Education is (or should be) an extremely important yardstick by which to measure the degree of a nation's civilization

There are also, yes, more and more Facebook graduates in recent times, sadly. I say sadly because knowledge is a deep thing, a responsibility that is distributed throughout all members in a society. And the education system is (or should be) an extremely important yardstick by which to measure the degree of a nation's civilization.

But we often tend to confuse the amount of information we bank in our memory with the ability to deal with reality: finishing a school, getting to the end of a course is definitely an important milestone for those who go through it and pass it, but if it is not combined with a certain critical capacity it stays a mere piece of paper. Besides, a profession, no matter how technical and analytical it may be, is not only learned by putting the school lessons into practice: there's a whole part that is, so to speak, "around" the method and is about managing and evaluating the complexities of the world. And being able to evaluate the latter is the only way to be able to really live in one's present. That is why education, particularly if we are talking about the mandatory one, up to high school, vocational school, and apprenticeship, is not an idea, or an abstract concept. It is a concrete opportunity to not only learn concepts that may (or may not) be useful in life, but - and above all - to create an ecology of thinking. To nurture the ability to assess and cope with what life-not just the vocational sphere-puts in our way. As a matter of fact, at university or in continuing education one goes to a university to encounter a range of information and methodologies that are essential if one then wants to act professionally in a given field. But this is a very specific aspect of "getting trained," whereas it is always good to keep in mind that we spend a substantial but minority portion of our time working; the remainder is life. And in going about it, just as this issue of Illustrazione Ticinese is intended to show, there are many ways to grow and learn. As many as there are human beings.