When your kid turns seven years old and teachers come to tell you his reading skills are below average, the stroke for the parents of the 21st century starts to enter their minds. They involve every possible person or institution to make sure their child won’t fall behind. After that, they have to start selecting certain courses in school, or as you might say basically determine their intellectual future at the age of fifteen. And when they finally think the pressure’s over and they have their school diploma in their hands, they are expected to race off to college not trying to waste any more time. The study they eventually choose is not a big deal, everything will fall right into place if they just keep on learning, learning and learning.
Most people will find this look on the education of a child quite pessimistic, and I’m obviously not going to deny that. I’ve often had interesting conversations with people in college discussing topics their study covered. However, the intentions with which people educate themselves has certainly changed a lot over the years.
In the middle ages, people didn’t study because they explicitly had to, but because they thought it would make them a better person. As Aristotle states; true evil and intended bad actions don’t exist. These actions are a result of the ignorance of a person, who hasn’t yet found the right truth. This polymathic habit however, of trying to gather as much knowledge in as much different disciplines of science a human being is physically capable of, has faded away. We study because society expects us to and because we want a good job in the future to sustain ourselves, with the addition of the occasional whim of interest here and there.
This conclusion doesn’t only sound pessimistic, but it’s also not a very comforting image of our intentions and our nature. Have we stopped trying to be good human beings? No, of course not. I do think however that the ethical emphasis societies and their norms used to have and the way morality is determined, is starting to change.
The motive for studying has sort of remained the same; whether you study for yourself in order to become a better person or to avoid public disgust and grant yourself a comfortable future, a more practical motive but still for your own good. However, the moral aspect in this motive is different. Acquiring as much knowledge as possible for the development of your own character states a criterium within science and yourself. There is one truth and if we find it, we will have reached the most perfect version of life and ourselves, an idea of course also derived from Plato; the more knowledge, the more perfect version we create of ourselves and the closer we come to the omniscience of the perfect gods. It’s the life goal to perfect your character as much as possible.
Nowadays however, the criterium for becoming a good person lies not within the perfection of your own character and within yourself, but with the public. There’s not one truth, but there are endless opinions on how to be good, which come with expectations. If you’re rich, like Bill gates, you’re expected to donate lots of money to charity, scientific research etc. The social community expects this of you, which causes you to act in that way. You act like this, not because you will then think of yourself as a better person, but because you will think of yourself as a better person, because théy think of you as a good person. Where morality in the medieval century was something individualistic and something you did on your own and because of yourself, it now depends on the moral opinion of others.
Because of social media, everyone is so occupied with each other that they no longer see themselves as the main cause of their own moral lifestyle. We determine if we are a good person based on another’s opinion and have forgotten how to create our own on the matter. I’m not saying we should act as we like regardless of what others think, but I am of the opinion that when it comes down to our morals we should have a moment and try to think about how we think we’ll become a good person and what moral actions are and not always depend on other people’s judgements.
From Knights to computers 