Are we part of the 21st century education?

What is the objective of education?

If the answer is "... to get a job" then we should not educate but train for six months and not educate for four or five years. I mean there's even a job that does not even entail education in this context - whoring = )

But of course, one can argue that the reason some of us are in that situation is because they did not receive education thus, their life choices is limited. And the reason they are doing what they are doing is because they want to save money so that they can send themselves to school and get educated = )

So, what's the objective of education? Someone said "...to be educated." I think that was de Quiroz who wrote that.

If that's true then how do I know if one is already educated?

Well, most colleges and university will point to an ability to write a thing called a Paper. To some a practicum paper. To some a research paper. I have no issue on this. My issue is that we miss the point of doing a Paper.

A Paper is a result of a journey of curiosity. And not the end on itself. One must have a journey. If one does not have a journey, one can not write a Paper even if he has all the resources at hand. Even if he has the new MacBook Air = )

One can only write a paper if one is "curious" about something that he is willing to give his life to a journey that will bring him to a place where nothing seems to make sense. To a place where he even start to doubt the very education he dearly paid for.

To be educated is to be open... to be passionate... so passionate that when it's time to write the Paper one could not even stop writing because one could not write the whole truth on a piece of paper in so many pages.

This where I think, we, yes, WE, or more correctly I am mistaken as an educator. I am thankful I have seen the error of my thinking.

To write a Paper is a never ending activity. Equally important to what one has found in his journey is the list of things one suggest to the next pilgrim where to look for the thread of truth.

This limitedly inspired thinking on paper writing has its roots on the 1960s expensiveness of information processing. One has to cut truth (data) to pieces because at that time it is expensive and technologically infeasible to process a larger chunks of truth thus, the batching.

But as technology progressed and developed over time, we forgot the reason why there was a need to increase processing power in the first place or why we did the batching in the first place. That we need increase processing power because we have to process bigger slices of truth at any given time. The long time coming of this technology dulled and lulled us to sleep and made our minds commit to batching and slicing truth to pieces and accept this sliced truth as the whole truth = )

This processing of data in batches has the same dynamics as the current Paper writing. We have to write the Paper before because we need to see the whole truth but at that time when we started writing it, the technology involved was not yet there. Thus, we batched it. But we are batching not because that's how it's supposed to be done but because that was a compromise at that time between our technology and truth. Now that technology has progressed a bit, we have to do away of our compromised way of doing Papers. It's now time we integrate back to reality and not let the Papers gather dust.

Because this the 21st century education, an education that sees and affects reality. Where the concepts shapes the real and the real refines the concepts.

In the end, to write a Paper is not to write a Paper but to see and describe the dance of life as it progresses = )