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AGAINST THE FALLACY OF EDUCATION AS A SOURCE OF ETHICS

For centuries, the major story of enlightenment was that education is and should be the cornerstone of our society. We try to educate people to make them respectable members of society, something which we inherently relate to being  ̳better persons‘, firmly believing that education makes humans less prone to evil. Today, modern research seems to validate that premise: statistics verify that more education results to less crime. But is this picture accurate and does this mean anything regarding morality per se? This paper tries to examine the facts with a more critical eye and determine whether education is indeed a source of ethics or not. The results of the analysis show that what we understand as education is not only unrelated to ethics but can also be a factor resulting in the degradation of morality in humans. Rousseau‘s arguments against science and arts are re-enforced with arguments stemming from other great philosophers and from modern experience itself. Using modern statistical analysis regarding the correlation of crime and education and through the examination of the modern regression in ethical issues, it becomes evident that education cannot and should not be a source of ethics. Knowing what is ethical is not as important as living an ethical life. Pharisees were the first to be denied the entrance to the kingdom of God. As Oscar Wilde once said, "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught".


INTRODUCTION
Many people today postulate that philosophy is dead. That couldn't be further away from the truth. In fact, in today's era of enlightenment, we are more and more bombarded with certainties that only philosophy has the ability and the power to genuinely question. And this questioning of the obvious is what every free-thinking man should do, if only he wants to remain a free-thinking man. This paper will examine and deconstruct one of the greatest dogmas of modern society: That paideia (as expressed mainly through education) is the main prerequisite of a human being good (ethical) as a person and as a member

FINDINGS
Examining the results of education is not an easy task, especially today where the benefits of education are so obvious for everyone that any hint of stating otherwise activates automatic reflexes of disagreement enhanced by decades of dogmatic thinking. Everyone today believes education is something inherently good; saying otherwise would be the same as doubting our own self who has grown to be educated and value education in others. However true philosophy has nothing to do with upholding the views of the many; most philosophers followed paths far away from what was considered as -obvious‖ for most people. The questioning of education started many years ago, from the age of Rousseau. Today, modern statistics of education seem to validate the intuition of the great philosopher: we have given too much trust to our mind and have forgotten what our heart cries out. More educated people are not more ethical per se, and vice versa: unethical people are not necessarily less educated. At the end, philosophy provides the way forward: the true source of ethics must be found in places which education currently blatantly ignores.

In the midst of enthusiasm, silent voices…
In the midst of the enthusiasm instilled by the scientific progress from 17 th century and onwards, few people paid any attention to some skeptical voices dimly spoiling the perfect notion of the new era of logos and progress. However, as history has taught us more than once, the majority of people was never good at grasping the essence of things when it comes to philosophy. In the desert forest of existence, it is the voices of the few standing aside silently that one should pay attention to. These few but important voices, tried to hint that the new direction of the European intellect might be wrong, nevertheless they were not enough to hold back the tide of change taking place in society back then. The modern era of -knowledge‖ was on the rise and science and education played an important role: Science being the tool through which knowledge was acquired, while education being the official tool which would transfer that knowledge to the masses. Knowledge was important for man to fulfill his potential as ruler of the cosmos, an integral part of the anthropocentric philosophy which was first founded in Renaissance (Zabulionite & Monakhov, 2018). This was supposed to be the start of an ‗enlightened' world, however as usual, phenomena deceived. Only a handful of people provided hints of some of the foundational problems of the new enlightened worldview.

Blaise Pascal
With the works of Galileo, Descartes, Bacon and De Groot, the new theoretical spirit of Europe grew to a glory of renewed puberty, a puberty that would grow into a full philosophical mature adolescence with Spinoza, Locke, Leibnitz and Newton later on. Only one person stood by the side of this river of enthusiasm, even though he could well be in the front lines; Blaise Pascal (Papanoutsos, 1978). Pascal spoke about the heart when all other people were astounded by the brain gaining new knowledge via science every day, spurring enthusiasm to all. At a time when logic was starting to gain ground as the basis of all progress, Pascal insisted on speaking of the irrational faith. His abstention from the general spirit of the times cannot be put more eloquently than himself: When other philosophers were too much involved into saying much, he claimed that -All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone‖ (Pascal, 1670). And if something can be the sole characteristic of modern scientific era is the endless chatter of the possibilities of the (scientific) tools man has discovered. And this was exactly the reason one of the leading mathematicians of that time was unwilling to share the general enthusiasm of his peers.
Barbarus hic ego sum quia non intelligor illis (They consider me a barbarian because they do not understand me) ~ Ovid

