Education: What is it and Why is it important?

What is education?

Education is a measure of how well a person has stored and can process information about reality. These are based above all on connections between what is going on in the world and how you deal with it. Education describes both the process of learning and the transfer of knowledge as well as the result, the information skills in a person’s brain.

Is school important?

School attendance has been compulsory in Germany since the 19th century. Before that, education was an accidental good – especially for the social elite.

Today it is actually the task of schools to create educational equality, better said equality of opportunity: all children should have the best possible access to socially recognized positions, jobs, prosperity, power, and political influence.

Today education is free and compulsory for all children – but it is still distributed very differently. Virtually all of the human knowledge can now be found on the Internet for free. Competencies are therefore even more important than knowledge – and wisdom is something else.

Why is education important?

I bet you yourself can think of a few answers straight away when asked why education and school are important …

Let’s do a headstand for this: Imagine that you had no education at all.

• Then you would not be able to use this technical device on which you are reading this text.
• You couldn’t read at all.
• You would not even on the idea come, the question “Why is education important?” To ask.
• A social life without education is not possible, especially not with our complex digitalized society in times of climate change

But: a large part of our education is not visible, we have got used to it.
Because: Education is more than what is taught in school – education is the number of skills, knowledge, meaningful behavior that we have learned.

Unfortunately, the corona pandemic has also shown us that public education is still failing in some places: many people do not understand the connections behind a pandemic and prefer to believe in crude conspiracy theories. In addition, there are many people with mental health problems despite high-quality schooling. Despite (and because of) high-tech industry, there are serious environmental crises that threaten our existence as humanity (bee deaths, climate change) – so there is still a lot to be done in our collective education. Do your part!