About education
There is a fashionable tendency to reject the educational process and, above all, higher education. The usual argument for supporting this position is the idea that higher education enslaves a person, “makes him a predictable “herd” for the system, and also limits a person in his desire to know the secret and unknown.
The higher education system is imperfect. But it allows the seeking person, who is busy with his own knowledge, and not with the incubation and cultivation of his greedy and selfish aspirations, to develop his intellectual potential. A higher education will not make you a giant of thought, will not in itself provide you with money or status if you need it, and will not even open up high career prospects. All this rests on your shoulders. Higher education will teach you to get in touch with ideas, with abstractions and intangibles.
Universities are the only educational institution where a person is taught to interact with the experience of people, whose creative and constructive potential, accumulated over thousands of years, has given humanity the benefits that every person uses every day, arguing about the “triviality” of education.
It so happens that money is one of the first motivators for work and even life for a large number of people. But here, too, the argument that the rich do not have a diploma, and yet they “know how to live,” fails. Let's turn to statistics.
Statistics say the following: among the 400 richest people on the planet, according to Forbes, 80% have at least a bachelor's degree. And the level of earnings directly correlates with the level of higher education. (Source)
Now about the philosophers. We can talk for a long time about the fact that don Juan’s students did not receive higher education (which is not true for Castaneda, Taisha Abelar and Florinda Grau, who have degrees in anthropology), that the monks of Zen Buddhism never studied at universities, but this will not make the slightest sense, since in this narrative we are talking about the European mentality in which readers grew up and were brought up, and in which the only instrument for transmitting the wisdom available to Europeans is universities. The Toltecs and Zen Buddhists have other educational mechanisms. That is why people of Knowledge may not always have European diplomas, but these people are always educated.
What does European Wisdom say in the words of Epictetus about education in the work “Discourses”?
So, keeping this structure in mind, we need to come to receive an education not so that we change conditions (this is not given to us and is not better), but so that, given the situation around us, as it is by nature, We ourselves have adjusted our consciousness to everything that is happening...
Therefore, what we mainly need is education, so that we can learn to apply the general concept of reasonable and unreasonable to particular cases according to nature...
What is the fruit of these opinions? This is exactly what the most beautiful and most appropriate for the truly educated should be: equanimity, fearlessness, freedom. In this, it is not the crowd that should be believed, which says that only the free can receive education, but rather the philosophers, who say that only those who have received an education are free.
Study and get educated, friends. This is the only way left for us by the wise to gain freedom.
Freedom from your own stupidity and myopia.
education
philosophy
castaneda
