Education

     So I thought I'd write out my thoughts regarding education. I have always found it interesting that there seem to be two ways of thinking about education, one which seems to be practical and the other focused on learning for learning's sake. In America, a country which prides itself on its rugged individualism, the view towards education has often been more practical. As in, learning for learning's sake is all well and good, but if you don't learn a skill to produce something of value on the market, then you are not going to be able to make any money to support yourself. I guess it goes back to the old pioneer spirit, where you had to go out and cultivate the land, grow your own food, build your own home, hunt animals, etc...things like philosophy and art were fine and nice, but those aren't going to get the field plowed.
     I agree wholeheartedly with the importance of practicality in one's education. Even if one wants to earn a great liberal arts education, one still should make sure that when they go to college, they learn something that will be valuable. On the flip-side of the coin, is learning for learning's sake. This is the education you receive that is supposed to enable you to be a good and responsible citizen. For much of history, it seems to be that the two were more balanced: people would work to learn a trade or a acquire a degree in something of practical value, but also understood the importance of being well-grounded in things like the basic workings of government, history, geography, literature, and so forth.
     One thing I've noticed though is that some people are prone to going to extremes with each of these philosophies. On the one hand, you have the people who will only learn something if it is practical, i.e. can make money. This was to a good degree the Roman mindset. Unlike the Greeks, who were into studying mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, poetry, etc...for the sake of expanding their minds, the Romans had no interest whatsoever in fields like mathematics except for its military and commercial value. In modern times, it seems a lot of people have this similar view.
     A person who really had this view was Henry Ford. He was very, very uneducated. His philosophy was that he didn't need any education because he had access to the world's knowledge at the press of a button. To me, this is where this shows the extreme of learning things only of practical value. I mean, "yes," you don't need education in that sense because at any time, you can just call up an expert to provide the knowledge for you. But the problem with this is that, without the foundation provided by a liberal arts education, you are essentially guaranteed to be an idiot in many ways, no matter how crafty you otherwise may be.
     There are multiple reasons for this. For one, a sound liberal arts education doesn't just teach you facts to memorize, it also teaches you how to actually think critically, how to reason critically, skills that you otherwise likely will not have. In addition, it also teaches you things such as history, which is important for the old saying "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." It is for these reasons that many elites, if you will, throughout history have sought to limit the level of education that the mass population could obtain. The American public education system, for example, was not originally intended to educate children, it was intended to school them, to delay their development and make them not have critical thinking skills.
     John Taylor Gatto, a man who taught in the New York City public school system for multiple decades, and who also was the New York City and New York State Teacher of the Year, has written multiple books about this subject, one of the best being called The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling. Essentially, the book is about how the people involved with the creation of the American public school system were not in it to design a system that could result in a learned, critically-thinking populace, but rather to create a populace malleable to the requirements of big government and big business (this was the era of the large, inhumane, bureaucratic, machine-like big business corporation). It also ties into the whole history of ideas such as scientific management, how to manage workers properly.
     Many do not know it, but it was big business that pushed to end child labor from behind the scenes. This wasn't because big business cared about children, but because child labor is one of the things that will make a child grow up very quickly. You take a fourteen year-old and have him out plowing the field, hunting, working a job, etc...and by twenty-five, he's a much more responsible, mature adult then the stereotypical twenty-something of today. Big business did not want workers who could think critically. It wanted workers who would obey and follow orders. It also wanted a population malleable to marketing so that it could create a lot of consumer products to market to them. And of course big government, which goes hand-in-hand with big business, wanted a malleable population so that they could easily win votes (the last thing politicians want is a critically-thinking populace!). It also worked well for military as well. It was a top-down mindset, in that you wanted the enlisted soldiers to not think, just to follow orders. This came from the old method of warfare where you'd have the soldiers marching in rows with their muskets at each other, and had to be able to do so even when the other side would stop and open fire or fire cannons. The officers would stand off to the side, and command the troops. In modern warfare, such non-thinking soldiers aren't very workable. One of the advantages modern Western militaries have is that even the lowliest Private is allowed to think for themself to a degree and be creative in following orders.
     Now in saying this about the public school system being "designed" to limit critical thinking skills, I'm not saying that there's some secret cabal somewhere that plots how to design the public school system to brainwash Americans. That is not the case. It's just that this was the over-riding philosophy among many of the people involved in designing the school system. This whole philosophy changed a good deal when the Space Race kicked in, where all of a sudden, the government realized it needed people who could think and who were educated, and lots of them, and hence there was the push for all Ameircans to go to college and studying mathematics, science, engineering, technology, and so forth, in order to prevent the Soviets from beating out America.
