Falling into Oblivion

Falling into Oblivion

Education is the knowledge or skill obtained or developed by a learning process. Education is the field of study concerned with the pedagogy of teaching and learning. The dictionary provides simple definitions of education. We are given a straightforward meaning of what education is, but according to B.F. Skinner, a renowned psychologist, "education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."

Ever since I was a little girl, I was constantly reminded how important education is. I went to a Catholic school, and my entire elementary education was spent with nuns, teaching out of the Bible. I soon realized, these nuns were teaching me about people who weren't "formally educated." These people never went to a structured school, like the one I felt I was being forced to attend. They never had to get up early in the morning, wear uniforms, take the bus to school, had classmates, and they were never told by different teachers what to do. Their parents taught them at home, and they just heard stories in the streets, and in the marketplace from their elders. No books existed, and I wasn't quite sure if they had anything to trace their education back to. Who, all of a sudden, decided to teach their young, and to turn that idea into a universal tradition, to keep it going for generations? I sat there and I couldn't help but wonder why these nuns were teaching me about people, whom I saw, as uneducated. I felt the entire biblical course was irrelevant. I thought I was in school to learn, so what could I possibly learn from people who didn't even know what a book was, or who probably couldn't read from a book even if they did? Who made the decision what we should learn or if we should even learn at all? Why have we stressed the importance of education historically?

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. Knowledge is first acquired from open-mindedness. As much as we might want to, we can't filter through what is being taught to us. We cant' choose the things we want to learn and claim we are educated. We can't read a book written by a black author and not know what his background is or have some knowledge and understanding of the history of his people.