I'm sure we all know at least one person whether it is ourselves or someone else say "We know how to find "x" but I don't know how to fill out a check" or something along those lines. I also cannot tell you how frustrated I get whenever I hear that. Sometimes it's because I know they learned that because I go to school with them, though they may not have paid attention. But I also get frustrated when I hear that because it truly shows us the flawed view people have on education. That flaw is that we believe that a normal education is supposed to just hand us everything in order to succeed in life until we die... that's simply not true. I am here today, to show you the truth about education.
Everyone deserves the right, no matter who you are, to a good quality education. Nobody should be denied that right in partial or fullness just because of some description factor (race, religion, nationality, etc.). But what does it mean to get an education? As I described, there is a percentage of people who misconceive education. The first step in obtaining a fuller education, is understanding the education you are given. We can break down education into two parts. They are academic and core education, and while they come together to create a full education, they are two completely different objects.
Academic Education
This is your usual topics of an education like language, science, history, math, and a plethora of others. These are what give you what we call "smarts", it may sound funny but it just works. Now the reason why we are provided these topics in school are to assist in finding the most enjoyable topics that we would be more likely to pursue further. If you lean towards the sciences and math, maybe you want to pursue a STEM based career. Likewise, if you learn towards language and history, your may want to go in a government, or public based career (civil service, administration, journalism, and other such careers). Now obviously that doesn't mean you have to, but these courses get you to start thinking about what you want to do.
These courses not only teach you the bare bone course but they also teach basic skills needed for occupations in the given fields. Skills like public speaking, presenting, out of the box thinking, and other such skills that we perceive as simple but never give much thought. Many don't realize these inner lessons because we fail to often open our eyes to them and we only focus on the overall topics.
Core Education
This is what we can see as life skills and are the ones that many often perceive as failed lessons of the average education. While some curriculums depending on your areas education guidelines provide a class such FACS (Family and Consumer Sciences) or Home Economics, many do not. These classes do not teach everything that you need in the life skills department but it's a start and also this is not my point. My point is that the way we learn these life skills is surprisingly through LIFE! Are some of these skills easy? Maybe, but will you fail occasionally? Definitely, and that is how we learn. We learn from life throwing challenges at us and if we get knocked we get back up, learn from our mistakes, and try again. If we do not learn outside of what we are given in school, then we will be ultimately ignorant.
I am sure that all of us here, haven't used just what we were provided in school to discuss these topics such as climate change, inequality, COVID-19, internet safety and security, but then also take action on such topics. No, we saw the impacts that they were having on the world, we didn't understand the cause, but we lived the affects. We grew tired of a lack of knowledge and urged for an understanding. We then went out and researched, discussed with others who have had similar questions and some who may have a partial answer. We found data that combined with what we researched and learned could give a better understanding on where we were with that topic and where we need to go. That's where we took action, and that's where we begun to speak out.
So What Can We Do?
We teach! That is why we are here, to teach and share experiences and knowledge to inform others of the conflicts into today's world and what we can do about it. We support each other in academic education and core education so that we can all receive that desired good quality education. That is why we learn, so that we can apply it to help others. Whether that is through teaching or implementing the lessons into real world problems, we use it to make an impact. Let's start today in insuring that everyone receives a good quality education.
