Why Should You Have an Education?

The great Irish playwright and dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, said "Youth is wasted on the young". Shaw was a pretty switched-on guy (he also wrote the original works upon which "My Fair Lady" and "Guys and Dolls" were based) - if he'd extended his statement to include Education, he'd have been spot on.

It's said that, when you look back on your life, you only remember the "good times". If that's true, I must have really hated school and it and the education it was intended to give me was definitely wasted.

I was skeptical from the very outset, at the age of five. The adults used to say "You should relish your school days, they're the best days of your life." My reaction was one of abject horror. "If this is the best", I thought to myself, "The rest must be really terrible".

When I look back now, I remember the ride home from school on the bus, sneaking out at lunch time for an illicit cigarette, and meeting up with the girls from the neighboring school (mine was boys only) at any opportunity.

Education? Well, like most teenage boys, I couldn't see the point. I really couldn't work out what I could ever want with World Geography, Algebra and Geometry. It was only when I got to work (the original Pan-Am) that all this stuff started to get useful.

Suddenly, I realized that the flight planning I was being taught to do need all those subjects. To me, the shortest route from Los Angeles to London was obviously straight across the map - in a straight line via Boston roughly, across the Atlantic and Ireland. Wrong!

The shortest distance between two points on our planet is along a "Great Circle" and the one upon which both LAX and LHR (that's London - HeathRow) fall, goes almost due north over California, Canada and the arctic, down over Iceland and crosses the coast of the UK over Northern Scotland. In fact, we used to call our West Coast - Europe services "the Polar Flights".

There wasn't much about my education that I did like or enjoy but I particularly disliked French - possibly because the teacher was Welsh and that seemed totally illogical. We were taught, as most young people being taught a foreign language are, the French we would need to transfer our lives to the country in which it is spoken, in our case, France. My first experience of a French speaking community was Montreal, Canada and the French spoken there is nothing like we were taught.

When it comes to speaking real French in real France, what we were taught at school turns out to be pretty useless. We weren't taught to book rental cars, check in at hotels and airports or ask the builder when he's going to get off his butt and get the job finished. If I were to go back to tenth grade high school though, I guess I'd be in pretty good shape.

Where does Education Begin? The principal objective of education is to prepare a young person for life in the adult world and we tend to think about education as what goes on in schools, colleges and other specialized learning establishments.

In fact, education starts from the moment a baby is born and it's sometimes said that the most important part of any education is that portion pre-school, before the age of five or six, when a child is being taught by its parents.

It's during that period that a child learns "social skills" - how to interact with other people and how to conduct his or her life within the accepted parameters of his or her environment. It's not done formally or deliberately, in fact most parents wouldn't consider that what they were doing as education or recognize its importance.

A child learns mainly by trial and error. The process can be likened to somebody being put into a darkened room with furniture randomly scattered around. The individual moves forward tentatively until he meets an obstacle and has to change direction.

The same process applies to a small child. The child will want something from the refrigerator, help itself, get chastised and next time, ask first. Everything a child does is learning, part of its education.

We humans watch natural history programs on TV or read National Geographical Society magazines and we're told of young animals "playing". In fact, the "play" is their education - it's all about learning to feed and protect them when they're no longer under the protection of the pack or their mother. Watch lion cubs frolicking and notice how their movements are just the same as the ones they're going to use when they're hunting prey for their very survival in later life.

In the case of the human cub, the formal education it's given at school takes the basic skills learnt at home and hones them. It then adds information and new skills to prepare the child for the next stage in its development. In days gone by, education was about facts. Children were taught dates from history, methods for use in laboratory experiments, math for math's sake. Nobody really knew what use trigonometry was, it only mattered that students could use the formulae.

Today, educators are more enlightened. Young people are taught to use their brains - how to observe, evaluate and put information and ideas to practical use. Even then, here are huge gaps in the knowledge that people have, even when they graduate from college or university and those gaps are only closed by the real education of experiencing life at first hand. It can come as a shock for a young man or woman - yesterday they were a boy and girl - when they start their first day at their first place of work. It's only then that their education really starts.