To What End Are We Being Educated? Part I

Bertrand Russell, who is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the sceptical school of thought, following in the paths of Bayle and Voltaire, posited the following in one of his Sceptical Essays: Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge, reading and writing, language and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgements for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence. Before going any further, it is important that I confess my profound admiration of Bertrand Russell and his works. It takes some guts for an intellectual to admonish the reader of his works and any other proposition to be sceptical about ‘established’ knowledge and go the full length of questioning every idea and holding it up to the light of reason and empiricism before utilising it. Considering that this piece does not intend to discuss scepticism, I shall part ways with the subject and proceed to the issue at hand.

The position by Russell cited above is a very profound one which I tend to agree with and can further be developed into pages and pages of paragraphs. It is not the intention of this article to do that and exhaust the reader out of any interest in further attempting to find out the theme of this article. Additionally, because of the extent to which Russell’s comments can further be developed, I will only attempt to expand on the first part of the objects of education, i.e., to give definite knowledge, also known as, information. My comments on the second part of Russell’s statement will come in the second instalment of this article. I will seek to ascertain to what end the objectives, as posited by Russell, have been achieved or are being achieved.

Every period in human history shaped its educational processes towards enabling humankind in meeting the demands of the prevailing circumstances during that period. I am sure our hunter gatherers ancestors passed down knowledge to their young ones on the basis of hunting and relocating as needed. The same can be said of our ancestors during the agricultural revolution. This scenario is also true of the industrial revolution and most recently, the scientific and technological ages. However, it is worth noting that during all these periods, it was considered a necessity to ensure that children or students were armed with the basic skills of reading and logic. Obviously, reading during the hunting gathering and most of the agricultural eras came in the form of stories and folktales handed down from one generation to the other. This implies that three (3) kinds of definite knowledge were necessary for the improvement of the mind, namely: language, logic (arithmetic), and specialised knowledge (career). Armed with this definite knowledge, generations after generations were able to take on the challenges of their time and build on the achievements of their previous eras in fostering civilization. The miniscule historical details intended to sway the reader away from the theme of this article will be avoided to keep the interest of the reader as high as possible throughout.

It is 2022, and the technological age is so far gone that humankind has started to predict beyond its wildest imagination the potential future accomplishments possible with the available technologies. If you have been following that space, you would know that there are major advances on the biotechnological, artificial intelligence, and machine learning fronts. The point of this article, however, is to call into question whether the objective of education according to Russell, as spelled out in the opening paragraph, is being achieved adequately in a third world country like Liberia to enable it keep up with its counterparts on the African continent and the world to bring much needed prosperity to its people. I know, as many of the readers do, that the educational infrastructures and system in Liberia is extremely broken and will therefore require some extraordinary or supernatural (maybe) interventions to have it back at prewar levels before working its way up to the level of the 21st century. As the most basic objective of education, the transmission of definite knowledge to the school going population of Liberia is evidently defective. If you are a regular visitor on social media platforms in Liberia, as most of us are, then you should have a fair idea of where I am going with this. Even more seriously, if you have ever had the opportunity to score essays in an academic setting, then you would agree with me that the definite knowledge of reading and writing is missing in most Liberians of school going age. Reading, as used in this article, is not limited to the kind we do during our leisure period, but also includes the one we do to enable us to study for examinations or answer questions on those examinations.

The flaw, as the case is in the Liberian situation, with the basic acquisition of definite knowledge creates a system in which the attempt at building on those flawed basic knowledge with specialised knowledge creates a much more dangerous situation than anticipated. In the words of Naval Ravikant, real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up. He also goes on to say Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things. What I have observed in our tertiary educational system is an attempt by people who have been 4/10 or less at the secondary school level attempting to get super deep into economics, civil engineering, accounting, computer science, and other specialised knowledge on a foundation of an extremely weakened basis. As a civil engineer, I can speak from experience when I say that an attempt to place a 4-storey building on a weak foundation (considering all the metrics) will lead to nothing but eventual collapse of the structure. This will be partly due to the fact that the load being placed on the foundation is way above what the foundation is capable of taking. Naval succinctly expressed this idea when he said I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost.

It is submitted then, that the problem in achieving the first objective of education in a country like Liberia comes in two (2) limbs. First limb: the educational system needs to be redesigned to meet the high demands of the global technological age. Second limb: students need to take it upon themselves and go beyond what is presented in the classroom and make use of the existing interconnectivity of knowledge available on the internet and in books. Ours is the technological epoch. The implication being that we must arm ourselves with the relevant knowledge needed to navigate this highly technological world. Our curricula need to be revisited and revised to reemphasize the old basics including reading (to comprehend) and writing, and the new basics which includes a lot of computer science. Our vocational and tertiary programs are still clustered with topics relevant to the agricultural age which ended about 250 years ago, the industrial revolution, and neglecting the contemporary needs of the scientific and technological age. While it is true that our economy is not a technologically driven one, there is nothing wrong with embedding such knowledge in our curricula to enable students to be on par with their counterparts in their travels abroad to pursue further studies.

I get deeply concerned, as do others, by reading comments, posts, responses on social media emanating from high school and college graduates in Liberia. The impact of this massive deficiency in the population feeds into ultimately preventing the achievement of the second objective of education which I will cover in the second instalment of this series. And as will see, there is a much greater harmful implication of such deficiencies in the larger population. Students should avoid setting standards for themselves centred around national averages and instead seek to improve themselves to the point of competing with their peers on the African continent, at the very least. It is understandable that it is quite impossible to have everyone on the higher extreme of the ‘intelligence’ continuum but is not impossible to have a higher percentage of the population fully appreciating the basics. We are so stuck in ‘mediocristan’, if I am to borrow from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that the population of the very few ‘extremistans’ can never improve the national average. This mediocre height of achievements that we aspire for as a nation is a direct function of the mediocre foundation, in the form of the 4/10’s and the 5/10’s, that have characterised our performances in the academics. The quality of output from professionals in almost every sector is below average and lacks the ingredients of people who have a strong grip on the basics. This is reflected in every sector of our society including schools, our places of work, our interactions with each other daily, our governance structures, and our news content.

To this end, the purpose of our education, as I see it, is for the mundane purpose of impressing others with our ability to pursue knowledge, rather than actually acquiring strong definite knowledge in the basics and our career studies. The first objective of education, with these facts, seems to elude us as a nation. To what end are we being educated?

To be continued…