Now really, what purpose does education serve?
Grace and I were talking yesterday, on the drive home from Vermilion, about Education: what purpose does actually pursuing a higher education serve? What would the world be like if we hadn’t ever come to a point where we placed such a high priority on academia?
Well, we’d probably live in a more agrarian or trades-based society, for one thing.
And in reading The Captain’s recent post on soaring education costs (noting a 439% increase in the cost of the average college tuition, and the lack of an attendant 439% increase in the quality of the education received), I have to wonder if perhaps getting rid of academia entirely would not also rid the world of a goodly number of other problems.
I mean, obviously, it would get rid of all the crap degrees that basically serve to fill out the ranks of bureaucracies the world over. But more than that, it would also serve to get rid of the ugly by-products of minds that have become occluded and clouded by too many years in the sterile, phony environment of the lab or faculty office.
That’s not to say that the pursuit of academic and technological achievements does not amount to any good, of course. I am sitting here today, in front of a computer, blogging about this topic, and I am indebted to many fine scientists, technologists, and programmers (most of them graduates of one university/college or another) for my ability to do so. I depend on the same general class of people for my income.
But I have to wonder, as horns blare for no apparent reason from the intersection that I can see outside my office window: what would I be doing in a world that didn’t place the same priority on that sort of thing, in a world that placed more priority on the work one could perform with one’s hands, or in a world that just valued genuine skills rather than invented majors in irrelevant topics?
Would such a world have abortion, at least to the same rampant degree we see in our world today? Would such a world have the same manner and intensity of crime that ours does? Would my daughter grow up, in such a world, subjected to the same bombardment of incitement to promiscuity that she will have to face in this world? Would such a world have lost so much of its faith?
And would such a world really be so bad, in the case that even a couple of the answers above were in the negative?
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