Another GRE essay …

The Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau once famously declared that “man was born free, but everywhere he was in chains.” For Rousseau, the source of this state of oppression was our political life, part of which included education, a subject he most famously expounded upon in Emile. What was the purpose of education? What must be the focal point of learning? For Rousseau, the answer was simple: the child was the measure of all things, and a good education inculcated the importance of citizenship. But for all his supposedly rebellious proclamations, Rousseau, the arch-Enlightenment figure, could not bring it in himself to stop the humanist mores of the modern and ancient world: a great degree of formal education lingered in the background, even if it was administered by what were then unorthodox methods. But Rousseau only serves to illustrate a larger point: that formal education seeks to free our minds and spirits by training them in the art of intellectual discipline, and in their restraint they provide a foundation. It is when the information it provides becomes and end and not a means to achieve something that it becomes burdensome and tiresome, stifling the creativity of those it is imposed upon.

The primary importance of a formal education is the inculcation of critical thinking skills, and especially that of logic and epistemology: how do we know what we know –– and what do we know? By recognising the boundaries of knowledge and how knowledge is formed, we are able to understand the world around us better, and in doing so we form a view of the world that enables us to live in it. It shows the importance of reason over emotion –– Plato reminds us in the Republic of the tripartite soul where the thumos, the appetite, has taken control over the logos, the reason, and soon the man devolves into a tyrant. A formal education equips us to avoid becoming what Hume thought of man –– a slave to his passions. By forming man from the ground up, it teaches him the importance of reason and provides him the discipline it requires to think systematically. It creates the foundations for discovery and developement of knowledge in myriad forms and along tracks that were not entirely foreseeable. Socrates, in the Platonic dialogue Crito, reminds Crito of his (and philosophy’s) first exhortation: the necessity of knowing oneself, of looking inward. A formal education gives us the necessary toolbox to look inward, and in doing so learning about the world.

By introducing students to a diverse set of ways of looking at the world, a formal education seeks to provide a holistic foundation. According to researchers, any morning’s edition of the New York Times contains over 16,000 facts. To make the morning paper appear intelligible and comprehensible is a hard task that takes years of accumulation of knowledge, even if much of it happens in the background. A good formal education provides the necessary tools to build upon the knowledge learnt in school –– it enables its possessors to recognise what sort of knowledge is valid, what is merely fleeting and passing or based on fallacious reasoning and would not stand scrutiny. When faced with fake news, a new pandemic that has afflicted us at a scale never seen before, someone who is formally trained with the tools needed to parse the information and then deduce its accuracy and reliability is less likely to fall prey to it. Those with a background in formal education that spreads across various disciplines, as is common in many liberal arts colleges, will not only wear a mask and socially distance themselves but also know why they are doing so: negligence will be minimal for them.

While it may seem that many might find formal education stifling, especially artists, writers, and filmmakers, it is important to note that a formal education in their fields is still remarkably important. It may appear that Michelangelo was merely a genius gifted with the skill of carving life into marble, but few will recognise the decades of study it took for him to realise his untapped potential –– study that spanned not just sculpting but formal study and visual analysis of a plethora of objects from Greek and Roman antiques to more contemporary work. The form of his famous Pieta was borrowed from a more common Northern European sculptural trope, for example. Similarly, Shakespeare drew heavily on the classics and knew enough Greek and Latin from his formal education, as the historian Jonathan Bate argues, that he could draw upon those stories from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and the subtle turns of phrases in Horace’s Odes to turn his work into subtle applications of a genius bethroted to an exegete par excellence. All forms of art take after other forms, and a formal education in their history is deeply influential for many of the geniuses and great artists: the rock band Queen drew its unique tinge from the operas of Verdi and Puccini; two of its members had doctoral degrees!

It is not formal education, thus, that stifles creativity and restrains the mind but a fetishisation of the past that hampers us from living in the present. A formal education provides knowledge and methods for living, but if those methods were ends in themselves, we would feel trapped. The sign of a good education, Sir Isaiah Berlin noted, was that its value would be recognised long after it was imparted: that certainly seems to be the case for many of us. By inculcating the necessary discipline in one’s minds, a formal education shows us how to be substantially free –– it shows us the life of reason, where the soul controls the body and not the other way around.