Educated and misinformed people

05/07/2024 Nilson Lattari

When I was attending my university, a professor told us that he wouldn’t know if, at the end of our course, we would be graduated, informed, or deformed people. It was a joke, of course, that provoked smiles among us. Today, I think that joke has become reality.
Do we go to school or does the school pass through us? Does life pass through us or, do we, simply, pass through it? It’s like to attend educational institutions and we don’t realize what they truly represent or represented to us.
The certificate of graduation is the ambition of all students who are attending these educational institutions. For some professionals, it’s enough to hook it on a wall as a symbol of knowledge or arrogance. As well as other people protect it carefully in a drawer and forget about it, and then go to the labour market to work in completely different areas. On the other hand, few people take it and strive to be the best.
Intellectual life exists not only to forge professionals because our choices also involve earning money or finding the opportunity to apply our knowledge to get a job that gives us a satisfying occupation in life.
We have to choose between money, fame, or recognition to do things that we would like to do. In fact, some professions are not desired because there is no possibility of earning money, and they are not considered useful. This utility proposed by capitalism is a cemetery of professions. It’s not usual for people, at some point in their lives, to bounce back and start doing what they really enjoy, turning into the people that they had imagined being in the past.
So, we have a universe divided among graduated, informed or deformed students. Then, we can narrow down this list to educated and misinformed people. For educated people, a certificate is nothing more than a piece of paper, and they need to improve continuously their knowledge, even though studies are eternal, boring, and exhausting. For misinformed people, a certificate is a symbol of arrogance and even having a primary knowledge they imagine themselves to be on a higher level than others. They have no sense of their own ignorance.
Of course, everybody has to think about their survival. And survival is also a choice. How can we survive in this world? Can we survive doing what we love or doing what we don’t love?
Can we do both? Yes. Will everybody be happy? No. Students are not at fault because they have to find a space for themselves within the job market. And they have to choose what they want to be.
But we have choices. We can be misinformed people and have more success than educated people. How? Misinformed people have more audience and followers while educated people have few or none. Misinformed people flow into abstract reasoning, a space where everything is possible. Real information provokes loneliness because it keeps educated people out of reality because they want to understand the reality that surrounds them. Misinformed people survive because they exist in the limbo of disinformation and don’t want to understand anything. It’s only an intellectual perversion. Lies are the best place for misinformed people: it is easy to build them up, it’s easy to broadcast them, and it’s easy to provoke enthusiasm in people. Truth is an indigestible place even for graduated people. For deformed people, the truth is not important because they have difficulty to understand it, or they don’t want to do it. But the truth is an important way to be always informed people.