Schooled but still uncivilized
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Schooled but still uncivilized

An educated person, as opposed to one merely schooled, is directed by values such as humbleness

Post by on Thursday, October 28, 2021

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Most of us have had schooling, attended classes, did homework, appeared in tests, passed and received a certificate or degree. We were virtually, institutionalised. But we can be schooled and still be uncivilized. We can frame and embellish our certificates on a wall and still be uneducated. We can attend many years of formal schooling and still be ignorant.  School, in this regard, is therefore not formal elementary school or high school; it is all forms of institutionalisation, including college and university, where we are schooled to conduct. The designed routines that lock students in classrooms and constrict data into their heads in fixed periods have contorted into an industry where past exam papers are practised, and notes are memorised to ensure that maximum number of registered students pass the exams. We can, in many places, even have someone paid to do tasks for us. In this context, the assertion “I went to school" is tantamount to saying "I went to jailhouse". It shows naught about the quality and meaning of that experience.

If a student brooks a zany performance with words that are meant to bespeak radicalism we egg him on, expressing mirth at the act whether or not the gumptious student knows what his words mean. It reflects schooling, and poor schooling, but certainly not education. An educated person is someone who learns, first of all, to unlearn. I am, and I can honestly confess that I know very little and have so much to learn. Yet when I listen to adolescents lecture on the precise causes of the global conflicts or the root causes of youth unemployment, I am lurched at the sheer temerity of these youthful claims.

An educated person, as opposed to one merely schooled, is directed by values such as humbleness. It is his deep understanding that he is not better than the person he despises or curse, and that very often he is subject to the same weaknesses as the one who offends him. When education teaches and fosters a humble spirit it prepares the ground for reconciliation; it creates, a foundation for leadership which admits reciprocal exposure and therefore prepares leaders who are capable of solving composite human troubles. To be educated is to have the bravery to act on rationale and not on the basis of political or religious contract. Sometimes, as a follow-up, friends may be lost, bids forwent and even family bonds lopped. Yet an educated person rises above the passions of the moment to pursue a broader solidarity than what our primeval adherences to colour or belief or company or self-interest often allow.

The educated, in other words, favour the brain over muscle, reason over emotion, and community over self-indulgence. It argues that simply insisting that our children attend school is not very helpful. In fact, the grave institutionalisation, the inexorable decrees and ungraspable schedules might in fact do more harm than if the children simply stayed at home. Therefore, schools might not be the best places in which to obtain an education. Schooling should not be confused with education; many psychopaths have had their share of schooling, yet they trampled on the values that education, often, promotes. Unless, we made schools temples of discipline, love, learning, relearning, aspiration, hard work and hope. Then it should not only matter how many children obtained distinctions and degrees in schools and colleges respectively. What would matter more is how many young people obtain distinctions in life through the commitment to love and loyalty, courage and caution.

The Author is Educator and has done Management Studies

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