Value of Education

Education is a way to learn from the past and to chart our future.

For me the value of education is to fight boredom. Brain is one of our organs and it needs regular exercise. We go to gym to make our body healthy. Where do we go to have brain exercise?

I get bored when I don't know what to do. It happens when (i) problems around me are too difficult or too easy for me to solve, (ii) I don't have money to spend, or (iii) I don't have someone to talk to. I can do nothing for the second reason, but the other two reasons are related to our brains.

If one is not educated, he will not know how to occupy his mind. Put it mildly, he does not know how to waste his time well. He has little interest in activities that make his brain sweat. He does not like brain exercise. He just wants to be entertained. What often happens is that he settles for spending money to fight boredom. He thinks spending money buys a cure for boredom. That's why we have the term "retail therapy".

I am not saying an uneducated man cannot be a hard worker. They are not correlated as far as I can see. An educated man can be lazy; in fact, a highly educated man is often lazy since he thinks he can solve world problems by just thinking about it or daydreaming or writing a blog ;-(

What I am saying is a person with education knows how to waste his time. He reads books and thinks about stuff that interest him. This activity gives him knowledge, ideas, motivations, and hopefully a plan of actions. When he thinks about all these things - I can assure you - he will not get bored.

A lack of education also causes one to believe problems in this world are not interconnected. The perspective will be narrow and one-dimensional. He then believes that there is no point to worry about this world since to comprehend it is beyond his wildest imagination. He can be easily misled and manipulated by political parties, advertisements, con-artists, among others, since other people do the thinking for him (or not).

What is funny though is that too much education can cause one to think these problems are too complex to solve. He overthinks them and wants to map out everything in his head. He does not act unless he knows everything. This is unfortunate. Education does not free him, instead it imprisons him. Instead of taking the first small step of action, he worries about the biggest problem in a far distance future. He becomes a constant worrier (not a warrior).