There Is Value in Traditional Education, But Not Everyone Sees It That Way

It’s interesting how many of the world’s great minds regard traditional education as “mental programming” or “forced conformity.”

Could you or I have come to the knowledge we now have by teaching ourselves to read, and then going through books on math, science, history, art, music and so forth?  It’s not inconceivable, but it sounds like a long slog, and one that would take a ton of determination.

Also, where math and science are objective disciplines, the others certainly aren’t.  Whose history are you going to choose?  There is a huge difference between the pabulum that we find in most text book treatments of U.S. history and things like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States or Readings in U.S. Imperialism.

Speaking strictly for myself, I feel blessed to have been taught to read by kind, matronly elementary school teachers, followed, quite a few years later, to have been led through art history, existentialism and quantum mechanics by some extremely gifted university professors.

Another way to view this is to look at the photo here and ask yourself: How much education do you think the guy at the right received?