Herbert Lewis, Contributor

I am convinced that some of our so-called educated people have failed to appreciate the true meaning of education. I have come to this decision based on discussions which one hears taking place on radio, television and in the wider public on a daily basis.

We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster.

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, according to some experts we will lose about 116 square miles of rainforest or about an acre every second. We will lose another 72 square miles every second to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mis-management and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today, the human population will increase by hundreds of thousands. And today we will add some 15 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere.

The truth is that many things on which our future health and prosperity depend are in jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, and the beauty of the natural world.

I believe that it is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. I believe it is rather, largely the result of work by people with B.As., B.Ss., L.L.Bs., MB.As, and Ph.Ds. Remember that the designers and perpetrators of the holocaust were educated people. Writings suggest that the Germans, in most respects, were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What, might one ask, was wrong with their education? I guess it emphasised theories instead of values; concepts rather than human beings; abstraction rather than consciousness; answers instead of questions; ideology and efficiency rather than conscience.

No guarantee of decency

The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think. Have we given any thought to the fact that it is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or did not make a fetish of reading?

My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. Don't get me wrong. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival - the issues now looming so large before us in a fast-changing world. It is in my opinion, that it is not education per se that will save us, but education of a certain kind.

Listening to some of our people who have been exposed to higher education causes, one has to conclude that our system is enshrined in myths which we have come to accept without question.

Myths

First, there is the myth that ignorance is a solvable problem. I don't believe that ignorance is a solvable problem, but rather it is an inescapable part of the human condition. The advance of knowledge always carries with it the advance of some form of ignorance. I believe that what had previously been a piece of trivial ignorance can become a critical, life-threatening gap in human understanding. We only have to look at the current concern for the ozone layer to understand my point.

A second myth is that with enough knowledge and technology we can manage planet Earth. 'Managing the planet' has a nice ring to it. It appeals to our fascination with digital readouts, computers, buttons and dials. But the complexity of Earth and its life system can never be safely managed. What might be managed is us, human desires, economies, politics, and communities. But our attention is caught by those things which avoid the hard choices implied by politics, morality, ethics, and common sense. It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants.

A third myth is that knowledge is increasing and by implication, human goodness. There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily be measured. What I think can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing, while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. For example, I understand that some institutions no longer hire certain faculty in their biology departments. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important areas of inquiry.

The fourth myth of higher education is that we can adequately restore that which we have dismantled. In our modern curriculum, we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and sub-disciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16, or even 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for their communities are large.

We have fooled ourselves

Let me give you an example. We routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This undoubtedly explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic improvement, soil erosion, poisons in our water or air and resource depletion from gross national products (GDP). We add the price of the sale of a box of coffee to GDP while forgetting to subtract the topsoil lost in its production.

As a result of incomplete education, I believe that we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

My fifth point is that there is a myth that the purpose of education is that of giving the means for upward mobility and success. If this is how we see education, then we are engaged in the mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate charade.

The plain fact is that the world does not need more 'successful' people. But it desperately needs more peace makers, healers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And, these needs have little to do with success as ourculture has defined it.

Finally, our culture does not nourish that which is best and noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul.

Measured against the agenda of human survival, how might we rethink education? A question for all of us.

Herbert Lewis is an industrial relations consultant and past president of the Jamaica Employers Federation; e-mail herblewis@cwjamaica.com.