The folly of public education
Published:Tuesday | June 22, 2010 | 12:00 AM
The Editor, Sir:
Peter Espeut's Friday, June 18 column on the value of an education in Jamaica is just another presentation of a modern, economic-elitist philosophy that, rather than freeing us from it, maintains the servile bondage of a colonial, master-slave relationship, this time, not between white and black, but between rich and poor, educated and unfortunate.
Lest we forget, much of what is called public education in our world today came little more than a hundred years ago to rescue poor children from the long, slavelike conditions of the industrial-age workhouse, in effect, from the bondage of poverty. Before that, education was the privilege entertainment of the wealthy aristocrat.
In time, inspired by the needs of the great world wars, we prided ourselves on educating the masses, but in truth we eventually allowed the system, as we do most things, to grow corrupt and perverse, and eventually, as so many are today, schools became tools of the state, teaching little more than what was needed to run the system for the benefit of the rich.
Wrong reasons
Today, we seem to treasure education, perhaps for all the wrong reasons.
In truth, we get an education apparently in order to better ourselves at nothing more than business, to lift ourselves above the uneducated of our brothers by learning to more efficiently exploit them for our service and entertainment. In other words, we do not learn for learning's sake, but for selfish reasons. We no longer care about truth, but only what it is that works to make the system work for us.
In the end, much of what we have made of education today grows like a malignant cancer, spreading across the so-called 'developed world'. It has become a path to elitism and arrogance, and of ourselves, it has made us pretenders, petty, self-serving fools who while we would be godlike, are constantly taught the harder lessons of life - lessons like Challenger, 9-11, Katrina, and the Gulf, among most recent others.
Ironic, isn't it? It all began by saving poor children from the workhouse, yet if we believe and subscribe to Mr Espeut's thinking, as positive and apparently beneficial as it seems, it will only teach us in the end how to put someone else's children there in our fields, in our workhouses, in effect, to replace one group of slaves with another.
I am, etc.,
ED MCCOY
Florida