The Importance Of Education

The importance of education may be different than you were taught.

"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." - F. A. Hayek

The supposed purpose of education, as marketed by the education industry, is career advancement, higher pay, and empowering a college graduate's job search. This presents the current personal importance of education as determined by a few studies performed back when bureaucratic machines were still humming. We will discuss the social importance of education later.

Educational importance before the industrial revolution was tied to:

1) learning,

2) preparation for wise leadership and personal achievement,

3) opening your mind to new ideas.

What about today? More importantly, what about tomorrow?

The bureaucratic epoch is ending.

You must now determine what will be most important, to you and your children, in the future.

Education should open the mind.

Effective learning involves creating and solving our own errors. Go ahead; over-step, stretch, get too enthusiastic. When you make those mistakes common to all high achievers, use them to learn. Then enthusiastically attack again.

Pry open your mind, don't let your education rust it shut. Learn to think, not to follow. combine your learning with action, letting unavoidable errors impel you to seek greater understanding.

Coco Channel is quoted as saying "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." As the bureaucratic age winds down college degrees as requirements are replaceable; independent thinkers and visionary leaders are not. Cultivating a love of learning is becoming imperative for success.

"I know very well that because I am unlettered some presumptuous people will think they have the right to criticize me, saying that I am an uncultured man. What stupid fools! Do they not know that I could reply to them as Marius did to the Roman patricians: 'Do those who pride themselves on the works of other men claim to challenge mine?" - Leonardo da Vinci

Churchill has been attributed with a statement to the effect that "to be young and not be a liberal is to have no heart, to be older and not be a conservative is to have no brain". If this is a mostly true insight than why must institutions of higher learning spend so much energy shouting long and hard on ideas that students will probably embrace naturally.

If you are a student, ignore the repetitious bombast, seek out convincing counter arguments. Then make up your own mind. Open your eyes and observe even as your ears are assaulted.

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky

Question authority, scientifically test and verify our answers, embrace fully only self-proven knowledge. If a pronouncement can't be tested, repeatedly verified, made more accurate; it is opinion, not knowledge. History is littered with debris of false, expert-authority opinions. Human progress has been accomplished by those that ignored "established facts," doing the impossible, advancing against the scorn of brilliant and highly educated naysayers. A kite rises against the wind, not with it.

We need freedom of expression if we are to discover truth - if like that kite we seek to soar.

Do not become one sided and two dimensional. Question those of us with educational authority; look past our emotion laden tirades to find our agenda. Expand your thoughts to understand all views that pertain to an issue. "We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us" - Virginia Satir

We each learn differently

Shouldn't education be forced to discern and approach individual needs? The bureaucratic answer is consistent - "we need more teachers, and smaller class sizes." If each student is taught the same curriculum, regardless of their skills, desires, temperament, and abilities; class size is immaterial (except as it grows the power and wealth of protected education industries and unions).

In commerce the day of one size fits many is just about over, replaced by self tailored solutions. In education everyone must fit in our size is still the rule. It is your life you are developing. Your life, and the lives of your children, will prosper to the degree you can openly structure self-directed learning and keep it pleasurable. This is the educational importance of the Internet - you can discover and test thousands of ways to learn, and find what suits you best.

Software is available that tailors itself to the needs and abilities of an individual student. Better and more appropriate learning is available online than in classrooms. Real change violates industrial learning traditions and the desires of entrenched educational bureaucracies, so powerful tools are played with only in the margins.

Computers are pack saddled to existing educational models in an inefficient pretense. At common schools most technologies are used like hitching horses to a sports car. The horse drawn car does not compare favorably with traditional horse and buggy. It doesn't matter if the modern conveyance is an ignorant or intentional misapplication; it will be better to properly enjoy car and horse separately.

The future will reward the prepared mind. Your life, and the lives of your children can achieve greater accomplishments by a simple process. Find how each individual student learns most pleasurably and effectively, and let them fly.

Provide the resources, and get out of their way.

Think
don't follow.

There must be more to education than monopolizing ears with boring litanies so students cease to engage their brains. In your life let reason and passion, not memorization and repetition, be your guide.

Once your eyes are open - concentrate on the positive, there are too many negatives on which to waste your time.

"My days of whining and complaining about others have come to an end. Nothing is easier than fault finding. All it will do is discolor my personality so that none will want to associate with me. That was my old life. No more." - Og Mandino

Doing something is not important.

Doing the right things at the right times is crucial.

Allan Wallace

An important factor in your education - read good books

Investments, college, politics, everything - read good books with opposing viewpoints before you make commitments.

A passion filled life, one where you enhance your knowledge by delving deeper into what is most important to you, is endorsed by many - sought by few.

"Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them." - Baruch Spinoza

Freedom awaits ...

Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education

by: Harry Lewis

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Amazon Price: $21.58 (as of 07/12/2009)
List Price: $26.00

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Amazon Price: $18.48 (as of 07/12/2009)
List Price: $28.00

Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School

by: Grace Llewellyn, Amy Silver

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Amazon Price: $10.85 (as of 07/12/2009)
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The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

by: Susan Wise Bauer

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Amazon Price: $18.45 (as of 07/12/2009)
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Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling

by: John Taylor Gatto

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Amazon Price: $16.47 (as of 07/12/2009)
List Price: $24.95

Education Is Important - but all education is self education.

"knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind" - Plato

Rigid common schools insist that organization and authority are the keys to education. They are wrong.

It is a student's desire to know that impels learning.

"The desire to know is natural to good men." - Leonardo da Vinci

What are your goals?

* If you want to learn - seek out knowledge for yourself.

* If you need to fulfill requirements for a bureaucracy you do not have to learn; you only need a diploma from a bureaucratically approved school.

