We have heard too much. People criticizing education, people praising it. People stressing its importance, others underplaying it. It can be talked about in any summit or conference, and it can be used to explain any social problem or offer a solution. Why? Why does education always carry so much weight? My answer: Education is so important and can never be talked enough, because it is fundamentally tied with the future of humanity. We can't talk about humanity's future without talking about education. --- Imagine eduation to be this giant machine and we send our young minds into. What they turn out to be and to do in the decades to come determine the future of humanity. Not the present, not the past, but the future. The effects of our educaiton, whether good or bad, only reveals itself in decades after the students graduate. This gigantic delay between effort and result is what makes it so hard to measure the effectiveness of our education. The behaviors of a human being -- the decisions we make, the projects we do, the goals we pursue -- is determined by and only determined by their beliefs, knowledge, and information available to them. We are machiens to churn in information and knowledge (from books, from expereince, from observation, for other people) and churn out actions, choices, and decisions. We are may not be realizing its every moment -- because fish living in water may never know what water it. A third grade belief might be still at work in the seventies. Education is not just the beginning several years of your life. It is your life. --- In order to answer the question of why certain humans behave this way or that way turns into the question of what do they believe in and what knowledge and information do they have that drive their actions. And that is the fundamental question of education. On a micro level -- Education shapes individuals behaviours by influencing the knowledge they gain and instilling certain beliefs. On a macro level -- education determines the collective behaviours and pursuits of future generations, and thus controls the future of humanity. In short, no. We are not talking about education enough.