For prospective college students contemplating taking online college courses, there are a lot of questions concerning the point of higher education. Therefore, it is an excellent idea to have an intelligent articulation handy when college students ask about the value of a college education. Socrates, you may recall, asserted that the unexamined life is not worth living. Contrast this with the notion that ignorance is bliss. If you are not aware of your ignorance should this be corrected? Is education that which enables you to survive? On a very basic level, education is survival knowledge. It is the notation of cause and effect. If you venture out in subzero weather without protective clothing, the consequences will be to become frost bitten, immobilized and possibly freezing to death. If you put your hand in a flame you will likely be burned. As a child you learned a lot of cause and effect relationships by directly experiencing them. As an adult, you can note more symbolic layers to cause and effect relationships. For example, if you do not learn basic math skills, you won't be able to balance your checkbook, calculate tax deductions, or determine if someone is cheating you.
Notation of cause and effect is part of being aware of events in the world. The more events we become aware of, the more cause and effect relationships we master, the greater our knowledge and the more effective is our education. Now, granted we can learn causal relationships via direct experience, as cited above. But it would be inefficient for you to have to learn all such relationships directly. Take chemistry, for example. To master this discipline, you would have to reconstruct all experiments and observations handed down to you from the beginning of this discipline. This is not only unnecessary, but inefficient.
In addition to learning cause and effect relationships in the physical domain, you can also explore such relationships in the aesthetic domain. For example, as you listen to music, you discover certain combination of notes you find appealing and some combinations that you find disagreeable. Later, you learn to predict what you like, whether it be a certain combination of instruments, certain sequences, whether completely instrumental or vocal or any number of other variables.
If you formalize what we are discussing, then you will have entered the world view of pragmatism. Pragmatism holds that one should judge the efficacy of one's actions by their consequences. This view focuses on the practical: If you do such and such, you predict that such and such an outcome will follow. In moral terms, it is like utilitarianism. If you do not pay your rent, you may be brought to court and fined. Further, you can be evicted. These are the negative outcomes of your choice. Applying this reasoning to education runs something like this: If you study accounting in college, it will increase your chances of becoming an accountant for large business. If you do not go to college, you will likely continue in the type of job you presently hold.
Why a college education? A college education, in general, is a way of increasing your awareness, whether it be awareness of how money operates or how the stars move in the night sky. It is a way of regarding experiments in the chemistry lab, a way of judging the effect of advertising on the sale of a product, a way of monitoring your own health, a way that shapes your choices at every stage of life. If education is this pervasive, then does it not make sense to consciously obtain it?
So, if education is awareness and the notation of cause and effect relationships, then how do you increase it? The short answer is to go to school. Schools are social depositories of knowledge (cause and effect relationships). This is a way of compressing our experience over time. And now, we have a great advantage over the schools of 30 years ago. We can go to school on line. We need not even leave the comfort of our home to go to school. So, what is the value of education? Recall Socrates' claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. If your life is unexamined, it means you are not noting cause and effect relationships that are right before you.
Your life will suffer as a consequence. It will suffer in the physical sense of being burned it you place your hand in the fire, in the financial sense if you do not learn basic math, and in the aesthetic sense if you have no understanding of your likes and dislikes. In conclusion, just consider the counter to Socrates: Ignorance is bliss. How functional do you think this maxim would be for survival?
