Education is not just a topic in a primary school essay

I had read,during the first quarantine of 2020, that anyone who will come out of it without having acquired something new, either as a hobby or a skill, then all the "I don't have time" they had said until then were not reasons but excuses. They were not busy, just lazy. That's something that’s stuck with me.

I remember that when we finally came out of that quarantine, we had to convince some people of some self-evident things. Not subjectively obvious, but about reality itself. First we had to try to convince them that there is a virus that is killing people and it's not actors around the world or the new world order that wants to impose a pandemic on us. Then, explain to them that we need to wear a mask to protect both ourselves and the people we come in contact with and that there is a reason why the music shuts down, demonstrably. As for the vaccine? The number of Google searches might equal the number of "internet scientists" we've acquired as a human race.

Even in politics, where you need experience and enough knowledge to be able to comprehend, but only critical ability to be able to judge, we failed each and every time a world organization congratulated us, the numbers proved the achievements of a nation, but we were victims of the "fake news pandemic" and of crafty pseudo- politicians who presented a part of the truth, interpreting it according to their own judgment.

Recently the same thing has been happening with the invasion of an absolutist in an autonomous country. We look for excuses like "I killed her because I loved her", "yes, but she provoked him too, she was wearing a mini" to diminish the obvious, the reality. There is no femicide, murder, war where the one who kills is, compared to someone else who commits the same crime, more or less right.

And while all this is happening to people who cannot change the reality, there are some others who believe that education is just a topic that a primary school child can write in an essay and not the root of the problem. There are people who don’t realize that it is through education that the world changes, exactly because it is the foundation of our democratic societies. People who wondered "when will I ever use biology?" are the ones who now stand in the way of eradicating a pandemic. Those who asked themselves "why do I even care about history?" are the ones who can justify wars. As for the ones who thought "I don't need to write essays since I won’t ever become a philologist", they are those who lack the critical faculties to be able to distinguish who is telling them the truth and who is taking advantage of them.

For as long as education continues not to be a priority, excuses and lazy people will evolve, internet scientists will have more influence and clickbait sites will be used as evidence. We will be doomed to a democracy held hostage by people who believe that education is only a topic that children in an elementary school essay would think of.

Author: Athanasios Tataroglou #inviTED