I found this in my unpublished files (and I added some additional material). It seems I have spoken of this theme before but I think it is worth recording:
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Recently, I spoke of what I called “over-education”. I always have difficulty defining it. I defined it in this way:
“Over-education is when people have been educated so much that they are actually impaired by it”
Education is basically learning what someone else has done. In this way, you are only replicating what someone else has done. You are thinking what they thought, doing what they did, using a process they created. Because of this, it’s not unlike a programming. There’s a point, though, where this works and is beneficial. At this stage education does these things:
- It teaches us to do specific things that are required in life, such as how to write, do math, know how to sign a check, etc.
- It helps us discover a personal creativity, a “thinking for ourselves”, that allows one to adapt to the different conditions of life.
But when there is too much education, and the programming becomes too extensive and too influential, then it actually hinders people. It actually starts to control people, and, in a sense, they become puppets to it, almost like a robot. It does things such as:
- They cannot think for themselves
- They are not creative
- They can’t apply what they know
- They only apply and use what they have been “programmed”
- They can only live in the little world of what they have been taught
In a sense, people lose their natural abilities to the “programming”. The programming dictates what they do, how they do things, how they think, and such. Once this happens then they can be considered over-educated.
In many ways, over-education makes people “stupid”. It creates a unique form of stupidity. Perhaps it can be called an “educated stupidity”. Because they know things, and how to do things, it appears as if they know a lot. Some qualities of this could be:
- They only know of what is in the confines of what they have learned
- They can only think according to the processes of what they have learned
Truly, they are “programmed” for, in many ways, they act no different than a computer.
There is no exact point of over-education that is the same for everyone. It varies from person to person. I tend to believe that when one graduates from public school then most people are over-educated. The rest of their life will be spent in undoing the over-education. Often, this entails “forgetting it all” and “doing other things”. There are some people who never become over-educated, no matter how much schooling they have. I think this is rare though. This is also a type of a person who sees more in learning than most people.
But there is a great illusion with education. This is because education is now associated with what can be called a “power structure”. This includes things like money, political power, economic power, social power, and such. Education may allow someone to gain access to this power but it doesn’t guarantee it. Despite this, education is mistakenly equated with that power as if education automatically entitles one to that power. It appears that this quest for power is the primary cause for over-education and why people fall to it so easily.
Here are some previous thoughts I had on over-education:
Some thoughts on the problem of over-education
Thoughts on the overvaluation of education
Copyright by Mike Michelsen
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