Education for its own sake

I’ve already posted about the differences between the use of the word education and learning. In that post I talked a little about the need for learning even when it isn’t just for job training. In this post I’m going to discuss that again, more in depth, as I attempt to make the case for education for its own sake.

There are a number of reasons why I think tax dollars used to educate people are well worth the cost, and why I think we as a society need to put more money into educating people, reducing the cost of tuition, reducing class sizes, etc. (I will make an argument for how best to put those dollars to use in a later post about How to Improve Education.) This post is about why it is worthwhile for society to spend that money.

The first reason I have goes back to my previous post about learning. When it’s working correctly, educating people can help foster a love of and provide tools for life-long learning. In addition to improvements for society that well-learned people might make, it is beneficial for cognitive health for humans to learn things and to continue learning new things. When learning is embraced, education can be fun. There’s a sense of accomplishment to be had in writing a good paper or successfully solving a differential equation. Plus, one never knows when some seemingly obscure knowledge might come in handy. It happens more often for those of us who write fiction, but I wish everyone could have the chance to have their minds opened to topics beyond what they do in their workday.

But I can see how the benefits of learning might not seem important to the twisted weasels that guard society’s purse strings. So here are some other benefits to society as a whole that stem from education.

One thing that comes immediately to mind is a better-informed electorate, which I think really benefits from a robust general education. I know that Republicans claim that students are somehow indoctrinated to leftist ideology when they attend college. (That most professors would argue that they can’t get the students to read the syllabus, how the hell are they going to indoctrinate them to anything underscores the obvious truth that the Republicans are utterly full of shit.)

Students may still be more inclined to reject right-wing ideology having attended college for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at the 2024 election. If a voter had taken a basic economics course they would have known what a tariff is and that Trump was lying. Even if they didn’t know what a tariff was, a college student is likely to acquire critical-thinking skills to help detect when someone is lying, which would have been obvious since his lie that other countries pay the tariffs should have been obviously false to everyone. A student that takes Calculus or Statistics should become extremely capable of reading and understanding graphs, and therefore unlikely to get bamboozled by some grifter using a graph to try and misrepresent data. Even a student with a grade school understanding of math should be shocked at the president’s inability to understand how percentages work. A student with an understanding of US history will know when the norms of our political system are being trampled. Learning about the Constitution and gaining familiarity with the Bill of Rights makes it obvious when those rights are being violated. Students are often exposed to a wider world when they attend college. They meet people outside of their family and community and often learn that those people are just people and not the demons that today’s GOP likes to paint entire groups of people as.

Even outside of politics, having a populace with critical thinking skills is beneficial. When people learn to evaluate source material and require citations, they are less inclined to believe any random bullshit printed over a photograph and posted to Facebook. Our society has begun to listen uncritically to any random asshole with a podcast and consider the random opinions of said podcasters as being as or more important than peer-reviewed research from experts. When civilizations abandon evidence-based thinking and start making decisions based on what they’d like to believe instead bad things happen.

There are also good economic reasons for investing in our schools and universities. Instructors and staff are rarely hoarding wealth. What income they earn is largely put back into the economy. There’s an additional bonus that these are relatively recession-proof jobs. When there are layoffs in other sectors, there is usually an increase in enrollment. This results in a stable hedge against a downward spiral where all demand tanks which leads to more layoffs which leads to less demand and so on. Finally, and although I’m valuing learning over job training, people who attend college tend to get hired into better paying jobs, which in addition to being better for them, is also more tax revenue for the society at large.

I’ll talk about how to utilize those dollars in the post about how to improve education, but technology in education will be the next post.