The Real Purpose of Education

We think of education very narrowly. Education is not just a means to find your vocation, education is an enabler in designing a good life.

As far as earning your daily bread is concerned, even uneducated people end up making big fortunes. At the least, they know how to survive.

But on the other end of the spectrum, we see many educated people (or lets say, people with impressive college degrees) in a dire state of affairs when it comes to living a good life. We see people around who have been handed over a good fortune that they squander. They have loving kids who they ignore in the busyness of work. They have caring parents around who they take for granted. They have a good career but their finances are messed up. Their relationships broken and they have a toxic view about life and others.

I feel that the real purpose of education should be recentered around living a good life and not simply have a good career. A good career is certainly an essential element of survival, but that’s cannot be the whole point of our life.

Where will we lead our society if we always place a premium only on vocational growth and position in the pecking order of society instead of celebrating people who are able to live a balanced good life?

A life built around the highest human virtues of love, compassion, contentment, relationships and generosity.

That’s what society needs today, more than ever before!

Elimination

The sculpture of David, one of the most famous sculptures of all time, surrounds itself by as much myth as its maker himself. When the Pope saw Michelangelo’s work for the first time, he looked at it in awe, and asked the famous artist how he could possibly create a sculpture of such utter beauty and precision. Without hesitation, Michelangelo answered:

“It’s simple. I just removed everything that isn’t David.

– Via Negativa

Start from what is absolutely needed. Keep things simple. Eliminate the clutter of stuff and thoughts.

Elimination inspires focus. It provides clarity. Simplicity, they say, is the ultimate sophistication.

On Brevity of Life

“You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”

…

Our time here is but a blip, and when we leave, the great world continues to spin. As such, the appreciation of our own lives has much to do with the ever-increasing awareness of its relative brevity. It is this — an awareness and acceptance of our own mortality — that makes us human. And it is the impetus, I’d argue, for living our lives to the fullest.

…

Today this awareness of the temporal nature of it all leaves me determined to seize, observe and interact with the days that remain. It is the knowledge of how quickly, sometimes tragically, things can change or disappear that fuels my urgency to be in the present.

– Excerpts from NYTimes Opinion piece Life Is Short. That’s the Point. by Allison Arieff