Education

Getting yourself educated is quite useful. For one thing, you are able to read this article, and for another you get paid because you are an educated man. Education is much more complicated than the way I have put it. I tend to think of it this way.

Over the years, millions and millions of people have lived, and some of them (which still counts to millions) have spent a lot of time thinking – be it about the universe, the stars or geometry. Sometimes, it so happens that these thoughts might occur again to you. It is possible that you may have suspected the existence of the gravitational force when you were five, for example. Or that you discovered the existence of Venus in the evening sky when you were nine. Now suppose that you had chosen to get educated. You would then first discover Venus in your textbook instead, and picture it as a tiny orange ball. Perhaps, you may never bother to actually look at the planet in the sky – you know now, that it does not flicker like other stars, you know why that is so, you might even know its diameter or its surface temperature.

Now, is it really important that you spotted Venus before you were told it exists? Is it really important that you interact with nature yourself and discover her intricate ways, than being fed this information by those who have lived before you?

Isaac Newton believed that it isn’t. His famous saying goes “If I have looked farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. He accepted the information compiled by his forefathers and went on to show which were the parts that were wrong. Although, he is most famous for his discovery of the law of gravitation, he was an excellent mathematician and also contributed to optics. I deem these would have been impossible in one lifetime without education. Newton was a practical man.

There are many debates in this world on education. These vary from discussing whether the present system is good to whether a thing called education is needed. I do not know of systems and if I do, I would probably want to stay away from them. As far as the need for education is concerned, most people argue that education does not let us think independently. What they mean is that education saves our time by keeping us from pondering over things that have been firmly established. But it does not tell us what the set of firmly established things are. That is for us to decide and accept. If, for example, Albert Einstein had accepted the firmly established velocity transformations of Euler, we would never have had a different theory of relativity.

The two constraints upon an individual’s understanding of this universe is his life span and his intelligence. Now, I believe that it is important to get educated since that gives you a glimpse of how people before you spent their lives and what they concluded from it. Education is the name we give to this coordination that enables faster development. It is vital for us to evolve and it is our security for the future.

The foundation for education is not completely baseless. What I mean is that there are a set of firmly established things and that we have started the right way. The alphabet and the numbers, arithmetic and algebra are a few examples of assertive and definitive theories. Some people may tend to contradict me by stating that these are largely definitions and there is no way any physically observable relation is contained in them. In the medieval times, the fact that the earth is the center of the universe was, in some communities, as solid a definition as that 5 is larger than 4. My point is that there are no internal contradictions in such a set of axioms and evolution has not raised a contradiction in such theories.

Today, education is changing rapidly to include processes that simplify our life and also things that make these processes faster. We are moving on to an age of rapid thinking and immediate recognition of proven results apart from increasing resources for testing one’s theories. When I say this, it seems absurd then, that a ground-breaking discovery such as quantum physics is not happening every other Tuesday. What I mean is that from a gap of two centuries that it took to discover that Newton’s laws are invalid in the quantum domain, it now only involves using a linear accelerator to test which hypotheses hold in which domain. If we are not making quantum jumps in various fields with every passing day, it is because we are eliminating the wrong conclusions fast, and in fact moving closer to the truth.

Intuitively, I feel that time has never been as important in any period in history as it is now. As I try to picture this, an athlete comes to my mind who starts slowly, and carefully crosses all hurdles, but sprints towards the end as fast as he can to the finish line. Are we then beginning to get close to a universal law of everything? Is this the acceleration that will last until the finish line? The least education can do is to stop us from demanding choices for this question too.