The purpose of an education is to prepare students for financially rewarding jobs

With the rapid social and economic development of our society, education reforms take place and benefit an increasing number of population by equipping them with knowledge and skills that are highly demanded by the workplace. Thanks to their education, many people have achieved a financially rewarding career and start to believe that securing a lucrative career has become the main purpose of education nowadays. Nonetheless, despite the apparent advantages of education that leads to a financially satisfying career, education serves a greater purpose that benefit individuals from various other aspects. Specifically, it broadens our vision and imagination, helps shape values and passions, and prepares us for solving real life problems that can transform millions of people’s lives.

Education plays a vital role in widening our horizons of knowledge and imagination by teaching us new concepts. For instance, Steve Jobs attended Stanford University where he studied a subject that was claimed to be the inspiration for Apple’s birth---calligraphy. The aesthetic values taught by Steve’s calligraphy professor inspired and encouraged him to revolutionize the traditional PCs by eradicating the dullness and adding visually appealing fonts and interface design to the products. Founded under Steve Jobs’s notion, Apple Inc. has ever since distinguished itself from the rest as a pioneer in championing technology devices with both practical functionality and aesthetic values. Thanks to education that has made calligraphy, a subject that was rarely taught at the time accessible to students, Steve was able to widen his existing knowledge system by studying an unfamiliar genre of art. Thus it is evident that education has had a positive impact on Steve’s imagination, based on which he drew connections between two seemingly irrelevant subjects---calligraphy and computers and created the Apple empire that transforms people’s experience with technology devices. Although Steve was later financially rewarded by his innovation, the fortune wasn’t the initial motivation. In fact, Steve had lived a frugal lifestyle in his parents’ garage for many years before his company became profitable.

Moreover, education helps people identify their personal value and passion that are more imperative than merely a career that is financially appealing. Xijin Hu, for instance, as one of the longest-serving newspaper editors in China, started his career as a war correspondent for People’s Daily in Yugoslavia after turning down a high-paid white-collar position in People’s Daily’s China main office. Hu chose to work in a dangerous war environment with minimal wages because he found a stronger sense of mission in standing next to victims and revealing the truths behind the former socialist state’s collapse. Hu expressed during an interview that his passion was influenced by the communist doctrines he grew up learning in China’s 60s as well as his undergraduate education in Russian literature in which advantages and drawbacks of socialism system are vividly depicted through literature of civilian life in Russia. Hence, it’s apparent that education guided Hu to understand what resonates with his personal value and passion that sometimes may even mean a career that is less financially comfortable.

Meanwhile, education is essential to equipping leaders with knowledge and ideology with extraordinary values that can transcend billions of lives. Deng Xiaoping, the second president in the People’s Republic of China, was born to a wealthy family and able to study social science in France while the majority of his peers were still suffering from impoverishment. Deng devoted his years in France into books and lectures, burying his head in causality of French revolution to the divergence between capitalist and communist systems, seeking the solution for social class conflict back home. Upon completing his degree, Deng was offered to a well paid position in France, however, he decided to return to his country and join the grass-root party where he introduced French theories that guided the newly established party on advocating the welfare of the working class. Without the education necessary to justify the revolution, Deng wouldn’t have achieved the economic reform that lifted billions of Chinese people above the poverty line.

Time and time again, great leaders of our time illustrate the significance of education with their stories. Because education introduces new concepts and knowledge that can broaden our vision and imagination, shape personal values and passions, and prepare them for tackling puzzles that can benefit our race as a whole, education makes possible not only a financially rewarding career but also civilized individuals who possess traits and knowledge that can improve the well-being of themselves and the society as a whole.