The importance of a degree

“Most of my friends, and most of my friends’ children, also have degrees. That doesn’t mean that they’ve managed to find the kind of job they wanted. Not at all. They went to university because someone, at a time when universities were important, said that, in order to rise in the world, you had to have a degree. And thus the world was deprived of some excellent gardeners, bakers, antique dealers, sculptors, and writers. Perhaps this is the moment to review the situation. Doctors, engineers, scientists, and lawyers need to go to university, but does everyone?”

~ Paulo Coelho’s Like the Flowing River

Education

My think-aloud thoughts...

Read from the papers recently about the education plans govt has or is thinking for the people…which makes me think about the role of education in the first place.

In The Aristos by John Fowles (written in 1968), he wrote in Chapter 9 – A New Education

1. At present almost all our education is directed to two ends: to get wealth for the state and to gain a livelihood for the individual. It is therefore little wonder that society is money-obsessed, since the whole tenor of education seems to indicate that this obsession is both normal and desirable.

2. In spite of the fact that we now have almost universal education, we are qualitatively one of the least-educated ages, precisely because education has everywhere surrendered to economic need. Relatively far better educations were received by the fortunate few in the eighteen century; in the Renaissance, in ancient Rome and Greece. The aims of education in all those periods were far superior to our own; they opened the student admirably to the understanding and enjoyment of life and to his responsibilities towards society. Of course the facts and subjects of the old classical education are largely unnecessary to us today; and of course it was the product of a highly unjust economic situation, but at its best it arrived at something none of our present systems remotely approach: the rounded human being.

3. ...

And in a Newsweek article dated August 2006, Martha Nussbaum wrote:

We live in a world that is dominated by the profit motive – which suggests to concerned citizens that education in science and technology is crucially important to the future success of their nations. I have no objection to good scientific and technical education, and I don’t wish to suggest that nations should stop trying to improve it. But I worry that other abilities, equally crucial, are at risk of getting lost in the competitive flurry. The abilities associated with the humanities and the arts are also vital, both to the health of individual nations and to the creation of a decent world culture. These include the ability to think critically, to transcend local loyalties and to approach international problems as a “citizen of the world.” And, perhaps most important, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person…in short, an education that cultivates human beings rather than producing useful machines. If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away. They don’t make money. But they do something far more precious: they make a world worth living in.

Some 40 years ago and now, we are still facing the same issue. We are well aware of the fact that education is supposed to ‘cultivate’ a well-rounded human being not only to serve economically but also as a humane human being. But the scale has always been tilting to one end.

Recall the recent coverage on underpaid and under-appreciated social workers…and also the recent news about some students getting 4 straight As, yet they feel upset about it (their concern lies in the number of As they can achieve and the type of scholarship they can be awarded (local vs. foreign uni). But what about the majority of the JC students?).

SIGH, need to remind myself we are living in the ME era. ME has been taught to study hard, so that ME can earn more money (of cos, ME also want to earn more money) and ME can have a better life. It’s all about ME. Gee...what have we become?