Academics: The Bane of Education

Education may be described as the process of imparting and acquiring of knowledge through teaching and learning. In it’s broadest sense, it is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Education encompasses any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts. ACADEMICS, however, deals with a much narrower, technical sense of the broader term, depicting education as the formal process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, customs and values from one generation to another, e.g., instruction in schools or some similar institution.

Education is critical to any society. It provides both the opportunity and framework for people and civilization to survive and to thrive, and also creates a springboard for the evolution of the status quo into something more potent and efficient. Academics, however, does not necessarily imply the same thing. Acedemics refers to the many norms and traditions that have come to be necessarily or unnecessarily attributed to the educational process. It refers to practices employed by academic and non-academic staffers in various institutions of knowledge and education across the world, some of which may have little to do with actually imparting knowledge upon the student.

Nobel laureate and man of the 21st century, Albert Einstein, says in his 1999 piece ON EDUCATION that “Sometimes one sees in the school simply the instrument for transferring a certain maximum quantity of knowledge to the growing generation. But that is not right. Knowledge is dead; the school, however serves the living. It should develop in the young individual those qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the commonwealth…”

It does not take a stretch of imagination to understand what this icon of human intellectual proficiency is saying in such a statement. He refers to the school environment being used in modern day as more than just a tool to educate, but one in which qualities that help the student amplify their “value for the walfare of the commonwealth.” The man certainly had a way of cutting to the heart of any matter. Sadly, this is not the focus of many academic institutions today. Today, teachers and non-teachers alike seek ways to enslave students to their own whims and designs. Much like the Catholic Church in the middle ages abused its powers and sought to enslave mankind to its whims, the academia of today seeks to enslave students and learners with onerous processes that do not necessarily improve their ability to contribute possitively to society.

Education is good – more than that, it’s imperative for any society and the whole of humanity as a whole; but academics strives to make swots out of students, thereby creating gabbage-in-gabbage-out (GIGO) products: people who know that 345 + 543 equals 888, but who are unable to understand quite simply that you cannot pronounce the letter ‘P’ without putting your lips together. They have the information, but they are unable to process it and create workable solutions that serve mankind. These are people proud to don the robes of academia, attend functions, look important, talk big, and even take home large paychecks; yet they also are individuals who when faced with genuine life-impacting moments would tend to cave.

It is time not to mourn the poor spate of education in the wake of the destruction that is academics in this day and age, but to strike a pose and do that which is right. It is time that students – genuine students – take up the arms available to them (their minds) and stand for that which is right, shunning the unreal. It is time to return to actually studying and improving education, not just looking good, talking the part, but being incapable of standing on one’s two feet when occasion calls for it.

It is time to lose academics in favor of education, especially at a school. “After all,” according to Peter Ustinov, “what is education but a process by which a person begins to learn how to learn?” (Dear Me, 1977)