If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take that away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. - Benjamin Franklin

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. - Mark Twain

Good Morning Friends & Digital Neighbors! Happy Wednesday! Less Tom-tificating today and more questions prompted by the quotes. I'll try not to ramble on too much today, but it is early and babbling is such a natural tendency in these early posts. 😉🌞

While education is a often a gamer changer between remaining in poverty and improving your life and economic independency, doesn't it all depend upon the quality, practicality & creativity of the education you receive? What is the purpose of education? Is it education about vocational formation, personal enlightenment, or some blend of both? When does education morph into indoctrination? Is learning without questioning a warning sign of indoctrination?

Ok a tiny bit of Tom-tificating. Up until this century, I was a confident advocate of higher education for many people. Not everyone, we need a plethora of vocations for a robust and thriving culture. I guess I was a sucker that one of the promises of higher education would be the ability for society to become more open and accepting of the uniqueness of persons and ideas that contributed to the good of society. I suspect that last term, contributed, has become something of an issue. Contributed to what or for whom?

As a curmudgeon-ing Gen-Xer, I keep thinking that the fringe movements in education from the end of the past century have now become mainstay issues for the public. Kindness opened the door for the fringe, fantastical and farcical of academia to be entertained by society, and now has become talking points and goals of the "Cathedral." It is odd how their use of freedom paved the way for oppressive intolerance that naively believes it is correcting the errors of the past and making amends. If we can't have financial reparations for the past, we will have cultural ones. I am not sure either heal the past or even prevent the worst aspects from being repeated. Reparations don't seem that different from retribution. Perhaps a final quote to make us more mindful.

The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and thousands of years of humanity's dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made. - Frank Herbert