What is Education For?

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In David Orr's "What is Education For?", six myths were discussed to demonstrate how education has molded young minds into unrealistic beings on this planet. The first myth he describes is that ignorance is a solvable problem. I completely agree with him saying that ignorance is in fact not a solvable problem because even as a child, our education system taught us that being more educated than your neighbour made you better. From personal experience, in elementary school there was always a stigma that children who were enrolled in the French Immersion program were better than the children who were not because they were going to get better jobs for being bilingual. Ignorance about being educated has been growing in people since very young ages when people did not know better. Even today, being at university and looking back at people I graduated with knowing that some students stopped their education at high school makes me feel as though I am somehow better than them. I myself am even ignorant about it, because that is how I have been taught.

The second myth introduced by Orr is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth. This statement sounds as though it could be possible, which encourages students to pursue higher education to be the person to figure out the puzzle of how to manage the planet but realistically this is an impossible task. People need to realize that we are visitors on the planet and that we cannot tell the planet what to do. The planet is where we have become so successful, and it's confusing as to why we've taken it so for granted. There is so much that is still unknown about the Earth, and the human race will probably never figure it all out.

Orr's third myth is that knowledge ...

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...on't believe that getting the type of education people receive today is going to help that.

For Mount Allison to change so that I receive the necessary tools to make the kind of world I wish to live, they need to educate us on relevant things that are happening in the world. By exposing people to the truth, it changes the way a person thinks. By educating students to be more innovative and come up with effective solutions to the world's problems, we can make it easier on the future generations to live. We need to look at the Earth, and study what we've done so that we can teach future generations to not make the same mistakes. The Earth is never going to get back to the way it was when we first starting using its resources, so we need to figure out ways to live happy lives without the Earth's resources, so that when we run out, we have the technology to survive.

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