What is the value of our education?
When people ask about school, it usually goes something like this: “Ah, Northwestern. Great school. You must be really smart to have gotten in.” Which is true, but only sort of. The smartness that Northwestern, and other ‘elite’ schools like it, value is really quite narrow. As students, we jumped hurdle after hurdle and finally cleared the entrance gates and now, of course, the question becomes: What next?
Well, for most of us, that’s pretty obvious. Just take high school, add some internships, a stint as an editor at the school newspaper, work as a Senator in student government, a lead in a play, then rinse and repeat. ACT and SAT morph into GRE, LSAT, MCAT.
We try to outrun our lives or forfeit them entirely to someone else’s idea of who we should be. We turn over our waking hours to organizations and corporations that give us all the comforts we’ve been accustomed to, and demand in return only our unconditional, unquestioning devotion.
We run from ghosts: the specter of our parent’s expectations, our friend’s demands, maybe most of all, our own fear of personal failure. What is the value of a good education? It helps you put these ghosts to rest, to realize what is real and important and what is not. Or: helps you realize that determining those things is a daily struggle, and that the people who attend “great” universities do not have a monopoly on figuring out what’s real and meaningful and what isn’t. It teaches you to breathe and to smile and to break down and cry and be comfortable with your voice, your smile, your tears. Maybe also to learn that worth and value have many different meanings, and that having certain things or knowing certain things or controlling certain things doesn’t automatically confer them upon you.
The value of an education should be to enhance one’s outlook on the world and to deepen one’s understanding of the self. Education should not simply be a means to uphold a standard of living; any animal can hold its place on the food chain. Only human beings can appreciate the beauty of life and death. Education’s value is found in its ability to open our eyes, hearts, and minds.
The value of our education is all what we make of it. We can go to class, study, and get good grades but that doesn’t truly make us educated. Getting involved in organizations, reaching out to others, seeing the world…that is where the real education comes into play and that is what we should value and strive for.
The value of our education shouldn’t be measured by our GPA’s, credits received, or the proverbial gold star on the top of our graded homework. If this is the case, I think we’ve missed the point. If I can think of the most powerful aspects I value most about my education (not necessarily linked to schooling), they would be the ability to foster creativity and self-motivation, as well as learning to embrace occasionally being wrong. We will graduate with an impressive degree from a top school, but what can we do with it if we’ve got no personal drive, new ideas, or open-mindedness to push forward? Northwestern supplies us with the pieces to allow us to be knowledgeable and well-read, but its our daily encounters here that will teach us to get the ball rolling and that I tend to value most.
To me, the value of education is the different types of knowledge we acquire, not only through the taking of different classes, but also and probably more importantly, through the various interactions and experiences we have with friends and faculty members. I think that this is where most of our education comes from. It helps us find ourselves, especially during college, when our minds are still expanding, and prepares us for our later years in life. I feel that an aspect of our education that is frequently lost and forgotten about is creativity. Our creativity is something that makes each of us unique, and yet I believe that it does not comprise a large enough part of our education.
People say that your education at a university is basically a tool to secure yourself a job. While I can’t disagree that this is what most people view their higher education as, I believe that it’s more than that. I believe that our education is not just what we learn in school to help our career, but what we take from a varieties of the life lessons that we encounter and how we use them to enrich our lives, and the lives of those around us.
The value of my education comes from the opportunities I know it will give me in the future.
On a simplistic level this could mean a job. When looking down at the below video posts many people in fact mentions careers and elevation on the economic ladder as the value of their education. Although I believe this is a valid point, I also think to truly understand the value of an education we must look deeper. What do these opportunities mean and how do we get them?
For me opportunities can be seen more as the way I view the world. Education to me means knoweldge and in turn knowledge means power. Having the power to understand situations, world events is the first step in creating opportunites for oneself. Having critical thinking skills to make a difference is the next.
Education gives us options. It gives us the ability to choose and at the end of the day it is what makes us free. When you are educated you can think for yourself, make your own decisions, come to your own conclusions. This for me is the value of our education. It is the ability to truly decide and figure out who YOU are.
The value of our education is different for everyone. It could be to make a lot of money upon graduation, or it could be to accumulate mass amounts of knowledge and become a human encyclopedia. Each person, each student has a different and personal view of their own education and caters to that goal with every decision he or she makes at Northwestern (or his/her respective school).
I think it is important to understand that there is no right answer. There is no right way to receive an education and there is no wrong one. Every person is fulfilled by something different and no one else can tell you otherwise. If it tickles your fancy to study econ and math and go straight to business school then that is great. If you want to steer clear of anything preprofessional and study literature and philosophy while you’re here- that is great too.
We have four years at Northwestern to learn, observe, question, challenge and enjoy. How you do those things, is up to you. The value of that is what you make of it.
I’d like to believe that education is driven by passion - the passion to learn, the passion to better oneself by constantly trying to understand the world around him. However, realistically, I think that education has turned into something that is driven by competition - we are constantly striving not to better ourselves, but to be better than others. We use education as a way to get into the elite schools, land the top jobs, to rise to the top. While I believe that education has achieved this pragmatic function in our world, I can’t help but wonder what education would be like, what learning would be like, what the world be like if education was focused on passion rather than competition.
I think that a lot of this discussion has been centered on defining what education is. Before you can place a value on something - we must first set parameters are to what we are evaluating. There are many different types of education: emotional education, acquisition of skills and knowledge that fuel our cognitive development and higher order thinking abilities, the acquisition of knowledge that expands our consciousness about ourselves relative to the world we live in, practical education that lends to becoming more productive members of society (ie fiscal literacy), and most likely the people in this discussion can contribute more ways to define education. Currently, as a teacher, I myself am struggling with what are the best ways to “educate” my students so as to best prepare them for life given the (often counterproductive) structures of the education system in America. All in all, there is no way to put a value on education. Do I think that all NU students leave having gotten an “education” - sure. Do I think that all NU students leave with an expanded view of the world around them outside of the desire to make tons of money…not so sure about that one.
