The limit of education
The beauty of education cannot be easily encapsulated in just a small write-up as this. Education enlarges the scope of the mind and opens it to greater height and desire for knowledge and creativity.
Because it quickens and awakens the hunger to know, it is a ready antidote to the crass ignorance that debases the unlearned with all its baggage of limitation and inhibition. Any wonder then why the scholar and great missionary, Paul admonished his protégé in the Holy Writ: “Till I come, give attendance to reading.”
Knowledge is like a treasure deeply hidden in the rocks. Education is the tool with which the diligent seeker digs it out. Education nourishes the heart, broadens one’s world view, enlivens our sensibilities, and stirs up the mind, freeing it from the shackles of ignorance.
“The roots of education,” Aristotle says, “are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” While justifying himself for spending a fortune in sending his children to the most expensive schools to obtain “the best of education,” a Christian brother of mine would always retort: “if education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Sure then, without doubt, education is profoundly beneficial to man as it lifts him from the bondage of darkness and shackles of ignorance; it also lifts him to profounder heights of freedom near sublimity.
But beyond all that we have said, does education really guarantee freedom – freedom of the soul? Can it or has it ever been able to free man from the fetters of mental depravity? Can it or has it ever been able to lift him from the nadir of societal ills and moral decadence that plague man?
With all his refinement that education, enlightenment and exposure provides, man remains a prisoner of self and society, still subject to the whims and caprices of an unregenerate soul and an easy prey of the allurement and entrapment of everything vile and vicious.
Education has not been able to curb many a man of the pugnacious, petulant and pernicious mannerisms and idiosyncrasies that tend to drag him down the darkening alley of bestiality and self destruction.
Indeed, “much learning doth make [the unregenerate] mad.” Having eaten “the fruit of knowledge,” he sees himself as either equal with or even greater than his Creator.
This may have prompted the French philosopher, Voltaire, to sneer, in a most deprecatory manner, that if there was no God, man will create one!
The sheer virtuosity of much learning has not been pungent enough to purge man of his cesspool of vileness, viciousness and vituperation. Such reminds one of Thomas Paine, the English intellectual per excellence.
But he was an atheist! His life, according to a commentator of his time, “was a compound of ingratitude and perfidy of hypocrisy and avarice, of lewdness and adultery.”
Paine was an academic of matchless intellect and stupendous brilliance, producing such seminal works as The Rights of Man and Age of Reason. Yet, he lived and died a most miserable man.
Unfortunately, Thomas Paine wasn’t alone in this eerie route to the despicable land of endless doom. He had a “good company” in Voltaire, Francis Newport, Edward Gibbon, David Hume and their contemporary collaborators and co-travelers dabbed in the filthy garb of free thinkers and agnostics.
Although equally richly nourished from the flowing fountain of the ennobling riches of education, yet they were miserably poor and wretched and died in that lost state.
Yes, the ennobling balm of “much learning” is inestimable, but it cannot deliver a damned soul nor guarantee the ethereal beauty of an eternal bliss.
By Kelechi C. Ogbamgba