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Just a year before the French Revolution outbreak, a revolution which helped spread the idea of education as the main solution to the problems of society, one of the greatest theorists of the revolution and at the same time one of the greatest critiques of modern ‗cultivated' society passed away. Rousseau is known for many things, but one of the most important works he published was one essay against sciences and arts with regards to ethics. In this essay the philosopher was asked to speak for the relationship between science and ethics. And he did, but not in the way people thought he would. Instead of arguing that science and arts help people be more ethical, the renowned philosopher argued for the opposite. His main argument was that science (and knowledge acquired via science) not only does not make a man ethical, but to the contrary turns a man more unethical because it focuses on the analysis of knowledge and not on living an ethical life (Rousseau, trans. 2012).
Even though this seems like a radical opinion, the truth is that Rousseau was trying to pinpoint the obvious: When someone is too much focused on learning good manners, he is mainly focused on the surface of things and not on the essence of being actually what he learns about. Analyzing the characteristics of an ethical person not only does not make you an ethical person, but it also somehow draws you away from the effort you need to apply to actually become one. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's account against science and arts tried to point towards the evil which lies at the end of the path of knowledge for knowledge, the main motto of modern age. As with Pascal, no matter how eloquent the criticism of Rousseau was, his warning was not heard. The fury of the revolution and the enthusiasm of the new era of ‗science and knowledge' was too intense to be disrupted by lonely voices of wisdom.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Well within the modern scientific age, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Nietzsche was best known for his famous quote -God is dead‖ (Nietzsche, 1883). People around the world are using this quote as proof that the great mystic was an atheist, but the true meaning of the great philosopher's works was gravely misunderstood. The announcement of the death of God; a death which is solely the responsibility of humans, was not a cry of triumph but a grave warning. The God being dead was not a matter for celebration, but a matter to be concerned about. Papanoutsos was one of the few who pinpointed this discrepancy in our understanding of Nietzsche (Papanoutsos, 1978). Nietzsche's desperate cry of agony reflected his desperation for the new nihilistic godless era which humanity had to face. It is well known that Nietzsche was very much against science and its promise of a better world and also against logic and its utopia of understanding everything. (he was the founder of irrationalism anyway) However his warning was misinterpreted to a huge extent; as the writing of many other philosophers back then; remember the way Wittgenstein's Tractatus was used to support a materialistic idea based on his calling for silence for the things we cannot talk about, while what he was trying to say that those things for which we cannot speak are the most important ones (-Ludwig Wittgenstein‖, 2018).
Nietzsche's main ideas were both anti-scientific and anti-rational, a typical product of the decadence of European culture and in general of the decadence of the philosophy which originated with positivism and culminated in the modern anti-intellectualism (- Nietzsche and Science‖, 1945). This decadence was a result of the failure of science to hold up on its promises 2 : It did not manage to solve the problems of mankind in the way it was supposed to. The new shinny -toy‖ of man had contributed nothing towards the solution of the great human problems, which had nothing to do with calculations or scientific models. This harsh truth is something we experience every day. Behind the thin veil of progress (another great story of enlightenment), the life today is in many ways crude, cold, harsh anddare to say more evil than it was hundreds of years ago. This inconvenient truth is what fueled the rise of irrationalism and the post-modern schools of thought which tend to criticize everything the man of the 19 th century held in high esteem. Modern education is based on that science which Nietzsche criticized so intensively; the importance of this criticism will be more evident when we reach the problem of the source of ethics at the end of this paper.

ARE EDUCATED PEOPLE LESS EVIL?
When Rousseau spoke against science at the dawn of the science era, not even he could predict how right he would be proved to be. Back then, at the beginning of the ‗enlightenment' era, no one could see the darkness hiding behind the hollow promises of a ‗progressed' world based only on materialistic ideas. We now have the luxury of knowing better.
This modern era of progress and education not only does not seem to be any different than any previous era regarding the evil perpetrating the cosmos, but from some perspectives it even seems worse, a rather surprising result on its own. Despite any apparent epidermic progress in terms of education, crimes are still part of everyday life. Even though places like Europe and the US seem improved with regards to human rights and the behavior of the official states towards the weakest of their citizens, other side-effects of modern civilization blur the idealistic picture of modern society. The solution of many problems of modern societies happens at the expense of developing countries, a side-effect we like to ignore. Depression and psychological problems have been rising ever since we have -solved‖ all our problems, abortions even at latest stages of pregnancy are a ‗human right' (Zamps & Gher, 2008) (just imagine the reactions to a medieval religious society killing inferior children), mass murders of women and children in the context of great wars with the use of advanced weapons 3 (again, imagine what modern people would say if in the split of a second a whole city was obliterated during a war in the Middle ‗dark' Ages), eugenics as part of modern medicine in many ‗civilized' countries well before Hitler (the United States and Sweden for example had advanced eugenics programs from the beginning of the 20 th century and those programs did not stop until very recently see Currell & Cogdell, 2006;Kevles, 1999), unethical medical experiments like the Tuskegee Study 4 (-U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee‖, 2015) are just some of the dirty little secrets of our modern polished society.
In other words, even though modern society is more educated in all accounts in relation to a medieval society, there are many issues which make the interpretation of that fact problematic: more education does not seem to have made us more humane. But what does the data say?

