Day 20: How Important You Think Education Is

How important do I think education is?

Immensely.

80% of the world's problems can be solved through proper education and intellectual stimulation.

I think in whatever you do, whatever you love to do, you get to a point where you realise that you want to be better at it, you want to be more knowledgeable on it, and you want to be more educated about it. And any education is valuable.

Do most other people think so?

For some unknown reason, absolutely not.

I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here...

Yes, as a product of an industrialist society, you have to sit through nine years of math. Holy fuck, it is not that much to complain about. If only you knew how much you actually don't learn about math in the first nine years of high school. I hate standardized testing, oh believe me, I do, I think we need an education reform, I would love to find a much better way of assessing and instilling a love of knowledge into young children. And I guess I hate math. No, I'll amend that statement to what you all really want to say, to what we all really mean.

I hate being bad at math. And really, so do most of you.

Ever had that joy of solving a puzzle? Overcoming a challenge? Solving a bug in the code? It's breathtaking. Relief you can't get in another way, joy, euphoria. The way math works is that you have to memorise a set of rules off by heart, then you have to learn the method of applying those rules to solve a problem. Now if for whatever reason, you were not taught a small thing, or some rule or piece of knowledge isn't ingrained into your soul, you miss out on some small key knowledge, you are now disadvantaged. Has happened millions of times to me. I'm still here despite my math being tragically bad, because there were things in my foundation that I was not good at, and because I was not good at them, I did not learn them as well I should have, and now I'm behind. I am disadvantaged. It's not that anyone is really bad at math. It's like trying to solve a 10000 piece puzzle with no knowledge of what the picture looks like, no previous experience building puzzles. Everyone hates that. It's tedious and hard and long and boring.

Now let's say you knew what the picture looked like. You've seen it hundreds of times before. Now the bottom of the pieces even have numbers to tell you where they connect with the others.

Much simpler, right? Actually kind of sounds fun. Taking a difficult task and turning it into a breeze.

That's what math is. That's what they're attempting to teach us. And for the love of fuck, it's not like you're disadvantaged by knowing Pythagorean theorems. First world problems. It's actually useful in... Practically every field outside Humanities that requires math. And you can go look up how many degrees require some form of math. Not just in the form of math modules. Just to do these degrees, because of the concepts you'll use in them. They are... Plentiful.

Okay, cool, but then what about people who don't want to study...

Yet again, it's the exact point of this knowledge not disadvantaging you. And it also enables you, if you so wish, to go study at some point in the future. Isn't that incredible? That tertiary education will always be available to you! You cannot even tell me that it's not somewhat comforting to know that much.

Now, one of only valid point within any anti-tertiary educate/ education argument.

Why don't they teach me the useful stuff, like balancing a cheque book, or doing taxes, or planning for retirement?

That's legitimately a good question. And I think it's something we need to address, it should be part of our education reform. For some reason, the boards or committees or whoever sets up our syllabuses think that outdated and biased history is more important than knowledge you'll need to know in your lifetime. I remember Life Orientation in highschool, a subject I found to be irredeemably useless, was the one that should have been teaching these things. No one bookmarked the bad information on what to do after a car accident in that terrible order, and as far as socio-political issues go, they always had an agenda, they were always biased and one-sided, and really, past extra reading, they're not going to help me when they're old news, I mean because some fucking idiot did a really fucking idiotic thing and now we won't have to hear of said idiot's idiotic idiocy because another group of idiots wanted this idiots idiocy to be spread, we sacrifice class time that could be put into orientating us in life, as the subject was suppose to.

Look, it's important. Education is important. Educating youth properly could literally save the world. But we've managed to convince our kids that x^2 + y^2 = r^2 is the enemy and that buying a greenhouse gas emitting car, avoiding a career in arts, patriotically dying so some old arms dealer can make a fortune is a great thing. I'd rather let integrals kill me slowly than let an AK-47 do it quick.

Finally, one of my favourite sayings.

You think education is expensive? Try ignorance.