A Blatant Disrespect for Education Signals the End of a Society

After I sold my small bicycle store in 2017, I spent a few months transcribing audio files. I didn't see it as a “career” but it was a convenient source of income as I planned my next move.Even though I could have been described as “over-educated” for the job, I still found there was a steep learning curve. Anyone who thinks they can waltz in on day one and outperform anyone who has been doing a task at a professional level for any amount of time is fooling themselves.I'm a fast typist and I have a degree in English literature, but I still had to adapt to the controls that allowed me to slow or stop the recording. I found that many recordings were of poor quality that made much of the transcription little more than your best guess.At no point in my life did I ever aspire to transcribe recordings. But once I had the job, it interested me. On the first days, it felt like making a reasonable wage while performing the task was next to impossible. After the first week, my typing speed had improved. More importantly, the text I produced was “cleaner” with fewer grammatical mistakes.I've always been a writer, and I've always been able to compose quickly. However, transcribing was the only job that incentivized creating an error free document on the first draft. Prior to that, I'd always disregarded grammar on the first run through because I didn't want to waste the mental energy worrying about it. But I found that if I had to read through a transcription a second time to fix the mistakes, I couldn't make a decent hourly wage.So, I had an incentive to improve skills which ultimately made me a much better writer.The interesting thing is that I lost all interest in transcribing at about the same time I actually started making money at the job. I didn't quit, instead it was a slow transition. I took fewer and fewer transcribing jobs until one day I never went back.This experience represents one of the realities of education that the population of the United States doesn't seem to understand. Phrases like “unskilled labor” are not accurate. There's not a single job in the whole world that doesn't require education. No matter how simple a task might appear, it takes people a long time to learn how to do that task quickly and efficiently. The development of any skill is deserving of respect.I've worked harvest next to old farmers who had done the job for decades. Their hands move in a blur even as they're able to maintain a friendly conversation.I've worked alongside electricians who were able to install twenty outlets in the time it took me to do one.I've taken classes from women with doctorates in Physics who were able to write out complex equations as they simultaneously explained the mysteries of the universe.All of these examples represent education.It's both frustrating and upsetting how people will casually disparage the idea of a PhD. “Fancy degrees don't necessarily earn you employable skills,” they grumble. But this kind of thinking completely misses the point.It seems to me that many people have absorbed this assumption that human beings only have value as long as they are able to complete some meaningful labor for somebody else. When you pause and examine that, you realize it's a very anti-humanist viewpoint.I had one person say, “We don't want a bunch of taxi drivers with doctorates.”My response to that is, “Why not?”I go back to myself as an example. The few months I spent working as a transcriber was not to fulfill the deepest yearnings of my soul. It was just a way to generate some income while I planned my next move.Why shouldn't people take a temporary job to give themselves time to assess what they want to do next? There's a pervasive, unspoken assumption that once you start getting a paycheck your education ends.That's absolutely ridiculous.What our society needs to understand is that your education never ends. Every day you should go to bed with a greater understanding of the world than you had when you woke up. If that hasn't happened, then you've wasted the day.The good news is that it doesn't take much. You can read a chapter in a book and learn something new. Every time you perform a simple calculation you make that process more instinctive. All of these efforts serve to improve your functionality as a human being. Education always empowers you to get more out of life.That we'd speak disparagingly about education is the most shortsighted thing I can imagine.The problem is Americans have been indoctrinated to equate education with debt. This is a malicious form of social engineering that's been deliberately deployed to exploit the population.We have to change our thinking and collectively recognize that having a taxi driver with a PhD would actually be good for us. Think of the conversations you could have on the way to the airport. But also consider that maybe that person is only driving taxi to fund the cancer research he's doing at home. Maybe that person will save millions of lives.Driving a taxi is important work.Transcribing texts is important work.Doing cancer research in your spare time is important work.The more educated you are, the better you can serve all of the human race.I meet a lot of people who have a confused perception of labor. They become resentful of anyone who aspires to get an education because they seem to think that represents some unwieldy social expense. But the fact is that society pays a terrible price if the population is allowed to remain ignorant.Every dollar a society spends on education brings in a profit that’s impossible to calculate. In contrast, money spent on war is lost forever with no benefit at all except for the percentage of those funds that's spent on education.The military trains doctors. The military trains pilots. Those represent responsible uses of taxpayer money.Building nuclear bombs? Not so much.One of the main problems in our perception of education is similar to our perception of healthcare. The general population has been indoctrinated to believe that these things must be appallingly expensive. Then the argument shifts so the benefits of education fall through the cracks and all we think about is the expense.“Who is going to pay for that?” becomes the question. We never even stop to recognize that these things don't have to be expensive. We're not even trying to provide education and healthcare efficiently and affordably. We act as if that's not even possible.The inescapable reality of modern life is that the world is evolving faster than ever. I took a job in 2017 that has already become obsolete thanks to advancements in technology. Rejecting education is not the pathway to stability. There's a very real chance that whatever job you're doing today is something that won't exist in five years.So, you better resolve to learn as many new skills as you can.Our education never ends. That's simply a reality of this existence that we have to make peace with. What you'll come to discover is that learning more about this beautiful world we all inhabit is one of the greatest joys of life. We need to respect education. The greatest tragedy, by far, is to squander your existence because you steadfastly refuse to allow your education to begin.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI'm so happy you're here, and I'm looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. 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