How Education Has Blinded People
Updated: Mar 7, 2022
In my early years, I enjoyed mathematics. It was the only subject at school that appeared logical to me. I enjoyed looking at mathematical patterns and series.
By early teenage, I discovered what I would later know as physics. The objectivity of mathematics finally had a purpose. I followed physics because it looked more interesting than anything else I knew.
By late middle-school and early high school, I had seen so much corruption in school that I had begun to wonder why people do what they do. I used to think about human behavior for hours. At 15, I changed high-schools. The new school forever changed me. The amount of untruth and dishonesty I saw there turned me into a stoic. I concluded that the Indian education system was a fraud.
I traveled to the United States for higher education. I had already discovered neuroscience but failed to get into any neuroscience program. One of my freshman year general education classes was General Psychology. I still remember the first day of classes. It was 10 am in the morning. The professor was Dr. Tom Carskadon. I had discovered the field that I thought might have held the answer to why people do what they do. I dropped my affair with physics and maths, and pursued psychology. At the same time, I grew interested in Economics.
A year down the line, it was clear folks back home weren't accepting my interest in psychology. I changed my major to Marketing as a compromise. I thought I might still be learning psychology in disguise. I was wrong. General Psychology alone had more substance in it than the entire Marketing program. To my advantage, I learned a lot about the corporate world and became disillusioned by it within a semester.
Since business was dumb and I didn't have to study to get As, I ended up reading books and attending open lectures in philosophy, biology, and anything I found interesting. It was precisely this year, 2017, when I understood that these majors or subject categories were making people blind. When philosophers debated, no one asked which discipline they were from. Nothing was off-limits in philosophy. I knew this was right. Leave no question unasked. Don't even bother naming and categorizing things. You are only complicating things.
Individual disciplines program a mind to see things only one way, blind to its all other aspects. People in physics looked at everything like a physicist would. People in psychology looked at things like a psychologist would. People in economics look at things like an economist would. Each of them think that they have a special vision when they are all blind. Truth, however, is not a field of study. Its pursuit must be holistic and all inclusive. Now, that I had changed fields so many times, I could see the pieces integrate. I could see what my peers in specific fields would never be able to see until they discover that academic specialization has made them blind.