It's not even clear to me what "education" is.
I still don't know why I had to endure the college experience, so I'm not really a fan of paying for it. It struck me as a form of torment and wasted years more than anything else.
In terms of financial benefit, it was definitely a big plus, so I tend to look at it as an ROI issue.
Some people see
education as meaning things like:
- Learning about philosophies and other ideas that formed societies
- Thinking about how those ideas influence us today
- Learning about how the great minds of the past made their discoveries and the challenges they faced
- Learning how and when to question the status quo
- Acquiring knowledge and applying it in a job and/or hobby
Unfortunately, more people see
education as meaning things like the following
and little else:
- How can I get certified to get a job in [insert job type]?
- If I study [insert topic] at [insert relative eliteness of school], what will my salary be?
- I will only hire someone with a BA for this menial job because the BA proves that s/he can complete something.
- How can we maximize our revenues? A lazy river might help draw more FTEs*.
*Translation: full-time equivalents, aka full-time students in this case.
These days, IMO, the second set of ideas dominates (to the detriment of a lot of things). It's a shame that reading Plato is now more of an excerpty-type learning task to be followed by multiple choice questions than a serious foray into the big ideas of the past and present. And math class has become a way to pass a standardized test for the school's benefit (apart from in college, where ideas are splatted out in outline form in "text"books and homework is completed online, thereby sparing the stressed-out adjunct teaching the class from having to correct homework for free).
Oh well.
