Education and servility

I’m rereading Fernando Savater, specifically El valor de educar (The Value of Educating), where he mentions that:

According to Jaime Balmes’s well-known dictum, the art of teaching how to learn consists of building factories, not warehouses.

But how much is education and how much is instruction? I’m afraid there is a feeling that development comes from training more technicians, for which all we need are instructors, not educators.

Things aren’t as simple as the Castalia blog puts it, in the sense that we should question the existence of the humanities-and-science high schools (an outdated and inappropriate classification, since as far as I know scientists are human too).

The truth is that if people from this kind of high school have nowhere to continue their education, that’s a serious problem, because it means we have a society that places little value on developing higher skills and prefers the immediacy of what is wrongly called practical knowledge.

I’m not saying it’s bad to train technicians, but really, the greater value lies in forming people able to face the present and future world with adequate intellectual tools. People who know how to think, and not just mechanics who are experts in technologies that go obsolete every 6 months.

First, there isn’t enough room for that many technicians, because our countries never did industrialize. Second, if we are heading toward a knowledge society, we need highly prepared people, and a humanities-and-science high school doesn’t provide that, much less a vocational one.

What’s going on is that Chile and many Latin American countries have chosen to follow the path of the so-called service economy (not to say the servility economy), where the skills kids leave the humanities-and-science high schools with seem to be enough (except that we have to give them a coat of English, and in the future of Mandarin)