Education Dishonored In Education

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Education Dishonored Nothing has arguably failed our society more than the standardization, militant disciplining, and stringent, inflexible control of our education systems. Plato, condemning this conformity, placed good education hand in hand with reason and truth. Today, however, knowledge and philosophical wisdom are as separate as ever, each existing on its own accord, independent of the other. One is placed on a pedestal while the other is kicked under the rug, and this is the chasm that is needed to maintain order in today’s society. Education is trapped within the walls of schools and universities; it has become an instrumental tool that fits its students’ minds into regulated molds. Consequently, we become “students of words: shut…show more content…
Today, education opens the door to employment, which in turn draws (different levels of) success and income, and for most, this is its highest peak and greatest capacity. Education entails the first steps of an ubiquitous progression that unfolds as such: you go to school, you go to university, you get a job, you work and earn a living, (more often than not) you reproduce, and the cycle repeats itself. Your accomplishments and successes are, almost always, in direct proportion to your wealth. Ergo, education, in its strictest sense, bears no relation to the truth, goodness, or wisdom, but perpetuates a system that privileges money above all else. Theories, formulas, battle dates, myths, and rules are drilled into students’ brains; thus ascribing worth only to common wisdom as it is used for personal progress. For Plato, education does not comprise implanting said information into the mind that lacks it, but instead turning the mind “away from the world of change until its eye can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities, which is what we call the good.” (Plato, 322) Every soul is innately capable of such philosophical wisdom, and may attain it by redirecting thoughts away from greed and the futile preoccupations of the material world, towards the truth. This “turning around of the mind” (Plato, 321) is entirely a result of proper education-…show more content…
Their function, it seems, is to equip students with all necessary requisites before they are projected into the labor force; scrubbing and polishing them before they drown in a sea of employees akin to themselves. Many enroll in university on the grounds that they must -I fall under this umbrella-, there simply is no acceptable or appropriate alternative; the structure of our society has left little room for the unschooled to thrive. Perhaps we would further benefit if education were more synonymous with critical and creative thinking; if we were taught to think for ourselves, to define our own moralities and form all our opinions free from the influence of those in power, if we were encouraged to question and challenge societal norms before we blindly obeyed them. Perhaps, also, we would be more interested in both common and philosophical wisdom if the former were not so deeply worshipped, and the latter rendered (socio)economically fruitless. It does not seem insuperable for education to be attained outside the walls of schools and universities, through experiences of our own
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