I’m university educated and feel ineffably grateful for being so. Sans coming from a well-off family, I’m fully aware that I’d be significantly worse-off had I not indulged in tertiary education dabblings.
Accompanying the in-person pleasure that comes from learning on a university campus is what extra-curricular lessons arise. Whether it be informal educations in music, alternate culture/s, or existential discoveries of multi-dimensional proportions, a university education is a passport to an imagined existence that, with application and compromise, can deliver on whatever realm of dreams people believe can materialize in everyday life.
The darker side to this relative utopic vision exists in the reality that not everyone has the opportunity to dream, let alone make their dreams come true via the path of tertiary education. While roughly an eighth of the world’s countries have free tertiary education built into their social infrastructure, they are, quite obviously, in the minority.
I’ve considered myriad options as to why countries would exclude their populous from becoming educated, and all logical roads lead me back to the understanding that certain countries simply don’t want their people to be educated.
This notion is neither novel nor controversial. I say this because global capitalism requires a mass of desperate people willing to prop up labor forces at reduced wages to stay alive. Should this mass of people be educated and offer eloquent, logical reasons as to why they should be paid more, both financially and rights-wise, the underbelly of the globalized economic system would fall through the floor and the modern world would, in a sense, be turned on its head.
It’s no secret that a university education is a ticket to enter the financial freakshow that we all live within on advantageous terms. A university degree advertises your compliance with the geo-status quo while intimating a psychological willingness to adapt – whatever that entails – to a state of living that ensures mutualistic benefit between the individual and the system-at-large.
As long as this status quo remains – that of social mobility being predicated on having a university degree – the politics of inequality will continue to be the defining characteristic of our human species well into the future.