Education As A Prime Mover Towards Change (Life) And Development (Mind)

By Jacqueline Acod. Jacqueline lives in Baguio, Philippines. Please read her article and leave your thoughts and comments below.

It’s like choosing what to dress for a day, looking at the mirror from different angles, questioning and answering is it good or the best? As for the education, it aims for the good as its best. Education is one of the prime movers of many civilized societies towards real change and development, whether to train students for their future livelihood or for intellectual purposes.

Education connotes two things, technical and academic. For technocrats and skilled, change comes through technological advancement. For the brilliant think tankers, change comes about through advancement in philosophical and analytical theorems. Combining the two, both are living, working and understanding each other for future progression. For example, a math teacher should be both technical and academic incline when teaching a math lesson, knowing the “what” questions and at the same time demonstrating or showing the “how” process.

One cannot go through self-change, growth and development without education during their prime years. This means elementary and secondary education must also be given emphasis because this are the framework and foundation of higher education. People who are deprived of their basic needs, such as education, are those living as peasants, criminals, and impoverished by the surroundings. For example, people who cannot even be in a workplace due to lack of their academic abilities and vice versa.

The constitution of other countries provides for free elementary and secondary education. This means that education nowadays is compulsory and necessary and should not be commercialized. For education to be a vehicle for change, it must reach all over the country, particularly in striving localities or in the grassroots. In this way, it will generate change because there will be zero ignorance and there will be massive mass literacy. If there is literacy, everything will follow. There will be change from social, political, economic and religious aspects.

If we want to change the moral fibers of society to get rid of graft and corruption and lawlessness, it is necessary to develop, first and foremost, the mechanisms of education, it is obvious developed countries have a higher level of education to help with this aspect.

Another prime mover for education is economic investments.

Investments come in many forms but it must be conceptualized as one that is constructive or for the good of the country. When there are massive investments in the country, like in the field of energy, production of goods, infrastructure and agriculture, there is – shall we say – a conversion of these investments into jobs, livelihood, sustenance of wants and needs. Now enters the graduates of technical and academic education who will man the investments producing billions of revenues for the country, the corporation and livelihood for the all workers. If there are no investments, then these graduates would rather work overseas for greener pastures and that is where a brain drain occurs in the country pushing back its economy to a stagnant status destroying the vision and mission of an Education Institutions to provide the country of remarkable graduate students for workforce empowering its own country.

In order to promote investments, changes in our laws, taxation and more offer of incentives is needed to sustain it. Naturally, if the systems are fair and graft free, nobody would want to miss the opportunity, an influx of investors would enter the country for business and work. Two of the prime movers I can think are these: education and investments. They go hand in hand in the short term or in the long term. In the end, if both are sustained and developed to the fullest, real change and development come in for the country.

So the question, should the role of education be to prepare students for working life, or to broaden their mind? The answer relies on the vision and mission of education and that is to prepare students for working life and to broaden their mind.

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