Education

Basics of Education and Its Trend Towards Globalization

Education is a very broad concept as it could be any form of instruction that leads to learning or development of individual skills, perceptions and beliefs. It is commonly used for classroom instruction but this is technically called formal education where students have to be in school to study. There is also informal education where its application could be almost anything. For example, a mother teaching her kids to cook is a form of non-formal education or a coach teaching the players about the basics of a game is also referred to as non formal education.

To better understand the real concept of education, its etymological roots should be considered. Education came from the Latin word “educare” which means “bring out” and educere meaning “bring out”. The concept of education is also derived from the word “ducere” which means “to lead”. Based on its etymology, education means an act wherein a person is lead by another so that something would be brought out. This is commonly found in classrooms where teachers lead their students or instruct them so that they could bring out knowledge or concepts of understanding the instructions provided.

Basic Stages of Formal Education

For formal education, every student who completes the basic education system the country has to offer usually goes through four stages:

Preschool – this stage usually starts at three years old until six years old. Kids are taught basic skills essential for the next stage. Kids are taught how to write as well as basic reading.
Primary – usually referred to as the elementary years, students on these stages usually age from seven to 14 years old. Some countries have a unified elementary school while others divide the primary education into two – the “infant” and “junior” primary years.
Secondary – students aged from 12 to 14 years often go through this stage. The instructions and curriculums at this stage often deal with real world application of what they learn although there are still basic subjects involved. Some students stop at this stage to work for blue collar jobs.
Tertiary or Higher Education – some students opted to proceed to college where they can gain bachelor’s degree. This stage of education is offered by state colleges and universities and students usually spend four to five years on higher education. After this stage, students could work in various industries they have chosen to study while in state colleges and universities.

Other Stages and Forms of Education

Aside from basic education stages where individuals could go through and start a career, there are other forms of education a student could take to improve what they learn or explore a new career:

Post-Graduate studies – students after college who would like to extend their expertise on a specific subject often go through post graduate studies. These are courses with a basic requirement of a relevant degree. There are two types of post graduate studies: masters and doctoral degree. The former could be taken after college while the latter requires a relevant college degree and master’s degree.
Non-Formal Adult Education – some countries offer basic education with basic skills for adults. The scope of studies range from the very basic (literacy course for adults) to advance training (bookkeeping or accounting) for various business processes.
Short Term Courses – these are courses offered to individuals looking for a change in their career or would like to know a new skills. These courses are often highly technical and intensive with emphasis on practical approach and daily practice.

Processes Determining Education

The government through its education arm, teachers and administrators often consider several factors in order to develop the proper method of education. This is very important since this determine what and how these students will be taught.

Curriculum – this is practically the “what” in education. School administrators create a curriculum which should be the subjects that should be dealt with in that particular year. Specifications on curriculum advances as the stages increase.
Learning modes – this is the “how” on students end. This is very important since child psychology differs on every stage so teachers have to know how students learn to properly adjust.
Teaching methods – this is the actual “how” on teaching. Teachers use specific teaching methods coincides the learning methods of their students to effectively convey information.
Technology – the advancement of technology has not only influenced business and consumer processes but also education as well. Many teachers are harnessing the technology so that they could reinforce what they have taught in the classroom.

Globalization of Education

The improvement of technology has not only reinforced education in the classroom but also opened the doors of students to international concepts. Education is no longer limited on the books they can read but they can also learn additional concepts from other countries.

There are also students who opted to study outside the country to reinforce what they have learned so far. The concept of globalization is not just limited on getting new ideas but learning advanced concepts from places that has significantly improved on a specific subject.

Conclusion

Education slowly introduces a person to different concepts that would help in their chosen career or way of life. They can go through basic formal or non-formal education which equips them when they chose to tackle a specific lifestyle. The knowledge they earned through the basic education system could be reinforced through advanced studies or studying in other countries with advanced technology and teaching methods of the specific subject.

Education Quotes (27)

Every time an educator brings a banker or a financial planner into their classroom, supposedly in the name of financial education, they arc actually allowing the fox to enter the hen house. I am not saying bankers and financial planners arc bad people. All I am saying is that they are agents of the rich and powerful. Their job is not to educate but to recruit future customers. That is why they preach the doctrine of saving your money and investing in mutual funds. It helps the bank, not you. Again, I reiterate this is not bad. It's good business for the bank. It is no different than Army and Marine recruiters coming on campus when I was in high school and selling students on the glory of serving our country.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

Most people leave school not knowing even the basic differences between a stock and a bond, between debt and equity. Few know why preferred stocks are labeled preferred and why mutual funds are mutual or the difference between a mutual fund, hedge fund, exchange traded fund, and a fund of funds. Many people think debt is bad, yet debt can make you rich. Debt can increase your return on investment, but only if you know what you are doing. Only a few know the difference between capital gains and cash flow and which is less risky. Most people blindly accept the idea of going to school to get a good job and never know why employees pay higher tax rates than the entrepreneur who owns the business. Many people are in trouble today because they believed their home was an asset, when it was really a liability. These are basic and simple financial concepts. Yet for some reason, our schools conveniently omit a subject required for a successful life—the subject of money.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

When I am asked what I would teach if I were in charge of financial education for our school system, my answer is: "I would make sure the students understood the relationship between taxes, debt, and inflation before leaving the school system." If they understand that, they will have a more secure financial future. They would be able to make better financial decisions for themselves rather than expect the government or so-called "financial experts" to save them.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

So many of us go on to work for the new plantations—the big corporations of the world, the military, or the government. We go to school to get a good job. We are taught to work for the rich, shop at the stores of the rich, borrow money from the banks of the rich, invest in the businesses of the rich via mutual funds in our retirement plans—but not bow to be rich.

