Purpose of Education

I have been a teacher my whole life. My experience never prepared me when my wife passed. It was so painful, but I have no idea what struck me. I had pain before, physical and psychological. But this pain is so immense…nothing makes sense any more. What is going on? Why so painful? What is meaning of life? How to deal with pain of this magnitude? Losing a loved one is a life changing experience and it happens to almost everyone sooner or later. For this critical human experience, our education system gives no answer, no explanation?! I have been student and teacher in China, the US, and Hong Kong. None of the systems prepares me for this. The systems fail.
A doctorate student came to my office this afternoon. She is interested in working on a Ph.D. thesis on healthcare inequality in China…what are policy options for patients without health insurances? She went on to discuss her theories about what happened in the Chinse system that causes the problem. While listening to her, suddenly I asked “Have you really talked to patients or relatives without insurances?.... The wife of the cancer patient who spent their life saving, desperately trying to save her husband’s life, and meanwhile worrying about the financial hole the treatment is going to cause…. The parents of the child with leukemia who have sold everything valuable for the treatment just to keep the child alive for other few months….”
“You are doing a doctorate dissertation. To you, this may be just a paper, a training you have to get through to get your degree. Have you ever thought about the true meaning behind the research? The real lives buried under the statistics. The true stories lost in scientific narratives”
“Before doing anything, go to visit a few such patients, hear their stories. You probably know better why you do this research, in short term…in long term, you may develop a passion, a true love for what you do…. You will be the few extremely lucky ones in the world who do their jobs as passion. You don’t have a job anymore. When a job is not a job anymore? It is when it becomes a passion.”
What is true meaning of education? Knowledge? Yes, it is important. But it seems to go much deeper than simply delivering information. I hardly remember any specific set of knowledge and facts by any professor in my education. What I remember was the whole education experience, the interaction, the environment, the relationship, the affinity with something fresh, friendly, and deep---the collegial value instilled only by being with classmates---your fellow humans at a close personal level---in learning together. Maybe that is what education is all about---learning to be human, with other human beings, for the sake of humanity.