Importance of Education

When I say education in this case, I mean school. School is often characterized as a large source of stress and misery for kids. Every school day, they have to wake up early in the morning, ride on a bus, spend several hours doing working, or take tests on that work, with a half-hour lunch break in between. Then they have to ride the bus home and spend some more time doing homework for school. This makes kids dislike school quite a lot. This causes them to ask questions like, “Why do I need to write essays?”, or “Why do I need to know what y=mx+b means?”. But school is important. It is vital for both individuals and society as a whole that people are educated. 

First of all, education is extremely important for the individual.  Most of the stuff that we learn in school tend to be prerequisites for certain degrees in college. High school level math is often a prerequisite for college-level math, which is required for most STEM degrees. Getting a good STEM degree can allow people to have lucrative jobs. But any degree builds on the education that we received in school, one way or another. We also need education in order to understand most things about the government. The chart below shows the vocabulary and grammatical level of the speeches of several candidates for US president. 

With the exception of Donald Trump’s speech, all of these speeches are at a high school reading level. If someone didn’t go to school and they only know how to read and write at a basic level, they’re going to have a really hard time understanding what these candidates are saying. If they do “understand” it, they’re most likely going to misinterpret it and vote against their own interests. According to an article from the National Center of Biology Information, people who are less educated are more likely to believe conspiracy theories. This can have really adverse consequences for the individual. Look at the people who attacked the US Capitol because they believed that Trump’s election was a fraud. People, who otherwise might have been reasonable, literally turned to terrorism because they believed in a conspiracy theory Education also makes people much less likely to be poor. The chart below from the Federal Bureau of Labour perfectly explains this.Workers without high school diplomas only earned 62% as much money as workers with high school diplomas. Workers with a Bachelors’s degree over 50% more than workers with just a high school diploma. There are more details in the chart. But the idea is that income correlates heavily with the level of education that one receives. People who are poorer are much more likely to be incarcerated. Adults in poverty are three times as likely to be put in jail as everybody else. In conclusion for this portion, more education leads to more income which leads to less poverty and lower willingness to commit crimes.

Educating our citizens also really helps society as a whole. This ties heavily with the first portion. Societies with less crime and less poverty tend to be better for everyone. Societies with lower education rates tend to deteriorate pretty quickly. The Ottoman Empire, for example, failed to educate its citizens. The literacy rate of the empire never went above 15%. This caused them to have a shortage of skilled workers. When the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe, the Ottomans simply didn’t have enough skilled workers to be able to build factories and machines, causing them to be unable to compete with the other European empires, ultimately leading to their demise.  Note that lack of education was not the only factor in their collapse, and maybe was eclipsed by them losing WW1. But it played a big part. Conversely, when education became the norm in western countries, we saw a lot of advancements in technology such as steam engines, the telegraph, the automobile, and more. Overall, education allows society to be stable and advance, but lack of education can cause instability and for society to crumble.

As you can see, education is very important. It not only can uplift individuals and keep them out of poverty, but it also allows society to function properly. Without education, society, as we have it today, would be impossible.