Education: formal or experiencial???
Hello steemians, this is an article I wrote sometime early last year, so I'm just gonna drop it here. It's about education, I hope you'll enjoy it!!!
"Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation"
Walter Cronkite
Education is the process of facilitating learning or acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits. Learning skills through experience is also known as experiential learning and is defined as learning through reflection on doing. The concept of learning through experience is very ancient. Around 350BCE, Aristotle wrote in the Nichomachan Ethics "for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them"
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one had learnt in school. The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Education broadens human perspective. It helps to change the minds of people. Education makes people understand other cultures, religions, and places. This is very important if we see it from the perspective of developing Nations which are plagued by old notions. In countries such as India, male and female children are differentiated. Even worse, women are considered the cause of female children while science tells us that it's the other way round. Similar old style dogmas exist everywhere in the world and the only way to eradicate them is by proper education.
Education as a matter of fact dispels inequality. For individuals who do not have a wealthy or fortunate background, the provision of quality education puts them on same footing as the vast majority of job seekers allowing them to rise from their present level. This phenomenon is also known as distributive justice, helps in reducing inequality, both economically and socially in modern society.
Looking at it from angle of employment, a job applicant who is educated and has a degree must have graduated with a grade which goes to give an evaluation on the applicant's performance in his course of study. As an employer, the applicant's grade gets to pre-inform you on the applicant's performance on the job. When employing someone who has learned skills through experience, there is nothing that hints you as an employer on what to expect from the applicant if employed because number of years of practise is not enough criterion for satisfactory performance on the job.
Experience may teach you that doing it that way does not work but education gives you the theoretical knowledge and analytical skill to show why it does not work. This goes to say that education broadens both your knowledge and thinking horizon. As an employer, one would seek to employ one with a wider thinking horizon because such an employee will be innovative and as such bring advancement to the organization.
Given the same elapsed time, a course of education will bring a greater depth of understanding than experience can provide. Yes, I agree that educated people are more valuable than people who have learned skills through experience in modern society.