Going to the data: Does education reduce crime?
Leaving aside philosophy or subjective comments regarding the quality of modern civilization, it is important to see the facts. And this entails going to the hard data and try to see whether there is a pattern revealed that can help us determine if our perception of today's society is solid or not. This section will summarize some of the most important statistical findings regarding the correlation of crime and education and will try to shed some light on the underlying causes of this correlation. The results of this analysis seem to very much be in accordance with the concerns the three great philosophers mentioned in the previous chapter, regarding the true benefits of education and science in our modern world of progress.

Negative correlations
In general, research regarding the effects of education on ethics is mainly related to the effects of education on crime, since the latter is the only actual measurable thing we can have in hand (it is difficult to measure how ‗kind' a person is). Overall, statistics show that an increase in education (which usually means increase in schooling) results in a reduction of the probability for conducting a crime (which is usually interpreted as probability for incarceration in most researches).
Lochner and Moretti estimate that a one-year increase in average education levels in a state reduces state-level arrest rates by 11 percent (Lochner, 2008). Other data sources (based on arrest rates but also on self-reported crimes) reach similar conclusions: schooling significantly reduces criminal activity. According to other researchers, one extra year of schooling results in a .10 percentage point reduction in the probability of incarceration for whites, and a .37 percentage point reduction for blacks (Lochner & Moretti, 2004).
Machin estimates that a one-year increase in average schooling levels reduces conviction rates for property crime by 20-30 percent and violent crime by roughly one-third to one-half as much, though the latter estimates are statistically insignificant (Hjalmarsson & Lochner, 2012). Meghir found a negative effect of the Swedish compulsory schooling reforms on the likelihood of conviction (5% reduction) among males directly affected by the reform, while Buonanno and Leonida estimates suggest that a tenpercentage point increase in high school graduation rates would reduce property crime rates by 4 percent and total crime rates by about 3 percent (Hjalmarsson & Lochner, 2012).
Merlo and Wolpin estimate that, on average, attending school at age 16 reduces the probability of a black male ever committing a crime over ages 19-22 by 42 percent and the probability of an arrest over those ages by 23 percent (Hjalmarsson & Lochner, 2012). Data for men from the US Census of Population also suggest that incarceration rates are monotonically declining with education for all years and for both blacks and whites (Moretti, 2005).
The results above are pointing to one direction but they are not univocal. Some investigators deny the correlation at all and suggest that in some cases statistical results, even after controlling for measured family background and neighborhood characteristics, do not necessarily imply that education reduces crime (Hjalmarsson & Lochn, 2012). For example, Witte and Tauchen (1994) found no significant relationship between educational attainment and crime after controlling for a number of individual characteristics (Lochner, 2008). Last but not least, it is interesting that research has shown that in some cases there is even a positive (re-enforcing) correlation between education and crime 5 . Participation in terrorism and political violence is apparently unrelated, or even positively related, to individuals' income and education (Krueger & Maleckova, 2003). On the demand side, terrorist organizations may prefer educated, committed individuals. Well-educated individuals are better suited to carry out acts of international terrorism than illiterates because the terrorists must fit into a foreign environment to be successful (Krueger & Maleckova, 2003

