The Importance of Education and Its Role in Society

In life, people have a unique ability to select the things they want to give attention. This ability enables a person to concentrate on a few things despite the hullabaloo of daily activities that people engage in. The selective mindset that people have influences the way people observe and understand things especially those of interest. In simple terms, people find what they set their mind to or what is in their mental channel. Therefore, it is imperative to learn how to create mental channels.

Education is one way of learning how to make correct mental channels or how to set the mind. Education enables a person to gain the skills of choosing what is and what is not appropriate in life. Through education, we also learn to recognize surroundings in a cognitive manner. The environment of a person always offers much information, which subsequently help in picking areas of interest and dropping what is not necessary. In addition to opening the mind to the surrounding, education provides life concepts used to comprehensively, understand the world. This way, education systems teache people how to choose “the right answer”. People who have gone through school have their mind set to acquiring right answers-hence the “right answer approach”. However, it is disappointing that this approach has negative impacts on the way perceive life.

Life situations are ambiguous and rarely constrained to single correct answers as mathematical problems and educational systems encourage. Life presents different situations, as indicated earlier, and people have the ability to choose what they want to give attention. It is likely so to find different right answers depending on what a person looks for. Unfortunately, education teaches people to one right answer and subsequently gets satisfied because of the answer. This blocks the openness to a myriad of ideas and other right answers that may be available overtime. During the early life in school, kids have a wider perception of life than those students do the upper level of education. A straightforward question posed to kindergarten kids might elicit many answers since they have not learned to select out possibilities. In contrast, those students at the upper level of education have the skill and ability to find the right answer and exclude other options. This, however, construes the ability to choose other answers that are more right. Getting specific in life reduces the power of thinking out of the box creatively.

The approach of looking for one right answer leads to problems in the current society. This is because most people have a single-right-answer mindset and thus have limited flexibility in their acceptance of answer. This situation in common in the education system too, where teachers expect students to give one right answer for questions asked. If a student wanders in his or her answer away from the teacher expectations, likelihood for a wrong mark is high even if the argument may be logical thus failing. This is the danger of thinking with an open mindset. Ironically, life demands diversity and flexibility to survive the competition of limited resources.

Finally, it is crucial to compare one’s ideas to other ideas. This way it is easier to expose the weaknesses of the idea and appreciate the strength of an idea. The ability to compare ideas acts as sharpening tool for effective reasoning, and application of ideas to avoid unforeseen disappointments. Through diversity, if an idea fails, another option takes up position.

In conclusion, the surrounding of a person offers opportunities to explore using diverse mindset. Education gives the knowledge of acquiring information from this surrounding and students ought to adopt diversity and try to find more “right answers” as opposed to one, limiting answer.