There have been a great many debates about the purpose of education, and its relevance, in today's world. Education as we see it in conventional schools and colleges in the western world and in those nations elsewhere where the western style of education has found root. Like in India, for instance. A system loved and encouraged by most upwardly mobile families the world over.
Martin Luther King said that the purpose of education should be moral and not just utilitarian. He said, "To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." How true! There are many other scholars, philosophers, thinkers who have warned about the dangers that declining standards of education can have on society, and indeed the world at large. The struggle to save this planet from destruction is basically a fight against a kind of thinking (influenced by a certain kind of education) that has caused/still causing the mess in the first place.
Sadly education has been reduced wholly to ONLY satisfy a practical need. Which is to gain economic prosperity and to do little else. This bull-in-a-china-shop approach towards gaining wealth that modern man seems to have has ensured we are already paying the price for going down the wrong road for the last couple of hundred or so years. Probably from around the time of industrial revolution. Yes, there were many benefits as a result of industrialization, but unfortunately man's arrogance led to hitherto unexpected levels of exploitation of the planet by force that he now had gained. I talked briefly about the role of religion in this in one of my earlier blogs.
Most academic institutions today seem to be successful only in mass-producing low-thinking, selfish, mind-numbed individuals incapable of having any foresight or vision. To have a vision for the future one has to be a leader. To produce leaders we need education that, like Martin Luther King said, should be both utilitarian and moral. One that will build character and culture. One that will lead not to just knowledge and intelligence, but to Wisdom. So there.
Eleanor Roosevelt said, "A nation must have leaders, men who have the power to see a little farther, to imagine a little better life than the present. But if this vision is to be fulfilled, it must also have a vast army of men and women capable of understanding and following these leaders intelligently. These citizens must understand their government from the smallest election district to the highest administrative office. It must be no closed book to them, and each one must carry his own particular responsibility or the whole army will lag."
This is without doubt most relevant for all of us who continually lament about the quality of politicians we end up electing and yet choose to send our children through a system of education that excels in producing precisely those kind of individuals.
Good culture is a result of good education and good values. Good culture protects and heals all that is considered sacred, and in turn automatically protects the world around it. Something that ancient cultures were extremely successful with; a legacy that is getting rapidly eroded by us today.
(Click here to read a brilliant speech on the same subject by David Orr, an environmental educator in 1990!)