Many people do not like hearing they are taught by our school system to be caught in the web, the web of the conspiracy of the rich. People do not like to hear that the rich have manipulated our system of education.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

One of the greatest sins of our current educational system is that it does not teach you about money. Rather, it teaches you how to be a good employee and to know your station in life. Some would say this is by design. For instance, in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island, Griffin quotes from the first occasional paper of The General Education Board, entitled The Country School of To-Morrow, written by Frederick Gates: "In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good upon a grateful and responsive rural folk . . . For the task we set before ourselves is a very simple as well as a very beautiful one: To train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are ..."
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

One of the first people I came across who shared my suspicions about education is John Taylor Gatto, author of, among other books, Weapons of Mass Instruction and Dumbing Us Down. Mr. Gatto was named New York City Teacher of the Year three times and also New York State Teacher of the Year. In 1991 he quit the teaching profession in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal saying, "I can't teach this way any longer. If you hear of a job where I don't have to hurt kids to make a living, let me know. Come fall I'll be looking for work." He brought to my attention that our current system of education comes from the Prussian System, a system designed to create good employees and soldiers, people who blindly follow orders, waiting to be told what to do, including what to do with their money.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

As Mr. Gatto said to me recently, "The school system was not designed to teach children to think for themselves. Nor was it developed to just support the present-day notion that we can all be free. In actuality, our current school system is based on a Prussian model that was developed to do just the opposite—to teach children to obey orders and do as they're told. Compliant and obedient students become employees who are content to work for the rich or become soldiers who sacrifice their lives to protect the wealth of the rich."
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

Most school systems do a pretty good job with academic and professional education. They fail when it comes to financial education.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

I am an advocate for education. In Asian culture, the most respected profession is the teacher. Yet in Western culture, teachers are the lowest paid of educated professionals. I believe that if we valued education like we say we do, we would pay our teachers more money and build better, safer, schools in bad neighborhoods. To me, it is a crime that in America our real estate taxes determine the quality of education a child receives. In other words, schools in poor neighborhoods receive less tax money than schools in rich neighborhoods. Talk about a conspiracy of the rich!
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

Why continue advocating a system that is designed to create cogs instead of free thinkers, and a system designed to suppress financial knowledge rather than create financially literate people who can prosper in a capitalist system?
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

One of the trends that can become part of a perfect storm of disasters for American society has been a decades-long dumbing down of education, producing a citizenry poorly equipped to see through political rhetoric, and even more poorly supplied with facts and the ability to analyze opposing arguments.

Thousands of students graduate each year, from even the most prestigious schools and colleges in the country, with no real knowledge of history and no real analytical skills at dissecting opposing views. It was once the proud boast of educators that "We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think." But today, all too many educators see the classroom as a golden opportunity for them to indoctrinate a captive audience.

The specifics of their indoctrination are not the biggest problem. Quite aside from the merits or demerits of the specific indoctrination - whether "global warming" or the new trinity of "race, class and gender" - what the indoctrination process does is get students used to hearing one side of issues and being urged to reach conclusions and act on that grossly inadequate basis. Such an "education" sets them up to become victims of the next skilled demagogue who comes along and who knows what kinds of rhetoric will get them to respond as automatically as Pavlov's dog.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Most of the graduates of even our most prestigious universities leave these illustrious campuses utterly ignorant of economics. Even distinguished professors in other fields are often not only ignorant, but misinformed, about the most basic principles of economics. Harvard's eminent historian, Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., admitted that he had no real interest in economics, though that did not stop him from concluding that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration saved the American economy during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Student riots in Paris remind us that education at elite academic institutions is not enough to teach either higher morals or basic economics.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Elementary as it may seem that we should hear both sides of an issue before making up our minds, that is seldom what happens on politically correct issues today in our schools and colleges. The biggest argument of the left is that there is no argument— whether the issue is global warming, "open space" laws or whatever.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that students are being indoctrinated with the correct conclusions on current issues, that would still be irrelevant educationally. Hearing only one side does nothing to equip students with the experience to know how to sort out opposing sides of other issues they will have to confront in the future, after they have left school and need to reach their own conclusions on the issues arising later.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Education is usually discussed in terms of the money spent on it, the teaching methods used, class sizes or the way the whole system is organized. Students are discussed largely as passive recipients of good or bad education.

