Why Go To University
I. DURING the long months ahead, you might occasoonally wonder. What am I doing here, taking university classess? On the face of it, the question makes sense. You may already be overbuedened with responsibilities towards your job, faimly,friends. You might wish to spend your leisure time relaxing instead of doing homework and reading speculations about the nature of the university.Going to university might create additional stressesin you life.You sometimes have to pay for your education and living expenses, or to take loans which you will have to pay latter.Moreover, in the time it takes to go to university, you could be working and earning money.It takes courage to have your papers compared,evaluated,and graded. Also knowladge doesn’t always bring graeater happiness. In some ways ignoranceis indeed bliss, an oncologist. For example, is more likely to appreciate the true meaning of Terminal lung cancer than a proffessional athlete. Finally, social ills such as environmental degradation, materialistic value systems, and political indoctrination are traceble in part to humankind’s successive incrementsin its store of knowladge.
These are excellent reasons to stay away from books and universities. Many more, I am sure, could be unearthed. On balance, however, most people feel that the case for self-education, higher education and cultural literacy is far stronger. They intuitively know what the advantages are,and this knowladge, most likely, fortifies their resolve to further their education, especially in the difficult first year of their university career.Still , at one point or another during the following months or years, you might need a bit more than mere intuition to keep you going. To meet this potential need, the following pages a commonsense, and widely shared, defense of university education.
The most obvious advantage concerns income and job oppourtunities.Statistically speaking, education and income levels are linked,the better educated you are, the higher your income tends to be. In assessing this link, we ought to keep in mind Benjamin Desraeli’s aphorism about lies damn lies and statistics.Nagative americans may or may not be vanishing, but the nagative american I talked to yesterday isn’t. Similarly, if I takea random sampleof 1000 high school dropouts, 1000 high school graduates, and 1000 university graduates, I shall find rich and poor persons in all three groups. But the numbers will be different. To take a hypothetical example, the respective numbers of people under the poverty line in these three group might be 200,100 and 50. Education enhances oppourtunities for career advancement.Without a university degree, certain promotional oppourtunities are simply closed. Many of our students tell us that the primary reason they are here is this to be promoted, and there by improve their income and social standing, they need a university degree.The societal benefits are no less striking. The chief of a nation, some economists belive, is not its land, natural resources,or population.Switzerland is fairly poor in all three yet it is one of the world’s wealthist nations.Brazil is rich in all there, but incomparably poorer. The german and Finnish expriences after World war even raise the possibility that, if placed on a barren island, an educated people could, in twenty years, create a more prosperous society than the one enjoyed now by Brazilians and Nepalians. To be sure, countries like Switzerland often enjoy a more congenial climate than Nepal, they are freer, and they enjoy greater political stability. These and other characteristics contribute ti their higher prosperity and quality of life, but it is generally agreed that the higher educational levels prevailing in these prosperous nations contribute to their affluence.
There are a lot of advantages of having university education :
i) University education provided jon oppourturnity and chance of promotion to improve income and social stander.
ii) It provides us knowladge (reasoning power, tolerence, humanity ) to save us from deffer day to day crieses or problem.
iii) Educated person good the health. As he/she has the knowladge of health hazards (smoking, overwide, lack of experience strees).
iv) An educated person blanceses the mental and physical excersise to avoid stress related dieseas.
v) Knowladge people can get high regard in the soceity, country, or in the world.
vi) Education develop self confidense and doardens as mind.
vii) Students get chance to have contact witgh new friends which expand their social horizon and they get new experience and know about defferent cultural and society.
viii) Education increase our personal freedom. People examins the things fretically as they are less dogagic or narrow minded.
ix) They have better understanding of the problems faced by the univers like environmental, degration, ozer depletion etc.
x) There are a close link between education and Democracy. People get freedom when their his Democracy. So, educated people can able to chose a good leader throw election to gover the country smoothly.
xi) If this way, we can say University education helps to develop and overall personality to lead a meaningfull and sucsessfull life.
One practical application deserves special mention here. According to one writer, “regardless of the
way health is measured (mortality, morbidity, symptoms or subjective
evaluation), and regardless of the unit of observation (individuals, it or
state averages), years of schooling usually emerges as the most powerful
correlate of good health.
That is though educated people are not necessarily
healthy, they are more likely to good health than tycoons, or athletes, or
petrol station attendants, or any other group of people. Insurance companies
know this, of course; hence the comparatively low life insurance rates for
teachers.
For the time being, we can only conjecture about the
causes of this surprising observation. An educated person is more likely to
have a better appreciation for the hazards of smoking, overweight, lack of
exercise, or stress. Her training makes it a bit more difficult for her to deny
these problems existence it gives her the intellectual tools needed to prevent
their occurrence, and it provides her a clear rationale for reducing their
severity or eliminating them. Education provides greater social mobility and
freedom an educated person finding herself daily exposed to occupational
hazards is less likely to explain them away or remain on the job for every
long. All other things being equal, an educated person is more likely to lead a
meaningful life, feel better about herself, and be less vulnerable to stress-related
of disease.
Consider some statistics. One out of five operations
in the United States may be unnecessary. Thirteen out of every1000 operations
end in death. Let us assume that the situation in Nepal ids similar. In that
case. Owing to human fallibility,
ignorance, greed,, you may face, at
some future date, the grave risk on the needlessly being cut up on the
operation table. The rest is simple. Ask yourself; wouldn’t education in
general, and familiarity with the medical profession and human health in
particular, enhance the chances that you and your loved ones escape this fate?
Isn’t lack of education a key contributor to such depressing statistics?
