How Much Faith Should We Put in Education?

Dandavats.com – by Ravindra Svarupa Dasa

With theories being established, taught, and discarded like disposable napkins, a father wonders whether his child will get a real education.

In the summer of 1970, I felt for the first time the fear that parents know when their child ventures out into the world. My daughter Emily wasn’t even three years old, a toddler. Yet one morning, as I watched her walking down the street to play, I suddenly saw her facing the whole sweep other future.

At moments like this, a person really comes face-to-face with the question of education. I started to think of what I could teach her to help her through the assorted puzzles of this world. And, much to my dismay, I realized that I had nothing to say.

Not that I was uneducated, by ordinary standards. I had majored in philosophy in college, studied literature for a year in graduate school, and had gone on to two years’ study in religion, also in graduate school. Yet, though I’d pondered for some seven years the greatest works of human thought (and in prestigious universities, under the tutelage of the best professors), all that came to mind as I watched my daughter playing were the hollow slogans of the day: “Be cool,” “Don’t get hung up.”