But education is not something that can be given to anybody. It is something that students either acquire or fail to acquire. Personal responsibility may be ignored or downplayed in this "non-judgmental" age, but it remains a major factor nevertheless.

After many students go through a dozen years in the public schools, at a total cost of $100,000 or more per student— and emerge semi-literate and with little understanding of the society in which they live, much less the larger world and its history— most discussions of what is wrong leave out the fact that many such students may have chosen to use school as a place to fool around, act up, organize gangs or even peddle drugs.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Society may lavish thousands of dollars per year on schooling for a youngster who does not bother to study, and yet when he or she emerges as a semi-literate adult, it is considered to be society's fault if such youngsters cannot get the same kinds of jobs and incomes as other youngsters who studied conscientiously during their years in school.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

But criteria exist precisely to have a disparate impact on those who do not have what these criteria exist to measure. Track meets discriminate against those who are slow afoot. Tests in school discriminate against students who did not study.

Disregarding criteria in the interest of "fairness"— in the sense of outcomes independent of inputs— adds to the handicaps of those who already have other handicaps, by lying to them about the reasons for their situation and the things they need to do to make their situation better.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Many people would consider it a handicap to be a black orphan, born in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the home into which I was adopted had four adults and I was the only child. Many years later, when I was a parent and asked one of the surviving members of that family how old I was when I started walking, she said: "Oh, Tommy, nobody knows when you could walk. Somebody was always carrying you."

You can't buy that. A leading historian of education has said that the New York City public schools were the best in the country during the 1940s. That was when I went to school there. That was enough piece of sheer good luck that came my way. Today the classes are smaller, the buildings more modern— but the education itself is a disaster. I got the kind of education that people have to go to expensive private schools to get today.

Perhaps more important, nobody told me that I couldn't make it because I was poor and black, or that I ought to hate white people today because of what some other white people did to my ancestors in some other time.

Nobody sugar-coated the facts of racial discrimination. But Professor Sterling Brown of Howard University, who wrote with eloquent bitterness about racism, nevertheless said to me when I prepared to transfer to Harvard: "Don't come back here and tell me you didn't make it 'cause white folks were mean."

He burned my bridges behind me, the way they used to do with armies going into battle, so that they had no place to retreat to, and so had to fight to win.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

It was once the proud declaration of many educators that "We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think." But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think, about everything from global warming to the new trinity of "race, class and gender."
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

Many of today's "educators" not only supply students with conclusions, they promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions— in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, without either a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side or the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don't understand or— worse yet— follow leaders they don't understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one's own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.
— Thomas Sowell; Dismantling America

During the dark days of American slavery, slaves were forbidden to be educated. In some states, it was a crime to teach slaves to read and write. An educated slave class was a dangerous slave class. Today, we fail to teach kids to be financially literate. It is another way of creating slaves—wage slaves.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

There are three different types of education required for success today. They are:

<ol>
<li>Academic education: the ability to read, write, and do math.</li>
<li>Professional education: learning to work for money.</li>
<li>Financial education: learning how to make money work for you.</li>
</ol>

Our school system does an adequate job with the first two types of education, but fails miserably at providing financial education. Millions of well-educated people have lost trillions of dollars because the school system has left out financial education.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

The primary reason most people are afraid of changing is because they are afraid of making mistakes, especially financial mistakes. Most people cling to job security because they are afraid of failing financially. The reason most people turn their money over to financial planners is because they hope the financial planner will not make mistakes, which, ironically, is a mistake.

To me, our education system's biggest problem is that it teaches kids not to make mistakes. If children do make mistakes, the system punishes them rather than teaching them to learn from their mistakes. An intelligent person knows that we learn by making mistakes. We learn to ride a bicycle by falling off the bike and climbing back on. We learn to swim by jumping in the water. How can people learn about money if they are afraid of making mistakes.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

1903: I believe the U.S. education system was taken over when the General Educatoin Board, founded by John D. Rockefeller, decided what kids should learn. This put the influence of education in the hands of the ultrarich, and the subject of money was not taught in school. Today, people go to school to learn to work for money, but they learn nothing about how to have money work for them.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

Have we been financially brainwashed? I believe we have. The primary reason why most people cannot see the daily cash heist happening all around them is because we have been financially programmed, turned into Pavlov's dogs, to steal from ourselves via our words. We mindlessly repeat mantras that cost us our wealth.

As I've said, words have the power to make us rich - or keep us poor.

Our school system does a good job training people for the E and S quadrants. During our formative years, our families and our schools teach us to repeat what they believe to be words of financial wisdom, but in reality they are words that train us to steal from ourselves. These words are mantras drilled into our consciousness, conditioning us to submissively surrender our hard-earned money to those on the B and I side of the quadrant. Without a solid financial education you remain a prisoner of the E and S quadrants.

Our leaders don't encourage us to change or to seek ways to move from the E and S side of the quadrant to the B and I side. Rather, our leaders teach us to live below our means instead of expanding our means. In my opinion, living below your means kills your spirit. That's no way to live.
— Robert Kiyosaki; Rich Dad's Conspiracy of The Rich

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