Education Level

Question I was recently asked by a professional who was about to attempt to help me with financial issues: How many total years of education do you have?

I thought about it quickly. Yikes! I have a lot of "education" behind me. The normal person graduates from elementary school with 12, as I did. That's a large chunk of time in and of itself. Add undergaduate education to that and you start talking 16 or 17 years. If you want to go higher than that, you are looking at somewhere around 18 years for a Master's degree and it escalates higher for a PHD.

That means that education consumes the better part of a fifth of your life, so you either better like it, tolerate it, or just plain hate yourself. I'd say I tolerated it. I never loved it. I loved the atmosphere of college and the people, but my classes were just something I did to stay where I wanted to be. Don't get me wrong, I did fairly well throughout all of my schooling. I was never one to study too much, but I had the ability to recall things when I needed to for tests. It's the old "learn it then dump it" routine.

How many people can remember all of the random theories you learned about in science or all of the mind-numbing facts of history? Are they important? Sure, in some aspect to somebody. Will they help me live a more fulfilled life or excel at my current job? Nope. People specialize their education so that they can have an excuse to not remember all of the other junk that they are forced to learn through the educational system. That's the way I approach it anyway. If you have a degree in computer science, you don't have much need to remember the classification system for all living things on the earth. (For those of you who are wondering it's kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species - thank you very much.)

So why do people spend so much time and money on education? Some people enjoy learning just for the sake of learning. I am not one of those people. Some people learn in order to get the job they always dreamed of. Some people simply get a degree in order to get a higher paying job. Some people graduate just so their parents will leave them alone. Some people decide they don't have a desire to go beyond high school education and so they graduate and get a job wherever they can.

I'm a big fan of education, but I do not think it is the end all be all of life. There are so many more important things than to constantly be stuck in a book or studying. There's a lot of living to be done outside the classroom walls, and some of it is way more important than anything you can ever learn within the walls of the educational system. Can education help you to appreciate certain things more? You bet. Can education provide you with a better background understanding of something? Undoubtedly. But can being "educated" define you as something that you may not be?

Somehow, we have equated a person's educational attainment as a reflection of who they are. Too an extent, this can be true, but it can also be a tragic fallacy. To consider a man or woman "worth" more to company because they have a higher level of education can be a dangerous miscalculation. If it comes down to a person with a master's degree in something who is a complete jerk and has no interpersonal skills or a person with a bachelor's degree who is friendly and a team player, I would choose the "lesser-educated" person in a heartbeat. Most companies would say the same thing, but the reality is that sometimes the degree carries a person who would otherwise be rejected.

You can be the smartest person in the world, btu if you cannot interract with people what good is that knowledge? There are people in the business world who I wouldn't trust to feed a goldfish, let alone lead a company. There are garbage men who I would trust with my life. One is educated and the other is kind. One understands the value of the dollar while the other understands the value of a person. One sees people as something to use for their connections while the other sees people as someone of interest.

Don't get me wrong here. Educated people can also reflect all of the good things in the list above, just as the garbage man can be the nastiest person in the world. I'm just saying that sometimes I think we classify people based upon their education and I think that is wrong. Sometimes the sweetest people on the face of the earth are some of the "dumbest" when it comes to educational attainment.

When I see a person, I don't see their degree.
I see the image of God in a sometimes tarnished and deformed host.