While you might prefer to talk about the Tigers’ wonderful victory this past Saturday or to track the “Twilight Saga” cast around Baton Rouge, I’m still struggling with the idea of justifying the importance of education — regardless of economic variables.
However, don’t be scared away or annoyed by my intentions.
I realize without higher education you wouldn’t be able to enjoy a good game day, safe tailgating or a fun environment that culminates in an important win for the Tigers.
Neither could you care about a movie and its production if it wasn’t for education in the process of creating, selling and ultimately appreciating a good piece of popular culture like “Twilight.”
So let me try this again.
Education: It’s not about the money it makes, it’s about the quality of life it nurtures.
The crisis we are facing is supposedly caused by a lack of economic and financial resources, but it’s actually a crisis of human resources.
We have everything we need — except for the creativity to come up with an educational system that is meaningful and strong enough to sustain itself.
Suffering from a sudden shortfall on the funding and structural resources needed to carry on an ignorant educational system designed to generate job-filling dummies, we lack the developed expertise of the very faculties that makes us humans: creativity, craftsmanship and passion.
“We make very poor use of our talents,” says Sir Ken Robinson, creativity expert and educator, in a TED.com talk. TED is a website with lectures from a diverse team of experts in several areas of expertise. You might want to check it out — if you care about your education.
If the University is a business-driven enterprise that is evaluated through the amount of “profit” — read “number of graduates” or “graduates occupying jobs” — we are missing the point of the education the University is supposed to provide in its higher forms.
While my mission here is neither to dismiss nor explain the obvious and explicit importance of money and funding for education to happen, it is to bring out the forgotten necessity of all the other elements that make our lives dependent on education.
Why do we want to spend money? Is living only working? Is education a matter of an input-output equation?
Living is learning. Heard that before? I’m sure the answer is yes, and unfortunately it might have been in a self-improvement book cover or online text. But it’s a true statement, and it’s up to us to recover its meaning.
It means if right now you feel that, rather than enjoying your educational experience, you are trudging through it (classes, papers, exams), you are not cultivating something that is going to help you build quality of life later.
In a recent talk with a friend and professor, I heard these words: “It’s not my job to tell my students and their parents how likely it is that he or she is going to get a job after graduating. What I do is teach the valuable skills I learned in life and in my occupation, such as discipline, problem solving, perception, creativity and expression.”
Wondering what he teaches? He’s an oboe professor and an established musician.
Maybe not the type of position Gov. Bobby Jindal and the LSU System Board of Supervisors had in mind when approving the $5.1 million in cuts to LSU.
But if all you care about is the Tigers or the “Twilight Saga,” then I don’t blame you. There are worse things out there.
There’s some who are only concerned with making money and getting to higher grounds in politics to, well, make more money.
I’m still trying to guess where they got their “education.”
Marcelo Vieira is a 32-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_MVieira.
 
—-
Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]