1I’m tired. I’m tired of hearing the same thing over and over again. I’m tired of listening to the same idea offered as a panacea for all of the ills of society.

I am a teacher and have been for some years now. And all too often I hear my colleagues and my students present education as the solution to problems faced in this world. Whether it is environmental issues or women’s issues, child labor or human trafficking, militarism or the war on drugs, education is presented as a solution.

Typical of this is an interview of Ronald Cohen by Haider Ali Khan, which appeared in Business World or an article by Craig Long in the Iowa State Daily.

How short are our memories? How quickly have we forgotten the horrors of the past? Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Propaganda in Nazi Germany held a Ph.D. in German Philology and Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), held a Masters degree. We are talking about two of the most powerful men within Nazi Germany and both of them were extremely well educated. Yet, it was under them that unmentionable horrors were committed.

If such well educated people – and these are not exceptions – were able to perpetrate such atrocities, how is it that education is still proposed as the solution to the world’s problems?

Humans across the ages have believed that knowledge leads to wisdom. The human quest for knowledge is unquenchable. And humans have acquired considerable knowledge over the past centuries, especially since the advent of the scientific revolution. The global literacy rate continues to climb and is now the highest it has ever been. The numeracy rate, though slightly more complicated to measure, is also on an increasing trend.

However, this increased knowledge – at least measured by literacy and numeracy – has not resulted in greater wisdom. We have increased the number of ways of killing each other – and in greater numbers. We have ruined our ecosystems. Age old problems like disenfranchisement of women remain with us.

The solutions to these problems will continue to elude us with most current educational systems. Most education right now is test based, with bloated syllabuses, filled with increasingly more content that is irrelevant to the major issues at hand. In a world in which our youth are inundated with information to an extent unimaginable in the past , we do not equip them with the skills to parse through the rhetoric of exclusion, hatred, and fear that is now being used to a greater extent than ever before by our national leaders – who happen to be, on average, better educated than their predecessors!

We need our education systems to change. They need to change drastically. They need to stop being primarily about preparing people for jobs, as though obtaining a job were the highest human goal. That model of education might have been acceptable during the early days of the industrial revolution, though that too may be disputed. But it is certainly not acceptable now. We have reached a stage where most tasks can be performed by robots. We do not need humans to comprise a work force that provides manual labor.

We rather need humans who are able to think deeply and compassionately about the issues facing us. And to that end education should be our humble offering to the next generation, in which we apologize for our errors and prepare them to face the horrendous challenges we have bequeathed them.

(This will obviously take much unpacking. But for now a seed thought is what I present.)