The Value of Education

            I am an education enthusiast, but I do not believe that college is for everyone. We as a nation have gradually formed this idea that one cannot contribute to society without a college education. But I would challenge anyone to tell me what exactly a college education is in this day and age. We have generalized it so much that the level of education being provided by most colleges and universities has severely decreased. The focus is more on this idea of the college education than on early education and high school, the foundations of learning.

            Why do we go to college? To acquire the skills needed to exceed in our chosen craft. But how many psychology majors work desk jobs at huge distribution companies? We can blame the job market, but I would bet that a huge number of those college graduates are not half as passionate about psychology as their transcripts indicate. They were told to go to college, so to college they went, accumulating debt as they did. They were told to choose a major, so they did, in order to graduate from that college they were told to attend. What we need are not more college graduates, but more specialists. We need to reacquaint ourselves with vocational learning. Even before that, we need to have motive for higher learning. Society must let go of the necessity to have immediate entrance into college, without any time for breath or meditation. One cannot be expected to know exactly what it is we truly want to study and practice for the rest of our lives after 18 years of simply being told, just as one cannot be expected to spend 40,000 dollars a year figuring it out. Personally, if that kind of dough is going to be tossed on something, it had better be something I’m damn sure of.

            Young people must have the utmost drive and desire to continue their education; otherwise we end up with useless, regurgitated information we find no need to remember, all for a piece of paper which somehow symbolizes our four years of “growth.” It’s time we stopped going to school for a diploma, and considered the real reason secondary education was instated: to be knowledgeable in the fabrics of this world we share, and to put that knowledge to use as we pursue our chosen career. But we cannot force our youth to be constantly hungry for knowledge. By telling them they must learn, and placing them in such facilities without giving them valid reasons beyond “to get a degree” or “to get a good job,” we are inevitably ridding them of their own hungers. It is time to dismantle the assembly line. Call it anarchy; call it whatever you want, but I feel an extreme anxiety hovering over the youth of our world. There are reasons for social norms, I think we like to believe they are the reason we can move together as a people.

The idea of secondary education mustn’t solely include colleges and universities, but all vocational and specified learning facilities. I’d like to see a time when a silly piece of paper from Harvard is equally prestigious as a technical apprenticeship, or four years in the actual field. We are a society obsessed with paper. Diplomas only exist because we believe they do. Money only exists because we believe it does. The entire concept of economy is just that, a concept. These are scraps of paper, not scraps of knowledge. And yet, paper is our motivation, give us more and more of it, and thus, we will be happy.