Physical exercise it is universally agreed is
beneficial to health- physical, mental and emotional well-being. “A sound mind
in a sound body,” We say. Almost certainly, the same logic applies to your
brain. You keep it exercised, and it stays in shape. You use it only a little
and it atrophies more quickly. You take care of your bicycle by lubricating it
and shouldn’t you exercise the most distinctly human portion of your body, the seat of your
thoughts and emotions, and the one organ that most clearly separates you from
bats and money key?
Opinion polls repeatedly show that our culture values
learned men and women. This high regard for knowledgeable people seems to be
almost universal. It is not only Nepal’s,
Russians, Japanese or Frenchmen
that value the learned among them stone- age people show the same respect
towards their learned shamans and medicine men. In most cultures then, a man
might be handsome, kind, physically
Fits or a valiant warrior, but if he is comparatively
uneducated, he would still be considered some ways deficient. This lack of
education may not only damage his social standing, but his standing in his own
eyes. In other words, although I am not familiar with any concrete research on
the subject, one expects to find a positive correlation between education and self-confidence.
Again the link, if it exits is only statistical in nature. Some undulation
people are extremely self-confident; some PHD’s are horribly insurance. But it
seems probable that all other things being equal, the better educated a person
the better he feels about himself.
One of the most outstanding and lovable characteristics of children is inquisitiveness. “why is the sky blue?” our toddlers ask. “why is 2+3=7?” “What’s under the living room carpet”? Animals too seem to be curious about the world around them. Take a dog to the woods and watch his behavior. Or watch a kitten’s endless games with a piece of string. Sadly, many of us lose some of the this curiosity when we come on age. Some psychologists trace this loss to our inadequate educational system; other ascribe it to our innate nature. Nevertheless, the remarkeble fact is that this loss of interest Is not universal: We alll know some adults who are as couries about things as any five-years-old is. Moreover, this curiosly, this love of knowledge for its own shake, seems to be influenced by culture. Greek intellectuals were obsessed with on insatiable love for knowing. Philosophy.” A Greek word, means “ love of wisdom.” Learning the ancient Hedrews similarly felt, constitutes its owns reward. Hence some of their greatest scholars went by such names as. “john the shoemakers.” This disinterested love of knowledge and the reluctance to turn knowledge into a ‘shovel for digging gold” continues to this very day. Among the scientists and scholars of the last few centuries one finds a lens makers, a pharmacist, a nobleman’s secretary, and an abbot of a backwoods monastery.
For a great number of individuals and cultures, then. Knowledge is its own reward. In many cultures this asoect of learning os often ignored; some even say that is its stifled and suppressed. Nevertheless, learning is the most immediate and obvious reward of either self-education or going to university. The decision whether to derive joy from your school work despite the occasional drudgery, test-taking, late hours, or a 70 hours workweek- is entirely yours. If you are not there already, we invite you to turn over a new leaf, discard any negative attitudes about the learning process you might have acquired before coming here, and give ,learning, and yourself, a chance.
Going to university expands your social horizons. You meet new people, make new friends, share new experiences. Unlike our ancertors of thousands of years ago, we do not live in a closed tribal society. We see more people every day but have fewer close friend. We go to bars or parties, and sometimes are lucky enough to find what we are looking for. A university provides an alternative setting for satisfying our needs for companionship, personal growth, and friendship.
Education increases our personal freedom. Some of our beliefs and habits are not truly our own. Often, our innermost thoughts and desires are products of indoctrination. What we call “our” religion is usually little more than a direct consequence of our accidental birth in a given social context. Most ancient Greeks beloved in Zeus and Apollo; many contemporary American believes in the teachings and divinity of Christ. Education makes us less domestic about our own beliefs, and more tolerant about the beliefs of others. It shatters some of the invisible prison walls of our minds. It doesn’t altogether remove us from Plato’s cave7 of shadows, but it does, unquestionably, carry us a small step away from the realm of indoctrination and false certitude.
Thought we know only little about the universe, this knowledge is still worth having. This knowledge suggests, for example, that all humans are members of the same species, and that they are the close relatives of all other life forms of this planet. It tells us that complex entries like the biosphere, the human mind, and world economics are both fragile and resilient, and that the consequences of tampering with them are not wholly predictable. It suggests that we are not as rational and unique as we once thought we were, that we are neither at the center of the biosphere nor at the center of the universe. It warms us that extinction of any species-including our own- is distinctly possible. It reminds us that prosperous civilizations can progress, and that they can sink into a thousand-year-long dark age.
The last benefit of education concerns the close links between education and democracy. Ancient Greece bequeathed to us traditions of mathematical, scientific, and historical inquiries. But this assertion is not entirely correct. Virtually nothing has been bequeathed by the likes of totalitarian Sparta. Decisive intellectual contribution was made by ancient Greek democracies or by places, like the Ptolemaic kingdom8, where freedom of inquiry was taken for granted. Similarly, excellent scholarship can be found nowadays practically everywhere, but it is most common in the established democracies of North America and North Western Europe. Democracy, observably, is the most fertile ground upon which culture flourishes.
But this relationship between education and democracy is a two-way street. To flourish, democracy requires an educated citizenry. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” says Thomas Jefferson, It expects what never was and never will be.” In his defense of Athenian democracy, Pericles says that “while not all of us can originate policy, all of us are able to judge it.” For the wonderful political system we call democracy to work, we must be able to judge our policy makers and their policies. We most know something about such issues as Kathmandu smog, income distribution, deforestation, or Indian foreign policies. If democracy is to work, if we wish not to fall victims to propaganda left and right, if we wish to vote for our interests and convictions, we must educate ourselves about the main issues of our time.
This is certainly is an idea worth pondering upon. The future of Nepal, and the future of humanity, depend upon our ability to bring greater awareness, enlightenment, and rationality to politics. This ability presupposes an educated citizenry. In this board context, therefore, you might wish to view your sojourn9 in academia as a modest personal contribution to humankind’s future.
