The Importance of a Good Education

If you've had a good education, you get a variety of choices for your vocation. You can make your work physically or mentally demanding if you wish, but you have the ability to control your work. A solid foundation of knowledge is the key to job selection and will enable you to remain in the job of your choice. When your knowledge is broad, you can see across disciplines and use that information to excell in your work. Life is a lot better when you get to choose your work.

Of all the evils facing people in this world, a poor education is the worst. A poorly educated person is easily be molded into a puppet. The mind of the puppet will spew forth whatever BS is put into it. It is the reason hatred and mistrust are rampant around the world. I will base my examples on US political parties and organized religion. The main difference between Republicans, Democrats and Religious leaders and with regards to education can be summed up this way. They all want your money, loyalty, and for you to believe in them. They also would prefer for your education to be limited in the hopes that you will remain true to them.

Republican philosophy is similar to the adage "a fool and his money are soon parted". They want you to be smart enough to think you can handle your money. They are good con artists. Like all good con artists, It is the challenge of the scam that gives the best pleasure to the perpetrator. The best scams require you to not recognize that you are being scammed, so, republicans don't want you to be educated to the point you can see their plan. Aside from that, republicans want you to be able to get your hands on money (it doesn't do much good to scam poor people as you have to do it too many times and its the repetition of a scam that enables you to catch it). The republicans are always striving towards making you think the money you have will remain yours. It's much the same as a Casino owner personally greeting each patron saying "Good luck".

Democrats want you to give money to them so they can "provide" government programs. Very little of the money used in the program is ever used to help anyone other than the program administrators. It is imperative to their plans that you remain uneducated enough to actually think those programs benefit those less fortunate than yourself. Education under the democratic game plan is designed to play upon your sympathies. The democratic empowerment programs never will put a significant amount of money into the hands of those who need it. To the democrats we are nothing more than children that need to have our money handled for us.

Neither group wants to truly educate the populace, as it might get voters more interested in those pesky third party candidates. The welfare families vote mainly for Democrats because their education is so poor they can't see that the increase in funding proposed, once divided up among the administrators, is never going to be enough for them to get anywhere. Since they didn't get the votes from this group, Republicans think it "unwise to spend money on the poor. Since the Democrats are firmly in bed with the religious leaders in these poor communities, they do their best to keep the population in check by not encouraging the people to place a high value on education.

The worst of the lot when it comes to education are religious leaders. Perhaps it is because they have the most to lose. A close look at any religion shows that it provides a set of rules that "if followed", enable a member to fit into society. It is the same stuff we learn as children in kindergarten, don't hurt one another, respect your teachers and parents, don't take things that aren't yours, etc. The Torah, the Christian Bible, the Koran, and Buddhist, Hindu, and Tao teachings, all contain admonitions to not kill humans. It is the "My god is better than your God and he wants me to kill you." lunacy we add to those basic tenets that make the world the hell it is. Is it any wonder that those who have the best educations rely the least on religious leaders to tell them what to do? Keep in mind, it is not the religion that is faulty, it's the interpretation of that religion.

A good education enables us to examine the faith healer who relys upon prayer cards and modern technology to perform the "miracles" that keep his flock making donations. We question why the minister lives in a luxurious manor while the congregation and the church building are barely holding out against the weather. Why is it OK for a religious leader to have a child out of wedlock, when that would be a sin to the average parishioner. Could it be that the scams done in the name of organized religion are tolerated because of the education level of the flock?

Limiting education in order to ensure religious purity of the herd has not been a good thing for the world. The Taliban are the result of under educating the populace so as to keep religious sects strong. When enough of the original leaders had an early demise, there wasn't anyone left to lead that knew that religious tolerance was among the guiding principles of the Koran. So Afghanistan's rich history of art was destroyed. Ireland isn't much better, Protestant and Roman Catholicism profess devotion to the same God, bombs and bullets ring out in his name due to the intolerant education the Irish have been getting.

Religious tolerance comes from being educated enough to see the similarities in different religions. When you see where the religions agree with one another, and you have convinced yourself that the differences are not as important as the similarities, you have a starting point for dialogs. Once you and I see the common core of our religions, you no longer have to blindly fear me. That doesn't mean you embrace my religion, for not all members of my religion have looked to the core beliefs. But you then see that I am "mostly harmless".