Can fixing education save the world?

The Value of Education: The View of a Devil’s Advocate

My passion for educational development and education in general is fueled by living in a country like Egypt, especially over a significant period like the past four years have been. While for the majority of the population there has been an epic focus on the ‘deep state’ or ‘corruption’ or ‘social security’, these times have done nothing but amplify the alarm bells going off in my head on the current and future state of education. My premise, as I am sure that most pedagogues in Egypt will concur, is that a large proportion of the issues facing Egypt, in particular your average Egyptian today, are down to the poor levels of education they have experienced over the past thirty years. A premise that seems so logical … yet is it?

I have recently been watching the TV show ‘Game of Thrones’ and aside from the gripping action and tremendously written storyline by George Martin, and the fact of course that it is fiction, one thing really stood out to me. The story is set in a fictional land, but at a time similar to that of many a great civilization, and though I am no historian, I can be as accurate as telling you that it was back when wars were fought with swords. This however got me thinking, how is the world, down its most basic abstraction actually any different today? Have we as people changed? Have our priorities changed?

I was baffled when thinking about this in a simplistic manner. People still kill people to take what they feel they deserve, or that others deserve less, people are still hostile/racist/ignorant towards other customs and cultures, there are still wars, invasions, rape, corruption, selfishness and greed. This did not make sense to me, how are we still behaving in this fashion when we have made immense strides in information technology, communication and most importantly education?

On the flip side, before formal education, there were still significant strides in invention, knowledge and science. People still discovered, explored, inquired and critically thought about topics.

This thought has haunted me since. Does education then have any true value or impact on human behavior? Can we blame current extremism, ignorance, and racism on poor education? Or is there something else?

Moreover, based on this observation, can we truly adjudge the value of education on modern society? I am not suggesting that we conduct a social experiment where one city was to be formally educated for a generation while a control city does not, however, I am struggling to think of how we can verify that our field has a true purpose? Could it be that what I perceived as the key to helping society is in fact an illusion?

Even if we cannot test this hypothesis using experimentation, we can look at trends from our past and history? There is a large body of data that reflects a direct relationship between a country’s economic performance (or standard of living) and its level of formal education. Significant changes can be seen in countries like Brazil, Korea and Finland. But are those changes solely a result of the change in educational system or is it because the whole country in every aspect was going through a severe change that was demanded by its people?

I really do enjoy my career and aside from this one thought, I have never doubted the importance of education, but it has got me wondering if we have got it right? I am always up to date with the latest research in education and have witnessed first hand the impact of using such strategies as active and cooperative learning, gamification and hybrid design. But will these changes help to achieve a better society in another generation? Are we just devising better ways for people to learn about things that will help them become successful statistics, or are we devising better ways of forming citizens?