The End of Education

 The value of a college education depends on what you do with it and what sort of person you are. Summarily, however, education in itself, if educated in the truth can only have a positive effect on the whole of the person. As Juvenal the Roman poet said,” A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

        

In the beginning of higher education, as we are familiar with it, we see it as a means of bettering both the society around us and ourselves, it was a pious activity designed to enlighten one and all in antiquity. This seems to have changed, however, and while the benefit of college education is evident everywhere, it has popularly become a tool to be used only in becoming richer. In this case, we see that what was meant to free mankind, emancipate his soul, and move us forward as a society has become a means with which to exacerbate objectification.

         

 If our education only serves to enable our various base impulses, then all we see is the continual waxing of “blindness” to the truth, which only brings about unhappiness. The positions we earn via education become a yoke and do not help us. If a person gets educational honors in a process they loathed, so that they can do a job that is loathsome, simply so they can have a bigger house and more money… they are miserable. They are constantly tortured by their own wantonness, which they have enabled and inflamed, to do what they don’t want to do so that they can have what they want. When they finally get what they want they are concerned with keeping it, and the savor they should have enjoyed the thing with is marginalized by the excessive bitterness whereby they acquired it! This cycle is repeated indefinitely. The person is worse off than a slave, because a slave at least gets to do what he wants to sometimes, this person never does. 

In this instance, it is far better that a man, simply do good and be good and not go to college, lest he glut his passions and ruin his life. After all, Diogenes was right," Content is the wealth of nature." and," Whoever is content with the least, has the most."

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." ~Aristotle~