Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” This seems to be an undeniable fact given the people who are in the chains because of religions, cultures, racial status and so on. On these grounds, people have been persecuted, subjugated, killed and mistreated. Now, to understand the difference and to resolve these differences, an open mind can play an effective role. The majority of the population can be said to be under some kind of captivity, be it political, social, societal or any other kind and grave situations make these issues even more dangerous to the harmony of humanity. To address these situations, a free and broad mind may play a role, although a broad mind may not be an easy thing to achieve – it is much harder than you think.
The issues are endless and mostly the result of limited minds in the world; that is why military science is achieving a higher level of development than medical science even though it is quite clear what we need the most. So, what is thing that may make thing this way or, more specifically, that may broaden our mind? Education. This has the primary purpose of releasing our mind from multiple chains and encouraging us to look the thing in big way and in a broad way because that is the only way to perceive the truth. However, it is sorrowful to see that education has now taken on so many roles that it has forgotten its primary basic role, which is why the all of the things that go from worse to worse.
This can be observed by the increasing trend in the education system where now most students are taught how to become better employees, how to earn more, how to be good at professions and time and energies are all directed in these areas. The excessive emphasis of education on financial security and a workforce future may not be the real job of education. If we realistically look at the current state of the world, we would find perplexing results; there are more deaths, higher poverty, growing extremism, terrorism deteriorating environmental conditions and so on. But these issues do not receive much attention and there is a lack of effort to try and mitigate them because most students are busy preoccupied by working life.
Education is really intended to keep the balance of life rather than putting people in the work place and if we have one thing that we can use to solve the problems of the world, it is the mind. If we concentrate most of this on the workplace then, of course, our problems not only remain unsolved but will also aggravate further. Working may be the one aspect of education but it is not all of it, and when the thing go wrong it will affect all of us. We will start to understand these problems as our own once we let the education broaden our mind as it is supposed to do and then things will be different.
Education is certainly not a limited thing that must have the sole purpose of preparing us for working life; its real, actual purposes is associated with humanity, global peace, human development and so on. Having such a useless purpose, in light of the perspective of global problems, makes the education a thing that narrows mind – which is against the very nature of education itself.
It is high time to broaden our life because the problems that have been mentioned may now pose an existentialist threat to humanity and require immediate intervention from all of us. In this process, education may guide us well if we let it help us.