The Purpose of Education

The purpose of education via schools, colleges, and universities is to learn how to be afraid of new and critical ideas. Indeed, to learn how to promote thoughtless sensationalism, if not to carry on with mindless traditionalism that keeps us away from growth, away from the winds of change, and away from development via the power of scientific modernism. Thus, college educated Pinoys and Pinays are more at home with decaying familiarity rather than courageous in facing the adventures of new ways of living and thinking, or how to deal creatively with uncharted opportunities. Jack W. Meiland, Ph.D author of – COLLEGE THINKING (how to get the best out of college) wrote: “In order to learn how to think, you must think about something, about some particular content. But the content is not the main point. Much of the content that you are taught in college will be outmoded or discarded anyway in ten or twenty years. Learning intellectual skills and attitude is far more important. . . Another important function of college is to inculcate certain habits of mind. One such habit is that of critical thinking.” Most of my college educated friends and relatives and associates think of me as someone who is mentally off balance - insane as I appear to them not only as an individual who was expelled out of high school but that I have not ceased proving even to my teachers in grade school that progress in intellectual matters requires that popular views or fashionable ideas must always be tested, challenged, and criticized. Indeed, in our sick society, if you expose new and critical ideas to any one – you are thought to be mentally sick, and thus not worthy of the forgiveness of sin from God, and therefore not qualified to gain eternal salvation in the next life after death. In the meantime, my dear reader, everybody wants to go to an extraterrestrial heaven, but before doing so, nobody wants to experience terrestrial death on this earth. Poch Suzara, Phsdo