A New Education

Think about the education that you received growing up.  Consider your formal education from school, and the lessons, habits, and ideas that you got from your parents and family.  Reflect on what you learned from your neighbors, friends, everyone.  Think about what you learned and what it has or is doing for you.

It means something different for everyone.  It's ongoing...What everyone takes from it varies.  We're taught to value education, in a traditional sense.  For example, we've been learning historically that getting a college education is the best way to a great career and financial security.  We've been learning that saving as much as we can is the best way to prepare for retirement.  We're conditioned to take the road most travelled.  Some of us are trained to follow in someone's footsteps...become the future leader of dad's company, be a lawyer like grandfather, or a politician because that's the family business.  Some of us are trained to "just go out and make a decent living, and take care of our families."

Part of the lesson is correct.  We should be trained to be leaders...of ourselves if no one else.  We should be trained to take care of our families.  But why is it that we are trained to go down the traditional, beaten path? It is because we've been trained to believe that it is safer.  The less risk you have to take in life, the better.  We know that the doctor or the teacher is going to be successful and secure...so we continue giving our posterity this one sided education.

Again, there are no quarrels here with teaching our posterity about the good possibilities that lay down road familiar.  But what is really sad is that even though we now see that steering the future leaders down that path is not necessarily safer all the time, we still turn our back on that road less travelled.  Experience is teaching them that going the traditional route is not always a sure bet to having the life you want, whether from a financial or happiness perspective.  So why is the formal education they are receiving not providing them with an alternative?  What does it say for our own education, that we believe it's okay to send them out into the world so inept for what they will really find out?  What will what they have learned actually do for them and us in the future?