     Today's public school system involves some leftover remnants of the old design that was geared towards social control. For example: the constant changing of classrooms in public schools. You go to a class, the bell rings at the end, and you go to another classroom. In private schools, that isn't how it works. Each grade has their own classroom. T Boon Pickens, in his book The First Billion Is the Hardest, inadverdently points out how the public school system was designed for social control. He pointed out that in the 1950s, when you went to work as an employee for a company, it was often just like public school. You'd go into work in the morning, have a bit of free time, then the bell would ring, you'd have a certain number of minutes to be at your desk, and then the bell would ring again, signaling work had begun. Bells would ring for lunch breaks and so forth. People thought nothing of it, because you had been conditioned to respond according to this like a robot from the first grade.
     This method of schooling was derived from the Prussian system of education, which had three levels of education, one for the working masses, another for the professionals in society, and then the full classical education for the ruling elite. This system was very good at producing soldiers and employees. This school divide still exists to a degree even today in America, where poorer and middle-class children must go to public school, while more affluent and wealthy children can go to private schools, where there is none of this business of bells and changing classes.
     One interesting thing to think about is how simplified much of the modern English language has become. Seriously, try reading a book written in English during the 1800s or beforehand. It's virtually impossible! Everyone talks so wordy. Oftentimes modern versions of such books have notes in them so that you can understand just what the heck they are actually saying. If an educated person from these times was to come to modern America and look at our current version of English, they'd probably wonder what happened to the language. A person who naturally could read and easily understand the incredibly wordy prose of those times would probably have no problem picking up on the more simplified English of modern times. But for a person who has only known the simplified English, learning the wordy English is tough.
     So going back to my original point, one needs aspects of a liberal education as well, even if one is mostly concerned with having a practical education and otherwise isn't interested in learning. Without the foundation provided by the liberal education, one isn't going to have the requisite critical-thinking skills and knowledge one needs to be a good citizen. Where Henry Ford's philosophy comes into play is when you're talking various forms of practical knowledge that nobody really needs to know unless you just really have an interest in it or its your profession. For example, I do not need to know how to design a jet engine. Or what materials it must be made out of. Or how to knit a sweater. Or how to land an aircraft. Or how to wire a building. And so on. You call an expert for that kind of thing. But EVERYONE should be well-read and learned in the basics of government, history, geography, rhetoric, grammar, the important works of literature, and I would also incorporate economics.
     Economics is one of those subjects that one must know both ways of thinking about, because otherwise, if all one knows is right-leaning libertarian economic thought, then any left-leaning person is a socialist in their eyes, and to a person who only knows left-leaning economic thought, any right-leaning person just "doesn't care" in their eyes (because to them every problem can be solved by more government). Unfortunately, most people seem to know either nothing about economics or just one way of thinking about it, which is what leads to much of hyper-partisanship we have today. For too many people as well, economics becomes a set of talking points for promoting a particular political agenda as opposed to being a way of just trying to understand how the economy and society actually functions.
     Now some may reason, "Well I can understand learning the basic foundation mentioned, but otherwise, I see no reason for continued learning and education, except with regards to what my profession requires." To this I disagree. To be a well-rounded person, one should always keep learning, as it exercises the brain. Another important thing about studying various subjects is how it further teaches you to think. For example, the law. Studying the law will teach one to think in different ways and to reason in different ways. Economics is no different. Studying economics will teach one to think and to reason in ways they had never fathomed before. What's especially neat is if you read two opposing points-of-view in economics and yet both of them seem to make sense! Mathematics is the same. It will teach you to think and to reason in different ways, as creativity is needed in solving math problems. Philosophy, that subject alone will wrack your brain when you study it. Physics as well. Learning to solve physics problems involves a tremendous amount of creative thinking and problem-solving. Computer science, that too, involves some rigorous thinking about how to solve problems.
     And so on. Now I'm not saying one must study all those subjects, but I mean continually reading and studying different areas will teach your brain to think in all sorts of new ways that you previously might never have even considered. And all of the above is ignoring the whole wide world of the arts as well, subjects like music, painting, architecture, etc...which are very fascinating fields in and of themselves.
     I was mentioning about how there are extremes, starting with the extreme of people who only want knowledge for "practical" purposes, otherwise whom find learning to be a waste of time. Well this goes in the opposite direction as well, with people who only want to learn the liberal arts education, but find learning anything practical to be beneath them. That is a bad mindset to have. One should always make it a point to have a practical skill of some type, as society functions off of the practical skills.
     Overall, what one should have is a balance. One should make sure to learn practical knowledge, both for making a living and just for getting through life (things like knowing how to change a tire, fix the pipe under the sink, etc...), but at the same time, should also make sure to learn about other subjects that increase their education and critical-thinking skills. This makes for a very well-rounded person. One other added benefit of being educated is that it will smash down many a class barrier you might encounter. You could be a plumber eating dinner with a group of professors and wealthy Wall Streeters let's say, but if you can talk as fluently about subjects like the Greek classics, Shakespeare, history, government, the economy, etc...and hold your own fine against these people who may have great formal schooling, well then they know that the only difference between you and them is that they have more money then you. So if you had to go to some fancy party with people who think you will be some idiot, you can show them that, while you may not be a lawyer or doctor or make their kind of money, you are equal to them in knowledge.