So far this has been the education of the head. What about the education of the heart? What about learning to become a good human being? What about cultivating the virtues of an enlightened soul? What about the levitation of the spirit?

What happened when you went to school, spent your days in the classrooms, year after year, and then went to private tutors, coaching centres, libraries, and study groups? Think how you worried about examinations, term papers, quizzes and grades! Not counting the nightmares your parents went through to put you through school, first getting you admitted, and then paying for it. But that is not the end of it. They had to take you to school when you were a child, helped with your homework, attended parents' meeting and shared your anxieties over tests and grades.

All in all, the whole curricular approach to learning, which goes by the name of education, is a formidable business. It takes up lot of time, childhood, teenage and a good part of youth. And if you are educated you would know what it means to have an opportunity cost. The healthy and fresh springtime of life is gone in the murky turkey of academic performance.

George Bernard Shaw was somewhat skeptical of the whole thing. "From a very early age I have had to interrupt my education to go to school", he wrote. Education coops up students in the classrooms, away from the world, away from the people, not watching how flowers bloom, crops grow, rivers flow and seasons go. Schools do to children what nurseries do to plants, raising them under managed condition for mass production of commercially viable humanoids.

What has education changed around us? Eight US Presidents never went to college. The Group Chief Executives of international banks are only high school graduates. Who has ever asked if Michael Jackson has earned a degree? Many players, politicians, entertainers, and business moguls, people, who own wealth, possess power, throw tantrums and create clouts never finished school. Prince Williams of England earned a degree in geography with the second highest honours, the best grades the British royal family has ever achieved!

Guess who attended his graduation ceremony? The Queen of England, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, the proud relatives of the royal graduate. Think who would come to your graduation, if you majored in geography? Forget friends and neighbours. Try your own parents, and even they might want to cop out of it! Education has gone the way of religion. The poor and less fortunate is full of passionate intensity, while the rich and famous knows how to exploit it.

But this is not to undercut the value of education. The Article 26 of The Universal Declaration on Human Rights recognises education as one of the fundamental human rights after food, shelter and water. In 2000 participants from 164 countries pledged at the World Education Forum in Dakar to provide education for all because it is a catalyst for human development.

Never doubt the power of education, which improves the quality of life by enhancing the ability of households to manage health problems, improve nutrition and childcare and plan for the future. In the Philippines, for example, maternal primary education has reduced the risk of child mortality by half and secondary education by a factor of three. Life expectancy rises by 2 years for every 1 percent increase in literacy.

So education is a vital thing. It is essential for economic development through increasing productivity of people, which allows them a greater role in economic life, and gives them the opportunity to earn a better living. An adult with a primary education earns twice as much as an adult without any schooling. An OXFAM study shows that in Niger, the incidence of poverty is 70 per cent in households headed by adults with no education, compared to 56 per cent for households headed by adults who have not been to primary school. In Uganda, four years of primary education raises a farmer's output by 7 per cent.

Lastly and most importantly, education promotes political stability and democracy. One of the examples cited by UNESCO is that in Bangladesh, women with a secondary education are three times more likely to attend a political meeting than are women with no education. This is supposed to be the net impact of education, giving people the right and choice to be fearless, tolerant and free.

If compared to a locomotive, this is where education fails to jumpstart its engine. People go to school, learn the alphabets, arithmetic, art and science of the universe, history of the world, properties of matters, secrets of the human body, and the knowledge to understand and balance the material struggle with spiritual sagacity. This is where education somehow loses its steam after the initial roar. People learn to read and write, then specialize in certain skills after which they go back where they started just like a nut with eroded thread keeps slipping on the bolt.

Hence, the difference between the educated and the uneducated, one blinded by too much light and another groping in the darkness, both eventually led to make the same mistakes despite their varying levels of knowledge. The educated man returns to his instincts at the end of learning, his soul gutted by the same flames of greed, need and lewdness, which burns in the hearts of the unlettered and the unenlightened.

Except for one difference, which is funny. When an uneducated man steals something, he goes to jail, and this is a stigma that stays with him. But if the educated man steals, he seldom gets caught and is hardly bothered if he does, goes through life without shame, and enjoys flaunting what he has stolen. His car, his house, the education of his children in foreign countries, their lavish weddings, his foreign trips, mindless shopping, and the sordid inequality between earning and spending.

Socrates laid the foundation of education when he said that an unexamined life wasn't worth living. It was comparable to walking blindfolded through a garden without appreciating its beauty and attendant sensibilities. But that examination has turned into fog, the biggest smokescreen of human civilization, which hides vulgar instincts behind feigned innocence.

We have lost education in our quest for knowledge. We learn to examine life, but not to explain it because more educated people live on questionable means than those who never went to school. It's the fog of education which makes it happen. Look who is hiding inside your skin after you finish reading. Don't be surprised if you find that on the spur of fervent examination, you have left yourself unexamined!

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.