Three Uses of the Knife

Education is a blade.

Nourish. Clean. Protect.

“The subject of drama is The Lie. At the end of the drama the Truth…”

–David Mamet

All that learning
used under creative commons license photo by Wim de Jong

Education nourishes. Tell me how knowledge cannot be the cure for your hunger. You can learn to plant, reap, and prepare. One can learn to do the same and then learn the virtue of caring for others. One can use their learned skills to earn money and buy food or they could give that money to another. It is the conservation of energy, the conservation of matter.

You matter.

We matter. Conserve. Us.

Education cleans. Heals. We remember what we were like. Experimenting with our prejudices. Loves and hates. We learn. Change. We are cleansed of our experiences that can perpetuate hatred, harm, and discord. Education is the space where we can be. It is our darkroom. We dodge or we burn. We develop and we change. Emerge new and then repeat the process. After a few years we begin to get good at it, even. We are new. We are healed. We are clean.

Education protects. Every act of learning is a victory against ignorance. Minimum. I do not say this lightly. The decisions that a child/adolescent/young adult faces in this age are no more life-threatening as they may have been decades ago. Save for the fact that actual life/death decisions are being made. Education isolates us from the ignorance and pain of the world. Lonely? Safe. Move on.

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