Education increases a person’s potential, but that potential can be compared to a fire that is only helpful if it is burning in the right place, and at the right time. The fire is individual accomplishment. Individual accomplishment is easy to measure, it is easy to showcase, and it is easy to exploit. Individual education falls short of its potential the same way other individual accomplishments do.
Individual accomplishments, have the potential to produce social betterment, but when they are not used that way they cause social depravation. Education is a tool, not a weapon. As with any tool, its effective use involves trying to use it safely, and effectively. Often it is used to make a better tool by improving its design.
Education has its roots in superstitious manure. It is a tree that needs the manure for sustenance. If what it produces is more superstition, that is just more manure that grows weeds that stifle education before it can bear the fruit of understanding.
All education is new growth. learning is an occurrence whose being is in real time. It is a new stem that that has the potential to bear fruit. Its luscious fruit provides the nutrients necessary to change people who act as if they are animals to a people who is humane.
The branches of education burn to warm the human spirit. When the fire is out of control it lays waste to its environment, causing the people to brandish their weapons of individual accomplishment. The ash-heap of history is an inadequate habitat for humanity. A single tree of knowledge remains to propagate an environment adequate to support humanity. That environment can become a forest of educational trees whose luscious fruit provides the nourishment for the societal education that will improve safety, capability, and happiness for this and coming generations.
One World, One People, One Future 