Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

Human beings, unlike other animals, need many resources in life, because they seek not only survival but also quality of life. Two important resources are knowledge and education, but they are not synonymous, and here we shall try to define the distinction.

One way to clarify them is to say that knowledge is whatever enters our brain through the five senses that nature gave us. When we hear a sound, our hearing tells us, at most, that this is a musical sound and not the bleating of a goat; beyond that, however, education is needed to tell us whether the sound was a violin or a piano, and whether it was a work by Beethoven or a song by Kazantzidis. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that education is more important than knowledge, but rather that one presupposes the other. One could also say that knowledge resides in the left hemisphere of the brain, which deals with measurements and classifications of data, something we often, though misleadingly, call “logic”. Yet this accumulation of knowledge must also pass through the right hemisphere of the brain, which will analyze and synthesize that knowledge in order to arrive at judgments, conclusions, generalizations and a comprehensive picture. Indeed, the activity of the right hemisphere may even focus on determining whether pieces of knowledge are real knowledge, something that requires a philosophical approach. There is in fact a special branch of philosophy called epistemology or the philosophy of knowledge, which deals with whether a piece of knowledge is proven and secure, and with which scientific methods are appropriate for proving or disproving different kinds of knowledge. Karl Popper, for example, one of the greatest epistemologists, tells us that proving a theory or a piece of knowledge is logically impossible. The fact that the sun has risen in the east up to now does not guarantee that it will rise there tomorrow morning as well. Popper maintains that only the disproof or falsification of a scientific theory or proposition is logically possible. Thus, the proposition that all swans are white cannot be proven; but if one single black swan is found, the proposition has already been falsified. Popper goes on to say that a theory or proposition is scientific precisely when there is a way to disprove it. When you say that this glass is unbreakable, you can easily falsify that by throwing it on the floor. But if you say that the glass is blessed, that can neither be proven nor disproven, and for that reason the proposition is not scientific but metaphysical. Socrates’ saying “I know one thing, that I know nothing” is very close to Popper’s positions on the impossibility of proving a theory, but it also has a broader meaning: it also expresses the fact that there is an immense ocean of knowledge, proven or not, which neither our mind nor our time is sufficient to acquire. It is, of course, a pity that all that DNA of the ancients, which we boast of possessing, does not lead us to the realization of our ignorance but to know-it-all syndrome: “I know one thing, that I know everything”. If we accept Popper’s epistemological theory, the conclusion is that none of our knowledge is final, not even the axioms of Euclid or Newton’s law of gravity. These bodies of knowledge exist and the theories hold until the contrary is proven. Whatever the force of knowledge may be, however, its usefulness becomes apparent only if it passes through the catalyst of education. Education aims at a synthesis of knowledge, ideas, rules of aesthetics, logic, ethics and other constants or variables, in order to reach an overall approach to reality. For a person to become a better person, it is not enough to know the multiplication table well or to have memorized the poems of Dionysios Solomos. One must also be able to draw correct conclusions from the multiplication table and the poems, and to use both knowledge and conclusions constructively. For the wise person is not the one who has much impressive encyclopedic knowledge, remembers the dates of battles and the names of military commanders, but the one who can synthesize that encyclopedic knowledge in order to produce new knowledge, new education, and, ultimately, to contribute to an improvement in the quality of life for all of us. Education, then, is what may perhaps lead us to a better understanding of reality and of the problems we face, and to the adoption of behaviors that facilitate the required solutions. Ultimately, education is what will help us unblock our thinking, free it from rigidities, so that we can engage in real dialogue instead of the polemics in which we indulge today. Everyone agrees that the deficit in the field of education is enormous in Greek society. One of the most accurate descriptions of the modern Greek is the word “ill-mannered”. Our ill-mannered behavior, combined with self-importance and the stuck-record mentality, has led us into terrible dead ends, especially in the economic sphere. The best antidote would be education properly understood, and we are all responsible for its absence: the school, the state, the church and the family. None of these institutions ever focused on the importance of education or ever taught real ethics, which is perhaps the most important part of proper education. For the church, for example, the crucial issues are that the members of the Holy Synod must wear the epanokalimavkion during votes, and that the mother of a disabled child should not pay too much attention to her child; it is preferable that she always be ready to offer sexual services to her husband. One therefore wonders whether our spiritual leadership is concerned with our education or with the consolidation of obscurantism, like the Ethiopian church, which banned the use of the wheel and the railway, claiming that they were tools of Satan.