* If you wish to define and achieve your own success - you need wisdom and understanding. That will be found within yourself by seeking wise counsel and considering it until understanding is found. Good books are one source of wise counsel.

Use formal schools where they are the best source of knowledge. Be very open to other avenues of information, discovery of actionable wisdom should be your primary motivation. Read good books!

"A winner is someone who recognizes his God-given talents, works his tail off to develop them into skills, and uses these skills to accomplish his goals." - Larry Bird

The bureaucratic age is ending, to prepare for the age of the empowered individual you will need to be flexible and knowledgeable. Soon the largest employer in the world will be "self" - concentrate on making you more valuable. Continually apply action as you learn what you need to do to change the world.

"The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows;
it is what the man or woman is able to do that counts."
Booker T. Washington

Do it. Seek to fulfill your potential. It is for you; why not do your best?

What is the importance of education? It is preparation of yourself for an improving future.

BFU is changing education and society.

"Wisdom and understanding are enthusiastic pursuits rather than an academic record." - Allan Wallace

Documenting the creation of a renewing form of education.

Bastiat Free University offers student directed learning for visionaries and entrepreneurs. Rediscover the pleasures to be found in pursuing learning that enables your most audacious dreams.

Preparing yourself to make maximum use of opportunities; to live, to love, and to learn; that is the personal purpose of education. Exploring the balance between society and individualism, that is a proper social purpose of education. That balance needs to be discovered and maintained, by you, for yourself.

Discover - Learn - Act - Repeat

Succeed for yourself.

The BFU Journal has been supplanted by a combination of BFuniv at twitter, educational Squidoo lenses, and new; a syndication of online essays. The archives of the BFU Journal will be kept, they are still valuable.

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Education quotes on the current social importance of education

"Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world." - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz

Modern schools and colleges are based on an early industrial age Prussian formula - the importance of education in society has become the manufacturing of compliant citizens. Students at government approved schools are trained to be easily managed.

The bureaucratic age is ending. Common schools of the bureaucratic age are no longer appropriate. We therefore need learning platforms that will empower and encourage creative individuals and teams. Visionary networkers are needed to develop a better future.

Most of these quotes show how and why the common education was developed; others highlight issues we must consider. I've set up links for a few of the lesser know names. Google or wikipedia any other quotes you find interesting.

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves." - Harriet Tubman

"Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it." - Benjamin Rush

"What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored." - F W Nietzsche

"The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will." - Johann Gottlieb Fichte

"What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system." - Bertrand Russell

"Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions." - William Godwin

"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent." - John Dewey

"Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand." - Ellwood P. Cubberley

"It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission, and welds them into unity." - Benito Mussolini

"It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion." - Joseph Goebbels

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." - Joseph Stalin

"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real." - John Taylor Gatto

"The only difference between propaganda and education, really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don't believe in is propaganda." - Edward L. Bernays

How are we doing so far?

Did you find some ideas on the importance of education, both personal and social.

I'm sure some poll clicks will be in frustration at, or support of, what I've written or chosen to quote. That's fine. Please use the following guest book to better share your rational thoughts - irrational feelings are optional but expected.

"Your world view is too extreme - if you refuse to thoughtfully consider other's views." - Allan Wallace

At Bastiat Free University, and more recently with the peer to peer (P2Pedu) Netcohort Institute, we keep trying to define (and redefine) what is the essence of worthwhile education.

For now we are content to use this definition of the purpose of education:
preparing students to develop their own rewarding lives.

That should take a lot less than a compulsory sentence of twelve to twenty years.

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Education is becoming a fungible commodity.

The cost of accessing knowledge and acquiring training is approaching zero.

What a common school of the last age provided at great cost to students and society, can become available to all interested students for the cost of a comic book.

Micro learning may be the future of education.

The importance of Squidoo lenses, e-books by experts, online tutorials, and Wikipedia is that they allow you to learn what you want, when you are ready.

This page on educational importance is a Squidoo lens. It provides enough information to answer questions, provides links to more information, and let's you decide if you need more. The virtual world is overflowing with such tools.

Technology is leading toward the disappearance of office buildings and bloated bureaucracies. Why is it harder to see it leading to the disappearance of public schools?

Schools serve local functions, accessing information, connecting with people, providing civic conformity. These occur both in the virtual world and real space; but the results are different. The flexibility of the virtual world allows each learner to discover how they learn best. Persisting in comparisons to other's memorization skills is less important than discovery of a student's talents and passions.

Schools can be replaced by playgrounds and sports complexes - and free form libraries that invite both small group and quiet individual learning projects. As office buildings will disappear - so will schools.

Kids will still play local games if allowed. Society is going to change, todays children will lead the way. If their love of learning is not destroyed by soft hearts and heads, they will use the tools available and find their own, individual routes to success.

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." - Daniel Webster

To succeed we need to keep learning, but our education does not have to be in formal institutions. We do not need to ask permission to study, learn, and understand new ideas. We have personal authority over our own lives, It's time to use it.

Think - Learn - Act - Grow

Repeat

What do you believe is the importance of education?

What do you think is most important in education; (1) certificate acquisition, (2) what you learn, (3) how well you blend with common society, or (4) discovering how best to live a rewarding life?

"Civilization's development has always been initiated by individuals balancing demands within their intimate groups against their personal needs for independence and identity. Social engineers and planners always error at this point. What they endeavor is to convert humankind from small, intimate, flexible tribes into a collective with one mind (their mind of course).

They want to make all the complex human herds and packs composed of individuals into a single hive of drones. They have always failed, they will always fail; for outstanding individuals will continue to emerge - imagining and accomplishing exceptional goals - changing everything." - Allan Wallace

As a human, you alone are important. History has been shaped by visionary individuals and their actions, will you join them?

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The Importance Of Education