Education is universally recognized as a key prerequisite for a healthy, vibrant, viable society. Hardly anyone would dispute that. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be a broad consensus on what one should be educated for. Although there certainly are many more facets to this question, I will limit myself here to contrasting two of them, which I consider most relevant to our present time: utilitarian education versus philosophical education.
A utilitarian education aims to equip one for the performance of practical tasks that have a direct and relatively short-term function in a society. Electricians fix power distribution networks; engineers build dams, computers and all kinds of handy apparatuses; physicians fix our bodies; diplomats avoid wars by resolving conflicts. The value and importance of these practical tasks to our society is unquestionable: through them, we can live longer, physically more healthily and perform our own tasks more effectively. But they ignore bigger questions: why do we live in the first place? How can we express our full potential in the world? What should we know and understand in order to live meaningful, fulfilling lives?
This is where a philosophical education comes in; an education that equips us to look critically and thoughtfully at the world around and inside us; an education that helps us understand nature, history and the dynamics of the human mind; an education that helps us take the lead in driving our lives to meaningful goals, as opposed to falling reflexively into the role of mindless consumers who only in their deathbeds come around to asking, ‘What has all this been about anyway?’ A philosophical education equips us to make something truly meaningful out of our lives.
We live in an age that – especially after the 1960s – turned so drastically towards pragmatism that we’ve nearly forgotten to ask why we live in the first place. Utilitarian advancements are important in that they extend and optimize our lives at a practical level, but leaving it at that is akin to restoring and turbo-charging your car so you can leave it in the garage. We’re so focused on living longer, optimizing the performance of necessary tasks, communicating faster and more frequently with one another, accumulating wealth and, most visibly, consuming and entertaining our way to depression that we’ve almost entirely forgotten to ask what this is all about. Why do we live? What is love all about? What is art all about? What have philosophers and poets alike been trying to say for the past few thousand years? What is going on?
It’s legitimate to optimize our lives at a practical level, but obviously not at the cost of failing to explore what life is about in the first place. Failing to provide a philosophical education that foments the growth and expression of thoughtful and sensitive human beings, attuned to their own place in nature, cannot possibly be a healthy way forward. Yet, the educational system in most modern societies today is almost entirely focused on utilitarian aspects. Why is this so? It doesn’t take much imagination to understand: a purely utilitarian education tends to turn people into controllable tools; cogs in the machine. Unequipped to even conceive coherently of the higher questions of existence, we’re left with no option but to blindly leverage our utilitarian skills day in and day out, contributing to economic output and wealth generation. From the point of view of entrenched power structures – which stand to gain most from this wealth generation – the benefits may seem to outweigh the risks: not only does the current educational approach favor production, it may be seen to increase social stability, reduce unrest and, perhaps most importantly, ensure the preservation of the power structures. The more unquestioningly one performs one’s tasks in the system, the less commotion and disturbances are to be expected.
Of course this isn’t natural. Human beings aren’t tools. We’re here to express ourselves – what else? – not to be cogs in a mechanism. A civilization of stupefied drones going blindly about their practical tasks is constantly flirting with collapse. But the power structures may believe that this can be managed through the right combination of alcohol, tobacco, television, pornography, commoditized shopping culture and, in more severe cases, cognitive behavioral therapy145 and dependencycreating psychiatric drugs.146The mainstream metaphysics of materialism enables this by rendering culturally legitimate the outrageous notion that unhappy people are simply malfunctioning biological robots.
The way to wake up from this all-too-real nightmare is a form of education that we, worryingly, seem to have lost familiarity with. Only a philosophical education can provide a truly human alternative for our future. Some may argue that, without a strong focus on optimizing the practical aspects of life, we would be so busy with securing food and shelter that we wouldn’t have time or opportunity to consider philosophical questions. Yet, a superficial look at the world’s pre-literate cultures proves this to be simply false: aboriginal societies have always made significant room for philosophy – which, in their case, we call mythology – despite their ever-present and rather formidable survival challenges.147 We look upon them as primitive and unenlightened whilst, in fact, it’s we who have become sick. Unfortunately, our sickness seems to play right into the hands of entrenched power structures and, in this way, self-perpetuate.
From: BRIEF PEEKS BEYOND
by Bernardo Kastrup
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