Education's Epiphany

I was chatting with a colleague the other day and she was bemoaning the state of education of the country. She then asked me a question: “What can we do about the education of our children?” This got me thinking. It is an important question with an interesting perspective to it.
First, I think it is good to know that we are not alone in this struggle. While traveling for work, I come across articles in newspapers abroad where their citizens bemoan the poor quality of education in their respective countries. And the questions are quite broad, ranging from “How can we get our students to ask questions in class instead of just listening to lectures?” to “Why do our students go on killing sprees?” Over the past years, woven into the various reports of newspapers here and abroad, questions on the nature, quality, direction of education are inevitably raised.
This all brings to mind something: everyone who raises the question (verbally or mentally) has some sort of “standard” to gauge against. Many times, we compare it to how we were educated and almost always, there was something “better” during our time compared to now. Does this really mean we were better educated? Who knows? How could we know? How many of us, supported by “better education” of yesteryear, feel we have achieved our life dream or life mission because of the education we received? Inevitably, our success (or lack of it which means success in a different sense) revolves around more than just the education we received. We start to speak of our life experiences and how these experiences taught us. When this point of view if taken, we begin to see that education is more than going to school, and that doing something goes a long way towards our education.
So what happens when we go to school? We sit there, listen attentively (hopefully), absorb, and then apply via a test. I sure we all feel that this is what it was like or that it was something not too far from this experience. There seemed to be so much to learn and so much we didn’t know so there seemed to be something inherently “good” about being in school. Well, lets try to take another look at this perspective.
We generally assume that we go to school to learn. And the reason we need to learn is that there is so much in the world that we don’t know and have to know. The modern world, with its ever rapidly changing technology, puts even more pressure on this need to learn. So here we are confronted with the first question: can we ever learn everything? What do you think? So let’s take another point of view: suppose we already know everything but we didn’t know that we knew it? Unlike the tabula rasa point of view, the point of view I am suggesting would mean that it is not a question of knowing (we already know) but rather discovering that we know. What do you think this would do to a classroom situation, to the teacher, to the entire learning processes? Just think: what if the challenge to education was not how much we would know, but how to know that we know? The difference in perspective makes a world of difference. From the tabula rasa perspective, our learning process is always a chasing one. We are continuously chasing information (sometimes erroneously called knowledge) because we need to know more in the modern world. From this perspective, the chance of ever “knowing” everything remains beyond our grasp. For every bit of information or knowledge we gain, there is always a “new” one created out there that now we must seek our and find and learn. But do we really learn? What we learn to do is to chase information. One day, we tire and agree that all we will ever know, is enough to get by.
On the other hand, what if we knew everything but just didn’t know it. Then we would have to chase anything. There would be no knowledge beyond our grasp because it would all be within us, the question is how to see it and get to it. In the second case, we can live with the hope that we can continuously learn and see something new because it is within us (literally and graspwise). The challenge is how to find this out for ourselves. Thus, from this perspective, education becomes not a question of knowing but a question of how to make manifest. Yes, how do we have an epiphany experience in education? How does what we know become manifest to us? The answer is within.
Education is a real challenge in the modern world. Degrees become symbols of prestige and power and gainful employment. In the process, we begin to lose sight of the importance of what true education means, learning through experience and learning from within. As the mood of the Epiphany season slowly fades into the background, and the Lenten season rapidly approaches, we could all take a moment to reflect on what it would take to be “educated” in the world today. No degree can cover that. Only what we truly know, hidden deep within us, can guide us to meet our destiny and mission in live.