We are killing critical thinking

Do you really need a degree? Short answer: Unless you're Queen B or Kylie Jenner, you're going to need one. Long answer: Knowledge is available everywhere, and it's free most of the time. Access to knowledge is the reason why I became so obsessed with Wellbeing at Work and Human Resource Development. And I've discussed it with some and realized that it is the case for you too - for a lot of foreign English speakers. Being able to speak English unlocks a world of knowledge, and YouTube, this LinkedIn profile (??), and the internet is a place where I could learn everything and anything.?

Now, back to my little story. I'm the type of kid who enjoyed spending afternoons at the library surrounded by free knowledge. And I remember, the first thing I did when being in a multi-channel university program was to go to different libraries with my brand-new student card and just get as much fiction and nonfiction I could and read, and read, and read. I'm saying all of this because I'm a strong believer in our ability to learn new skills by ourselves. With the resources available around us, and I'm not the only one, self-learning has progressively become the norm, and now traditional education is in the midst of a crisis.?

Why should I even get a degree? In the realm of self-help traditional education is perceived as a waste of time, and the arguments of self-help gurus are similar to that of individuals like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or Peter Thiel. They claim that you don't need a college degree in order to succeed. But how do they define success??

You'll often hear about higher education as an investment, or as insurance. Both terms imply that money is involved. In fact, higher education is costly in most countries all over the globe. In the US alone, there is an estimated $1.67 trillion of student debt as a result of expensive university tuition, yet university enrolment is perceived as a necessary path towards a future job and a stable career by parents and college applicants. And education pays, unemployment rates are directly correlated to your level of education. Education has always been framed as the best way to achieve upward mobility, yet we have to nuance that statement, first, because the growing commodification of education goes against its ideals of democratization, knowledge, and upward mobility that stretch back to the enlightenment. In the US, by age 24, only 9% of students from the lowest income quartile can expect to earn a bachelor's degree, versus 75% of students from the highest income quartile.?

Second thing is that the way we frame education as a costly investment show how our relationship to education has evolved in our system. Education is going to add something to your personal brand, it's going to make you more attractive in the competitive job market. In many cases, education has been so commodified that it's no longer about the experience of college, about learning, discovering new things, but more about that little paper you get at the end, like a little badge of honor. A good example of that is how for decades, if not centuries now, rich people have secured access to elite colleges. They honestly do not need a degree to be successful, they get in in the most insidious ways and are taking the place of someone who could have very much benefited from that degree.?

Finally, we've been completely brainwashed into thinking that education is something we solely do for ourselves to get a job and earn a good living. But we could see it differently, your education is a gift to the country. You being a doctor, a nurse, a social scientist, or a cashier, is a gift to your country, you're creating value, you're making your country richer and more powerful. And you're, I mean we're still getting screwed every single step of the way, and that's why we need to completely change the way we approach education.?

In the end, the commodification of education isn't an economic problem, it's a form of indoctrination. Let me give you a few examples: In the 1960s in the US, college education was relatively free. People from different socioeconomic backgrounds could come and get an education in whatever field they were interested in, as there wasn't much pressure with unemployment as there is today. On top of that, students fought to develop ethnic studies in their universities, so black studies, Asian studies, Latin American studies, and so on and so forth. They started to deconstruct white supremacy and capitalism to organize protests, yet in response to that, the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, proposed at the University of California system charged tuition to attend college in order to "get rid of the undesirables, those who are there to carry signs and not your study might think twice to carry picket signs."?

Since then, college tuitions have been on the rise, thus further excluding people from diverse backgrounds and putting the burden of the student debt on the other ones so that students are more likely to pick secure, pragmatic jobs. And when they leave, well, they don't have many other options but to work, and to work a lot to pay off the debt. They become very disciplined and do not really have time to fight for their rights or better economic status. I know it can seem a bit weird I'm saying all of this because I studied in Sweden, and in Sweden, education is free. So why am I even talking about all of this as if it affected me??

Well, indoctrination is also occurring here in Europe. All universities cannot keep up with the growing number of students who want to get a degree. Yet instead of increasing the volume of students the university can take on, or hiring new staff, the government chose to make universities more and more selective using the arguments of meritocracy and prestige. When on the contrary, it helps to make sure that individuals from higher-income backgrounds are still part of the elites, while marginalized groups are more and more excluded. On top of that, partnerships between private companies and public universities are becoming more and more popular, while social and hard sciences teaching jobs are getting precarious.?

So yes, we are killing free independent research and education for private interest. Now, some of you might think that "Yes, the commodification of education is a form of indoctrination." But that, at the same time, education itself is a form of indoctrination. I think we all had that one history teacher that attached a political agenda to his or her course curriculum, and that's what most self-help gurus will tell you: At school, you are being taught what to do, at university, you are being taught what to think.?

So, should we get rid of our educational institutions as they are today? Should we give up education to start an online business? Well, I don't think that educational institutions are doomed because the way they did, the research that has been done, is the basis for new ideas. Most great artists or scientists have spent a lot of time with masters before they started to develop their own style, or come up with new theories. As MIT physics professor, Victor Weisskopf, said to one of his students, "It doesn't matter what we cover, it matters what you discover." And that's how you make society progress, by investing in research without a definite plan or an end goal in mind. And yes, research in higher education has always been biased, whether they support the status quo or goes against it. But that is how you forge critical thinkers, by exposing people to different ideas, different theories, and by encouraging the professors to state their biases and guide students through those theories with the right mythological tools, eventually letting them decide what they want to support. That scientific reasoning is the most precious thing the human race has ever developed, and higher education is the best way to learn it and practice it.?

The last thing I would like to address is the fact that there can be a bit of elitism in discussions centered around education and academia. And I don't want to fall into the trap of, "If you don't have a degree, then you're stupid," because that sentiment reinforces the anti-intellectualism that is, in fact, very present in self-help. Nevertheless, criticism targeting higher education should not come from people who only care about becoming the next richest man in the world. They certainly pinpointed a problem, but self-help and creating your own business is not the right answer. It's great to think outside of the box, outside the education system, but if your ability to think outside of the box only serves your personal interest and your endless thirst for money, then there is absolutely no pride to take into that - I'm getting angry here. It's really hard to fight against the individual empowerment mentality because the system is geared in a way that forces us to comply with it in order to survive. If you cannot afford a college degree, you just cannot afford it, and you might want to find other options.?

But we can certainly find a balance between surviving within that system and trying to change it, to reform it. And changing our approach to education can be decisive for that matter. We can forge opinions outside of the structure of the state, outside of the corporate media industry, like TV, not for individual empowerment but for collective change. Great ideas come from the bottom, back then it was revolutionaries gathering in a little cafe, or trade unions secretly meeting in the company's offices. Now we can attend free research seminars online or in real life, and we have platforms where we can exchange ideas - like underneath this LinkedIn article. It might seem like nothing, but we're doing something, and I hope we'll continue to grow.?