Education vs 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 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.