Reason is not education, and logical truths are true, knowable, and absolutely certain without education either making them true or revealing them. This core truth is hated or overlooked by almost everyone in Western culture. No one who denies or forgets this truth has valid beliefs about anything in education since they are relying on reason as they ignore it. Nothing I say that follows is in denial of this, for education is not the epistemological savior or grand moral purpose that so many wrongly assume it is. There are still genuine problems with how education in general and higher education specifically are treated in America that stray from the core of what education truly is. Higher education (but also education as a whole) is so often merely used as a way to profit from poor students while doing little to actually help them and as a meaningless title for prestige, for the arrogant illusion of feeling superior to people without formal education.
College students, unless they were by happenstance born or adopted into wealthy and caring families, are some of the people in the worst position to pay back the exploitative amounts of money demanded of them--the belief that college should be free for everyone is nothing but emotionalistic, non sequitur idiocy, so I am in no way advocating for that, but colleges do tend to charge gratuitous amounts for, in at least some cases, far too little true workplace preparation that is delivered by philosophically incompetent teachers who confuse education for reason and rationality. Some students even have to work while progressing through courses just to survive, which only steals more potential time away from studying or reflecting in order to actually pass the courses and escape this cycle that demands so much time and money of them.
There is also the way higher education is so commonly treated as an invalid but popular excuse to look down on the poor or anyone whose priorities or life circumstances did not make education attainable or worth pursuing, to make people try to feel superior or special when all they probably did was just assume whatever hearsay they were told by professors is true while devoting their life to philosophically trivial (by comparison to the things they neglected), unverifiable claims about science and history that they are only interested in for a career boost. Now, there is nothing irrational or necessarily immoral about treating education as nothing but a disposable means to the pragmatic end of simply obtaining a job with better security or pay, so the last thing I mentioned in the previous sentence is not problematic in itself. The other aforementioned factors in why many people look up to education or prize it are objectively asinine.
Of course, there is no such thing as knowing that mere hearsay and perceptions one would encounter an abundance of in higher education correspond to anything beyond just that--mere subjective perceptions and hearsay. This alone means that anyone who thinks they could know what happened thousands or even hundreds of years ago, to name just one general category as an example, because of a college course or professor is a damn fool who makes assumptions, perhaps without even realizing it. For those who understand epistemological truths like this and still want higher education for career, social, or even just educational purposes, there is nothing wrong with pursuing this kind of education. It is just that even these purposes are hindered by the greed and arrogance that are so commonly found attached to higher education as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment