By Olcay Cat – Sociology Major at Bogazici University

   Every person who has graduated or is in his late years of university education should think back and see their self going to their first class. The change can vary, but each student has gone through it, mostly for the better. Well of course, one might say, but this change is not only about the things we learn or having more to say on a manifold of subjects. University education has the power to alter the way we look around ourselves.

    I was not raised in the States, so I am not familiar enough with its high school education system. What I do know is that in almost every country of the developing world, including mine (Turkey) indoctrinates its subjects through national education. Private or public, every school has to comply with a curriculum which is issued by a central power. The intensity of indoctrination may differ in each, but nevertheless, a high school graduate in such countries end up with having very similar world views to his counterparts.

    University education, on the other hand, does exactly the opposite. It helps the students strip out of their former, collective body and construct an identity for themselves. We are included in lasting social networks, we further discover our abilities and we unlearn or question the things which are thought to us before. The last part is most crucial. Undergraduates, especially if they study social sciences, gain a very valuable skill: critical thinking.

    However, it gets tricky after graduation. While those who stay in the academia do not deviate from the intellectual path, those who do not tend to slowly lose what they held dear in their university years. Marketing, advertising or administrative jobs are just as good as any, many of us are going to have such jobs and we may be content with it. However, committing oneself to that kind of work is not advisable at the very least, in my opinion. When those jobs take over and be our lives, our critical thinking and our intellectual appreciation we had in our undergrad years are slowly eroded.

    In today’s world, globalization of trade through the revolutionary advances in information technologies brings along the possibility of profit to almost everyone who has access to the global market, and this semi-promise of riches push people to come up with an endless multiplicity of goods and services. This of course comes with a cultural cost. What seems to be the era of eternal consumerism alters our conceptual mapping, our way of thinking. It deprives us of our very imagination, because we are surrounded and bombarded by images and thoughts that we take for granted. We are exposed to these stimuli so frequently every day that we bypass the part where the critical thinking must come in. What do we have to say about all that? How can we criticize it? In what way we can contribute to the lives of others, and ourselves?

    However the age of information has also given us a blessing, which is the mostly-free-flowing knowledge. People around the world can exchange ideas, news, emotions and experiences. A datum exists through being present in a living creatures mind, and it moves on by constantly multiplying itself through conversations, letters and so on. The age of information presents us with the means to preserve any data we have if we choose to do so. It prevents even the tiniest piece of knowledge from withering away, thus making the accumulation of information occur in an unprecedented pace.

    The images which are provided for us by global consumerism and intellectual data are constantly at battle. The two sides struggle to change the thought processes of the human being. People, though, are not (and should not be) mere objects to be manipulated, they can (and must) make a difference. If the Modern Scroll can not only disseminate information but truly contribute to the global forum with unique ideas and questions, we will do our part to keep critical thinking intact in our readers, as well as ourselves, even after we all leave our undergraduate years behind.

(Source: modernscroll.com)