They want to be lawyers, journalists, biologists and engineers. That is why they need education.
quote:
If we all aspired to these heights and reached these levels of professionalism, do you think the world would be a better place?
False dilemma.
Just because people aspire to reach these levels of achievement doesn't mean all people have the same intellectual potential or drive to reach them, even if we all have the same educational opportunities.
Not everyone will
want to get a PhD or a medical or law degree. Some people will instead want to become businesspeople, or artists, or whatever.
A good education is needed to be a well-rounded person. A good education is extremely helpful in having the knowledge and thinking skills and exposure to varied ideas that enables people to be creative in their careers and lives.
I find your implication that we should withold education from people who currently, due to their lack of opportunity to become educated, are the labor pool which produces cheap consumer goods for rich western nations, simply because it would be terrible to not have cheap laborers anymore to be morally repugnant.
Brother Guy Consolmagno has this to say about educating poor people:
I'd been an astronomer for 15 years before I decided to enter the Jesuits. And I did my undergraduate work at MIT and my doctorate at Arizona. And at one point I wondered why was I wasting my time doing astronomy when people are starving in the world - a little voice of conscience.
So I joined the Peace Corps. While I was there, I discovered that I loved teaching. But mostly I discovered that the people in Africa, the people in Kenya, where I was, wanted to know about astronomy. That's what they wanted from me. And they were as fascinated and as excited about it as I was, as anyone in America.
And I understood then why it's important. It's one of those things that makes us more than just well-fed cows. It satisfies a really deep hunger to know, to go someplace, to explore. And that is a hunger that is as human, as basic to human beings as food and shelter and anything else. And it's denied to a person only at the cost of denying them their humanity. By telling poor people, "No, no, you have to go hunt for food, you can't do astronomy," you are saying that they're less than human. And that's wrong. And it's a tragedy.
Edited by nator, : No reason given.
Edited by nator, : No reason given.
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