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PART II

EDUCATION AND THE 

MASS MEDIA

NINE

EDUCATION

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. It's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

- Albert Einstein

Formal education is a major part of the system. Public education is free yet compulsory. As part of the system, it manages so much of what we consider to be socially acceptable behaviors, thoughts, actions, and ways of being. Education trains and molds you. It doesn’t grow or expand you. If its purpose were to expand and grow you, the education system would not repeatedly pump out cookie-cutter copies of kids, each with the exact same intelligence and same skill sets. It replicates the same mold over and over again and sends the kids into the herd. If you statistically “make it” out of the herd, you’re considered one of the “lucky’ ones.” It’s clearly not the system’s expectation that you’ll excel beyond the herd. 

Imagine this. Close your eyes and picture hundreds of teenagers all standing at a starting line, about to start a race, all about to start running IN THE SAME DIRECTION. Everyone has been prepared the same. Will some separate and get ahead? Of course. Where will most end up, though? Think about this. Ultimately, there will be a herd, and the herd won’t be at the finish line. There will be a point when people start dropping off on the sidelines into the same spots and group together. They’ll go where they see groups of others, not to the finish line. These groups will set themselves up based on how they were trained and conditioned. They’ll view where they stopped as normal. 

Were you trained for a finish line or to believe the stop along the way was the finish line? That job, that house in the suburbs, all those things you were told were normal achievements – were they the ultimate finish line? OR is the finish line using your entire lifetime to see what you could become, to see how much you could master – how large of an empire you could build? Not simply checking off the career, house, and car then saying, “Oh, well, made it far enough” and essentially never seeing what you’re truly made of. 

Okay, now for a startling fact to really get you reconsidering how you’ve been educated. As it stands right now, the most recent statistics indicate that 17 percent of U.S. adults reported not reading any books in the past year. (Gallup) Not one book! 

We grow up conditioned to dislike and avoid learning! People leave formal school with nothing more than a lack of excitement for knowledge! How many students graduate from school with a thirst for knowledge? How many students are inspired to continue learning after they leave school? Almost none. The public school system removes enjoyment from learning. Turning learning into education has turned learning into a chore. It has segregated learning and the quest for knowledge from any self-satisfying feelings and emotions. Traditional education has led people to dislike, and even avoid, learning. Because, as is human nature, we avoid what we dislike. 

Here’s another Einstein quote for you: 

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.”

Learning and education are not one and the same. There is a HUGE distinction between education and learning knowledge. What does education mean? If you simply Google it, you’ll find the first and most common of two important answers. The common answer? The root of the word education means “to nourish” or “to bring up.” BUT if we dig deeper, we find that it originally had two meanings. This was later adapted.

According to Craft, the English term education stems from two distinct Latin origins: educare implies the process of shaping or training, while educere suggests guiding or leading forth. 

Modern education tends to train and mold but often fails to promote questioning, thinking, and creativity. It becomes evident that modern education does not align with the foundational intent of educere – to lead forth into the world equipped with knowledge and the capacity for thoughtful, innovative questioning.

Have you ever wondered why you didn’t learn more in school? 

Why weren't you taught how to run your life? Budget your time and money? The public school system simply trains with the false illusion that it is adding value to the student’s life, for the student’s benefit. With its lack of questioning and critical thinking, what it really serves is the system. 

When no one questions things, things don’t change. This keeps us “manageable.” This is how the system likes it. Asking questions disturbs its reality – the reality it built. When you think about it this way, it’s no wonder many of the textbooks used in schools haven’t been updated for forty years! The status quo, not new information, is prioritized. 

What about learning vital information that would help us in life? What about learning how to leverage your money for time, how to grow a business, how to buy a house, or how to afford university? As it stands, the only people who can go to university are those who can afford it (or take on massive debt). The system limits our access to learning valuable information, even though it provides free public education. 

As we go through the system, our ability to learn decreases instead of increases. If education were about learning, shouldn't the basics of living life be taught to all children? Shouldn’t they be taught to question? We all think we're getting an education, but what we're really getting is set up to be equal. This is a disservice to children.

As children, we are full of a life force. We have endless energy, creativity, and imagination. We have fantastic memories, and our brains are like sponges. Schools don’t nurture any of this or bring out any of these creative sides.  If you think about it, in our youngest years, when our brains are the most malleable, we don’t really learn. Well, technically, we are taught but not what we need to learn. We don’t learn what we need to learn to have a successful life. We aren’t nurtured into creative, inspired humans. The education system is not designed to set us up properly.  Imagine all the things you could learn that would have set you up for winning in life. 

Children are only set up for more success when they are sent to alternative schools, where someone decided on day one that they are exceptional and good at something. These children are more likely to become part of the 1 percent that gets ahead because they aren’t being trained and molded into cookie-cutter copies of everyone else around them. They’re not being fed into the herd. Their skills and creativity are being nurtured from the beginning, and they are being properly set up for success while everyone in the public schools is being conditioned to accept lower levels.  

Everyone graduating from a public school is simply thrown out into the world with a checklist and few skills. They’re told to get married, get a nice house, and tick off as many things on that list as they can, even if they don’t have the actual skills to get the jobs to earn enough to even get a nice house or achieve anything else on the list! They had a disadvantage from the very beginning! The system produces a segmented society. Masters of nothing.  The system cultivates lack of motivation toward learning and moving forward in the Game of Life to the point that few continue to self-educate. 

Remember the statistic from earlier – a quarter of Americans haven’t read a single book in the past year? You can't get ahead when you're part of the herd and everybody's the same. After all, that’s where everyone has the same, limited skills and is competing for the same, limited potential places. All while being taught to accept their level in society as normal. It’s no wonder everyone's feeling so unfulfilled in the end. 

When the education system is not serving you, the only way to get ahead is to self-educate. This empowers you to reach beyond the system’s limitations. It’s the only way to get ahead in the Game of Life, escape the herd, and earn your spot at the top.

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