The ideas we have formed in personal experience are often egocentric in nature. The ideas we inherit from social indoctrination are typically ethnocentric in nature. Both can limit our insight significantly. This is where mastery of academic subjects and of our native language comes into play. This is where education is supposed to empower us.
The ideas we learn from academic subjects and from the study of distinctions inherent in language use represent sources of ideas that can take us beyond our personal egocentrism and the social ideology in which we are otherwise typically entrapped. When we learn to think historically, sociologically, anthropologically, scientifically, and philosophically, we can come to see ignorance, prejudice, stereotypes, illusions, and biases in our personal thinking and in the thinking common in our society. Many, without such command, confuse very different things: for example, needing and wanting, having judgment and being judgmental, having information and gaining knowledge, being humble and being servile, being stubborn and having the courage of one’s convictions.
Command of distinctions such as these and those inherent in multiple disciplines can have a significant influence upon the way we shape our experience. If, for example, we see confuse ethics with arbitrary social conventions or religion or national law, we have no basis for understanding the true basis of universality in ethics: what does harm or good to humans and other sentient creatures.
When we develop our thinking, we go beneath the surface of ideas. Our personal experience is no longer “sacred.” We recognize our fallibility. We strive for ideas to broaden us and empower us as free individuals.
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