The importance of education may be different than you have been taught.
"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." - F. A. Hayek
The 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 age 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 college 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
We need that freedom of expression if we are to discover truth.
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.
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
read the book
Investments, college, politics, everything -- read good books before you make commitments.
"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
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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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The Road to Serfdom (Routledge Classics S.)
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Guerrilla Learning: How to Give Your Kids a Real Education With or Without School
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How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty
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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 need to learn; you need a certificate 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 industrial 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.
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 the future.
BFU is changing education and society.
"Wisdom and understanding are enthusiastic pursuits rather than a historic 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.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byThe Other Reason For Education
"Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world." - Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz
The bureaucratic age is ending. We therefore need tools that will empower and encourage creative individuals and teams. Visionary networkers are needed to develop a better future.
Most of these quotes show how 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.
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.
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 to live a rewarding life?
As a human, you alone are important. History has been shaped by great individuals and their ideas, are you one of them?
education should be determined and graded by the level of individual creativity
Posted July 17, 2008
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totalhealth
very important and interesting lens. education is not only acquiring a degree but a learning process through our experiences. Posted July 09, 2008 |
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debnet
Thought provoking lens. I like the sentence 'We therefore need tools that will empower and encourage creative individuals and teams.' Posted July 07, 2008 |
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LaurasDreamWorld
Oh, how I want to take the wayback machine and concentrate on my education, instead of having wasted so much time dabbling with garbage and stupid people. Posted June 26, 2008 |
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TML0921
this is a very useful lens, check out my lens on education. http://www.squidoo.com/importanceeducation Posted June 24, 2008 |
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jeolaa
What a nice lens. This rocks. Effective learning involves creating and solving our own errors. Nice. Great resources about importance of education. Feel free to have a tour on education Education and surf the stuff about the Online University Courses and College Studies. Posted June 22, 2008 |
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eGuru
Great lens 5* Posted June 19, 2008 |
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Karendelac
Great Lens. Posted June 10, 2008 |
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JimLeatherwood
This is a very interesting lens. You provide some great information and resources on the importance of education. Please feel free to visit my lens and say hello when you get a chance. Posted June 05, 2008 |
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eccles1
'Education should involve opening the mind' you are right! Posted June 01, 2008 |
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JJNW
I love your insightful lens. I homeschool my children (actually one is now in college with "only" a homeschool degree and no SAT test - she's on the Dean's list!). My grandfather delighted in teaching and learning. He influenced many by his simple love of learning. Posted May 27, 2008 |
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Carla-White
Great lens. gave it 5*. Check out my lens on conversion courses. Posted November 30, 2007 |
How to keep developing your understanding of education.
The following education lenses may provide just the insights you desire.-
Netcohort Institute - student powered peer to peer education
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We are entering an era of the technology empowered individual. It's your age -- The Netcohort Age. The Netcohort Institute is being prepared as a peer to peer learning tool. At the Netcohort Institute we view the purpose of education as preparing st...
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Comparison of College Style
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A change is coming in higher education. About time! We will first look at the marketed purpose for a college education, and contrast that with the apparent real agenda of the education industry. Second we will allow you to examine a couple of upsta...
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We Be Ignorant
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Well educated specialists are as informed of their narrow areas of expertise as modern science allows. It is natural to think of how sophisticated our modern knowledge is, and to proclaim the vast areas of ignorance of not more than a decade or a cent...
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Renaissance Education - how to study and apply classical literature
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Educational endeavors, as all social activities, move from extreme to extreme like a pendulum. At the start of the renaissance there was need to redevelop appreciation of science and math after the excesses of allegorical thought within the preceding...
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Alternative Learning Systems & Experimental Education
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Public schools perform much worse at edifying students than private or home schools. They are the wrong environment to facilitate learning. The excuse is public schools help students learn social skills - like how to follow orders. Primary and secon...
