Tag Archives: #Middle East

[define:Education] vs [define:Cultivation] How would you best describe a per­son who has accom­plished a great deed of stud­ies? Most would say: edu­cated and they are cor­rect. How­ever, how would you describe some­one who has not stud­ied at all yet he or she is very gen­tle, polite and acts as a bright indi­ca­tion of civilization?

I would sug­gest the most appro­pri­ate word for it: cul­ti­vated. This word is orig­i­nally used for crops mostly, describ­ing the whole process of plant­ing, and care­tak­ing of use­ful and edi­ble goods in the fields.

The appli­ca­tion of the word I’m sug­gest­ing has two main mean­ings. First, it reflects the process of help­ing some­one cre­ate a full and coher­ent per­son­al­ity. Sec­ond, it indi­cates that there are fac­tors affect­ing someone’s per­son­al­ity and ideas related to the subject’s envi­ron­ment. In our days the vast major­ity of young peo­ple are educated.

That means they have at least some type of degrees like a high school degree as the low­est stan­dard mov­ing on to uni­ver­sity degrees most com­monly. Keep­ing in mind that most peo­ple start school at the age of 5 approx­i­mately and by acquir­ing a uni­ver­sity degree they will be some­where between 21 and 25 years old, we notice that a respectable sum of years from our lives is behind stu­dent desks.

The point is what do we actu­ally learn in all these years? Almost every­one mas­ters the basics of edu­ca­tion mean­ing math, physics, his­tory and all sorts of courses at their basic level and some oth­ers learn a craft or gain exper­tise in other sci­en­tific fields. How all these help us being a bet­ter person?

Many stud­ies have proved in recent years that there is a rela­tion between the level of edu­ca­tion and the crime rate in soci­eties. Noth­ing more than that. Also, that con­clu­sion is rather… incon­clu­sive if we accept that in high pros­per­ity soci­eties there are less motives for com­mit­ting crimes.

On the other hand it is com­monly accepted that edu­ca­tion increases respon­si­bil­ity of actions, pro­motes work­ing in a group and most impor­tantly cre­ates val­ues and ideals for young peo­ple. How­ever it is not the only fac­tor that cre­ates ideals and values.

Oth­ers may include fam­ily, friends and work asso­ciates. Also, the gen­eral soci­ety we live in makes actions look appro­pri­ate or inap­pro­pri­ate respec­tively. Let’s take a look at an exam­ple. Lit­ter­ing is not a crime in most coun­tries, yet it is more approved in east­ern cul­tures rather than the west­ern. Why so?

Every­body knows that lit­ter­ing is not a good thing for the envi­ron­ment edu­cated or not. In our exam­ple we must note that the west­ern­ers used to lit­ter more, cen­turies before it became com­mon belief that lit­ter­ing is a bad thing. On the other side, in east­ern coun­tries the lit­ter­ing prob­lem became more evi­dent dur­ing the past cou­ple of cen­turies when more con­sum­ing goods were intro­duced and the level of pros­per­ity grew at almost the same rate as the one of pop­u­la­tion. So, that’s were the word cul­ti­va­tion blends in.

The dif­fer­ent lev­els of pros­per­ity among the peo­ple of the world can affect social cul­ti­va­tion which is irrel­e­vant from edu­ca­tion. Poor nations whose peo­ple have to face more sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems than the one of the above exam­ple (lit­ter­ing) are bound to delay the adap­ta­tion of west­ern val­ues from their societies.

Glob­al­iza­tion or titled locally as Region­al­iza­tion does not help the above pro­ce­dure. Notic­ing how peo­ple live in more devel­oped coun­tries makes the peo­ple of less devel­oped coun­tries want to expe­ri­ence the same things as the rest. In that effort they skip steps of becom­ing more cul­ti­vated as we might say.

The phrase “the end jus­ti­fies the means” comes more often to the sur­face. A few cen­turies ago, the nations along the globe which did not inter­act and lived in their own closed soci­eties had dif­fer­ent lev­els of cul­ti­va­tion directly linked to the evo­lu­tion steps.

There were the rich and wealthy and devel­oped Eng­lish peo­ple want­ing to intro­duce to India by force their way of think­ing. The same hap­pened in almost all the colonies of the super­pow­ers at the time. It could not hap­pen to the nations that were of no inter­est to the global pow­ers, such as many nations in Africa, in Asia and in the Mid­dle East long time before the use of oil was discovered.

In more ancient times the same exact thing hap­pened. The few cen­ters of civ­i­liza­tion existed and all the oth­ers were thought to be bar­bar­ians with their soci­eties fol­low­ing a dif­fer­ent pace in the race for evolution.

Today, that we all evolve at the same time some nations have to take longer steps than oth­ers to fol­low them. That cre­ates lack of cul­ti­va­tion in their soci­eties. Every farmer knows that they can­not go directly from plant­ing to har­vest­ing but it takes rather a lot of time and effort to reach the final product.