As you remember I was recently at the ONA short film festival. One of my favourite movies was shot in the salt ponds in Peru and follow this older woman memories and her stories. The strong traditions and culture these people have is something that I believe we have long lost in our fast paced societies. It feels as if they really cared about what they did, and had a strong sense of community . More often than not , in our western society , we do not care about our jobs and we do things ‘just to do them’ and put the ‘hours on the timesheet’. Now. I hope to never be in that category of people , but you never know when inspiration will stop striking .. but then something happens. Westeners (tourists) start to come. And not only young people want to start imitate their way of dressing and acting , but also , they realise they can make more money than just by selling salt and that could be great to guarantee their children an education and give them a better future .
Now. This post wants to be a little provocative. Of course there are benefits to school and education, please don’t get me wrong . I am in education , I love inspiring the younger and teach them some new things . I am not questioning the value in itself . But will it necessarily give a ‘better future’? What are we measuring that against? Firstly - is not like having a degree is enough to guarantee you a highly paid job . Actually . I know many people who even have a PhD that ended up working in a cafe , and are not better off because if anything they are more bitter than their colleagues just out of school. Secondly - school can be a teacher of many things, but so is living life directly. And yes, studying history may teach us something. But history keeps repeating itself , so we are either terrible students or studying something just to pass the test is pointless. On this note, I don’t understand the critics to a father that took his kid (11 years old) to climb a mountain letting him skip the first two days of school this year. The first two days : yes the two pointless ones when you are introduced to the new teacher and there is a general outline of the year and the ‘tell me what have you done in your holiday’ , which is basically just an excuse to do nothing for five hours and chat with your friends about pointless stuff. A mountain can teach you much more .. and similarly I don’t understand the critic to home schooling , as long as the children have some playtime and interactions with other kids to learn ‘how to play in society’ then surely homeschooling, when done well, is perfectly fine. Thirdly - some jobs are essential and do not require a degree, but passion Some jobs, whether more artistic or practical, do not really require a university degree but a lot of passion. And sometimes, studying at university because one has to - well can be detrimental to that passion. I watched an independent (italian) movie (quel che conta è il pensiero) where the main character has a lot of passion for creativity, cinema, the theatre. Yet he is studying medicine, and not managing to give any exams. Because he doesn't really like to.. And I even know people who would be great electricians, woodworkers, artisans.. and yet are 'wasting time' studying economics, law and whatever else they feel forced to do... Going back to the movie of the start. To the young people going away to study and coming back with westeners clothes and ideals and then working with the tourists: are we really sure that they are 'better off'? I don't know..
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