What is our education?

What we now call education is a matter of accumulating information and knowledge from books, which anyone can do who can read. Such education offers a subtle form of escape from ourselves and, like all escapes, it inevitably creates increasing misery. Conflict and confusion result from our own wrong relationship with people, things and ideas, and until we understand that relationship and alter it, mere learning, the gathering of facts and the acquiring of various skills, can only lead us to engulfing chaos and destruction.

As society is now organized, we send our children to school to learn some technique by which they can eventually earn a livelihood. We want to make the child first and foremost a specialist, hoping thus to give him a secure economic position. But does the cultivation of a technique enable us to understand ourselves?

While it is obviously necessary to know how to read and write, and to learn engineering or some other profession, will technique give us the capacity to understand life? Surely, technique is secondary; and if technique is the only thing we are striving for, we are obviously denying what is by far the greater part of life.

Life is pain, joy, beauty, ugliness, love, and when we understand it as a whole, at every level, that understanding creates its own technique. But the contrary is not true: technique can never bring about creative understanding.

Present-day education is a complete failure because it has overemphasized technique. In overemphasizing technique we destroy man. To cultivate capacity and efficiency without understanding life, without having a comprehensive perception of the ways of thought and desire, will only make us increasingly ruthless, which is to engender wars and jeopardize our physical security. The exclusive cultivation of technique has produced scientists, mathematicians, bridge builders, space conquerors; but do they understand the total process of life? Can any specialist experience life as a whole? Only when he ceases to be a specialist.
Your thoughts as always .

Education is usually just a means to an end.
That end is usually a career and money.
Studying engineering in my opinion simply prepares you to absorb, understand and process data which a potential employer may require.
The degree more or less insures that you posses that ability.
I always found that after the course in question was completed and exams passed it was relatively safe to forget everything that had been taught.

School does not teach you about living life.
Parents, children, lovers,friends and enemies, now they may teach you about living life.

School is only so useful....we go, we jump through a few hoops, clutch our bit of paper and wander off.

There is no manual on living life. Its a journey we all must make for ourselves.
But what fun it can be.

If you want a school to teach you how to live life I suggest you study philosophy and comparative religion and the like.
Just don't expect them to have all the answers.

Perhaps you should look more towards friends and family for their insight on the ups and downs of a life lived.

Cheers
Trex

Thanks for the post ,hope you enjoyed it .