Education

It’s not that I have never questioned the validity and efficacy of industrial education methodology but that I had not considered contribution the severity of our society’s current situation. Moreover being myself currently working towards a Ph.D., I cannot help but wonder if the progression I am attempting to realize is inflicting more harm on myself and my surroundings than the benefits it professes. Education has been long uphill battle for me from day one. I was always that child that the teachers called “bright but undisciplined”. I am even today, after years of undergraduate university education and of research-based graduate training “bright but undisciplined”. Maybe I have noticed my self forcing out the innate human intuitions and a desire to enjoy the process of education to make room for memorization and repetition of factual information that so often is the bulk of classroom material. Is this process that I have been subjected to (and continue to be) serving me well in my quest to understand the life I have been given? Or is it simply distracting me from the source of understanding to condition me to become a good, obedient American scientist meticulously advancing technology forward for the benefit of our great civilization? I’m not sure I can answer this question but I can point out some conflicting points of view that further confound this quandary.
As I endeavor deeper into the body of information we call science I am continually butting heads with the fact that all our environmental problems can, directly or indirectly, be traced back to a scientific discovery. Global warming = harnessing fossil fuels. Overpopulation = industrial agricultural technology. These may be gross over simplifications yet the concept, I think we can all agree on. So the question arises: is my PhD in environmental toxicology contributing more to the release of toxic materials into our environment than to my original goal of mitigating the effects of persistent pollutants? If this is true, and I fear it is, then I have been taught to think that my little contributions to scientific understanding and the dutiful commitment the development of a career will only serve to advance the cause of industrial civilization. Yet my intent is to combat the effects of industry through scientific understanding of persistent pollutants as evolutionary stimuli. Would I be closer to that goal if I didn’t waste all that time in organic chemistry class? Will my dissertation be worth the paper and ink it is printed with (including the multitude of related environmental costs associated with these products)? As I continue on in the industrial education system these fears haunt me more and more.

However, it has been said that humans are the only creatures that has figured out how to pass information from generation to generation outside of their genome. The reasons for this evolutionary adaptation are many but what is understood is that education is as much a fraction of the human creature as the two feet we walk on. In the education process we are all filled with information, patterning, rules ideas, and even simple biological information like how to walk. But is this “memetic” code now tainted by industrial education? Am I filling my head with misconceptions and erroneous understanding? Will my ambitions of ameliorating toxic effects in the environment be lost in the consumption of toxic and disposable products to conduct my lab-based research? Is environmental altruism hijacked by the inherent deleterious impacts of modern life?