someone, the sweetness is money; for other, it is the experience or moments or anything.
Measuring Curiosity
The funny thing is that most of the thing education gives uc cannot be listed on a CV. Like how do you quantify perspective? How do you out curiosity under "Skills"? How to question your assumptions or understand someone else's pov? Perhaps that is the problem. We have become so obsessed with measuring value that we struggle to appreciate things that cannot be measured. Education, certainly, helps us earn a living, yet its greatest achievement has never been helping us make money. Its greatest achievement is helping us grow and make sense of life.
Yes, I know it sounds idealistic belief. Well, blame the Greeks. They started it. Only if they had known about money, the scenario would have changed. ALAS!
Moving forward there is this strange irony. We do have more universities, numerous degree programs and more educational resources than ever before. However, conversations about education are dominated by salaries and employability. This thought process has made us shallow. It is as if we have forgotten that education was meant to create informaed citizens, thoughtful individuals and curious minds. Rather, the system has created efficient machines and named it "workers/employees".
The Experiences
The strangest yet beautiful thing about education is that its greatest lessons rarely come from the syllabus. Pause for a moment and think about your elementary syllabus. Most people barely remember the details of a lecture, but they remember the friendships, the debates, the absurd fights, the failure, the awkward presentations, the punishments and the moments that challenged their beliefs. The outside world exposed via educational institutes is just something else. The higher you reach; the more you achieve. A degree maybe printed on paper, but the real education is often written as our character. The grades may fade away with time, but the experiences stay with us far longer than any grade ever will.
The Disguised Enemy
Being harsh, social media - especially so-called influencers - has played a henious role in spreading hatred and negativity. Someone with a real or fake entity will appear on your screen saying degree is useless, join my skill classes and ve a millionaire. Boom, easy money! The modern men, consider youth, will easily fall for this trap. Because, the modern society seems to have developed a habit of viewing everything through the lens of success and failure. This binary has resulted in constant pressure and pessimism. We constantly hear stories of unemployed graduates, useless degrees and broken systems. While these concerns are real, they have created a form of educational pessimism where the expectations become the rule. People rarely discuss the confidence, awareness and personal growth that education provies because these things are difficult to measure. In this fast-paced world, patience itself has become a virute.
Too Much; Too Little
Perhaps the biggest damage done by the didtal world is that we have unlimited access to information while understanding seems increasingly scarce. A few clicks can provide thousands of facts, but alone do not create knowledge. Knowing the GDP of a country is information; understanding its history, culture, ecnomy and politics is knowledge. My beleif is that if a specific reading does not ignite a new wave of thoughts, then you have not truly read it. We scroll through more information in a day than previous generations did in months, yet manu of us spend less time thinking about it. Information fills the mind; knowledge shapes it. Unfortunately, we are mistake the first for the second.
In the end, we are standing at a strange crossroad where knowledge is abundant, but wisdom is becoming rare, where information is just a click away, but understanding is slow and often unimportant. Education is not a straight road to employment, but a lifelong discomfort with infinite answers, a quiet resistance. As Dostoevsky once said, "The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prison". I believe, the same idea applies to education, the real measure of a system is not how effectively it produces workers, but how deeply it produces thinkers. If education is reduced only to utility, we may still build economies, but we risk losing the very reason that once made education worth it.
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Peace 馃晩
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