Why I still rely on my on my encyclopedic and eclectic education rather then on my modest cooking skills
Back in the good ol‘days education did still matter. Everyone around you – and especially your parents – felt the need to give you an education so that you might grow up – you, a new member in the huge family of human beings, whereas all you felt was the urge of your body to pee once in a while at random and utterly inadequate times and places and had nothing on your mind but primordial instincts that drove you directly to find nutrition, comfort and protection. And well, those days of early childhood decided also whether, once a grown up and sexually active, you‘d become a jugs-man or rather an booty-guy. Education was meant to civilize you, and that frankly is the center of all education. Education makes you a man, a Human Being. Let me spell that with capital letters! Without education you‘re nothing – a beast at best, a half bred monkey that is allowed to drive a car. Now that I created it, thanks to my encyclopedic and eclectic education, the image of the half bred monkey that is allowed to drive a motor-vehicle is an utterly striking and efficient one: it gives you the essence of what it means to be skilled without being pproperly educated. Because just being the proverbial man of many skills is kinda lame – for the given reasons. Think once again of a monkey-featuring image: the notorious room full of monkeys sitting in front of old fashioned typewriters – if you wait long enough one will produce a Shakespeare play. What the monkey needs is to be skilled at typewriting. A skill that is not hard to obtain. Possibly as hard to obtain as a B.A. Degree – but then: typist classes for monkeys are actually reality.
I gathered from the news recently that they are teaching chimpanzees to ‘speak’ sentences in English at Georgia State University in the US.
A custom-designed computer system makes it possible for chimpanzees to generate thousands of words using a touch-sensitive pad connected to a voice synthesizer. The technology apparently took four years to develop, and the research question behind all this is: „Do chimps already communicate this way in the wild and humans haven‘t just yet cracked their simple linguistic code until now? Or it could be that they don’t, and then this would show how much language a non-linguistic species can pick up.“ The computer is also linked up so that the chimps can contact researchers anywhere within the university campus. A researcheress says the chimps often ‘call’ her using the system to tell her what they are doing. Now that must be fun! Lets speculate how long it takes until some of ‘em chimps comes up with a sonnet. But again, back on topic. Some argue it is enough to teach you different skills, so that you become a valuable member of society, that is endowed with all necessary knowledge he or she needs to contribute to the progress and to the prosperity of society as a whole.Now that is as pathetic as it is bull.
If you are a highly skilled individual but lack education you won‘t contribute exactly (if not less than) nil to the progress and prosperity of any society.
You will be a skilled monkey whose fingers stumble over keyboards and in an potentially dangerous skilled way grab steering wheels and turn valves or flip switches or whatever robotic skill you might require in a 9-15 job. You are useful to the society, but you do not contribute to its growth or progress. And you don‘t contribute to your own growth and progress either. I was so lucky to still receive a proper education, old school M.A. Degree and stuff. But those after me won‘t be blessed with a proper undergraduate program and an option to go for a PhD. They will enter university and robotically learn how to stumble over a computer-keyboard to produce an acceptable amount of lines of code in a given timeframe, how to turn the steering-wheels of small business (and reach the lower managment at best, junior-vice president of the sales department for Upper Austria).
Hopefully they will be skilled enough with a B.A. in applied physics to flip the right switch before the reactor-core fissions and save a couple of thousand lives…
provided they are told so by their superior, not by their conscience. Because if it comes to ethics and morals and common sense (and trust me, in every life there comes a moment when the situation requires one of those) you don‘t need skills but you need education. And if you just have skills then we‘re all screwed. So get you a proper education you punks!
