On the relevance of education: Stephen Downes

On the relevance of education...

Well, I guess the first thing I would say is…

Welcome to Canada!

but, welcome to Canada...

I’d say education is relevant.

I’d be very surprised if anyone said that is not relevant.

And I think it’s relevant not simply for the facts that you learn…

Learning facts is good, but you know, facts change over time,

what’s true changes over time, what you need to know changes over time…

So it’s not simply the facts that you learn that make education relevant.

I think that education gives you new ways of seeing the world,

new recognitions of things that are out there,

new opportunities of things that you can do

and new understanding and possibilities for your life that you can have,

that you might not have had otherwise, without an education.

An education is what opens the world to you.

A lot of people would say that an education is important

in order to have material success,

to get a job and all of that, and that’s true,

but it’s also important to know that education is by itself

not going to be sufficient to do this. You can’t just say:

“Oh, we will educate the population

and then they automatically be prosperous and peaceful and all of that"

I mean, it takes more than that.

I think an education is necessary for that to occur,

but you also have to, over time, build the society as a whole.

Education helps to do that, but it takes a wider good will in all of society…

I’m not sure how to express that exactly, but...

the idea...

the belief in a society that everybody in this society is important

and everybody in society contributes…

If you have a society like that,

where everybody believes in everybody else in the society,

then education becomes a very powerful tool

to help you as a community develop into something more,

and to have an interesting life…

Thank you.