Education-Crime causality analysis
As in any other similar case, the data say nothing per se. It is the interpretation of that data that needs our special attention and this interpretation highlights a picture which is far more different than the picture we want to believe in. Even though all the sources agree that education does reduce crime, there is an important question which needs answering: Why? Why does more education result in less crime? Is it because the person has become a better person? Is it because education increased his morality? Or is it because of other reasons unrelated to ethics? A deeper examination of the source of the observed decrease in crime for more educated people reveals an inconvenient truth: No matter what the cause is, it has nothing to do with making the people more ethical per se.
Theories suggest several ways that educational attainment may affect subsequent criminal decisions. First, schooling increases individual wage rates, thereby increasing the opportunity costs of crime. The punishment is likely to be more costly for the more educated, since incarceration implies time out of the labor market and since schooling increases wage rates (Lochner & Moretti, 2004;Moretti, 2005). Grogger estimated a significant negative relationship between wage rates and crime. However, he found no relationship between education and crime after controlling for wages. (Moretti, 2005).
Secondly, schooling may alter individual rates of time preference or risk aversion. That is, schooling may make people more patient and more risk averse, who would place more weight on the possibility of future punishments (Moretti, 2005) (Lochner & Moretti, 2004). Schooling may also affect individual tastes for crime by directly affecting the psychic costs of breaking the law 6 . (Lochner & Moretti, 2004) Additionally to the above points, there is also the practical aspect. Keeping youth off the street and occupied during the day makes it difficult for them to commit crimes in the first place (Lochner & Moretti, 2004). Youth cannot be in two places at once, and many criminal opportunities are more limited in school than on the streets. (Moretti, 2005).
In summary, there are many theoretical reasons to explain why education reduces crime, reported by various researchers. What is important to note is that none of these reasons has anything to do with ethics per se. We live in a materialistic society and education serves nothing more than to guide humans towards using materialistic criteria in taking decisions. The elephant in the room is too big to ignore. In all the sources referenced in this section, there seems to be a consensus that the cause of the reduction in crime is related to anything except education making someone a ‗better person' (i.e. more ethical).

ARE EVIL PEOPLE LESS EDUCATED?
The era of science and progress has given birth to two world wars and some of the most inhumane acts humankind has seen. When it comes to evil, the thought of modern people easily goes to the example of Hitler, the Nazis and their crimes. The genocide of the Jews and other -inferior races‖, the infamous death camps, the mass murders of captives are some of the things which make modern humanity still dream of nightmares when the night falls. World War II killed innocence in our mind and what is leftbesides a great sense of guiltare only shattered hopes for a better world. By examining some characteristic cases of this dark era, we will further strengthen the conclusion that being good has nothing to do with education.

German society before WWII and the evil of Nazism
The fourteen years of the Weimar era before the war were marked by explosive intellectual productivity. German artists made multiple cultural contributions in the fields of literature, art, architecture, music, dance, drama, and the new medium of the motion picture. The era of Weimar culture right before the advent of Hitler and the Nazis is often described as a Periclean Age, as a Golden Age for the arts, the culture and sciences in general (Schebera & Schrader, 1990;Panoutsopoulos, 2014). As a continuation of the deeply philosophical history of Germany from the time of Kant, Schiller and Goethe, the era of Wassily Kandinsky, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Albert Einstein, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, Max Horkheimer, Carl Jung and Max Weber was a promising one. And yet, after many years, this golden age gave birth to monsters.
Even though the analysis of the causes behind this failure of the German society at that time is usually focused around the political circumstances, which are considered pivotal in the rise of the Nazis (Geiger, 2013;Grego, Lombari & Mauceri, 2014). it would be absurd to claim that the people who made the ‗Golden Age' of Weimar were different than those who made the atrocities of Hitler possible. With a simple search one can find great examples of intellectual men who supported the regime. The Nazis were not a special kind of people, but people who were part of society back then. As Hannah Arendt famously postulated, the Nazis were what we would call ‗ordinary people' who just became evil due to circumstances. Circumstances which could reveal the evil into any other person. This banality of evil is the main characteristic of evil which modern man cannot grasp: There is nothing special into being a monster. Even the most cultivated people can be lured into the darkest unethical paths. That is how and why the place which gave birth to Kant and Shiller also gave birth to Mengele.

From Schiller to Joseph Mengele: Prime examples of negative correlation of ethics and education
The case of Mengele deserves special attention. Not only because of the atrocities he committed, but also because of the extensive scientific coverage of his inhumane ‗experiments'.
Mengele (a.k.a. -Angel of Death‖) was a trained doctor, something which by itself is a good argument against the correlation of science and knowledge with ethics. In 1935, Mengele earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of Munich (Kubica, 1998). In 1937, he joined the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt, where he worked for Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a German geneticist with a particular interest in researching twins (Kubica, 1998), focusing on the genetic factors that result in a cleft lip and palate, or a cleft chin (Weindling, 2002). His thesis earned him a cum laude doctorate in medicine (MD) from the University of Frankfurt in 1938 (Allison, 2011). (his degrees were revoked by the issuing universities in the 1960ssee Levy, 2006) He joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1938. He was assigned as a battalion medical officer at the start of World War II, then transferred to the Nazi concentration camps service in early 1943 and assigned to Auschwitz, where he saw the opportunity to conduct genetic research on human subjects. His subsequent experiments focused on twins, with little regard for the health or safety of the victims (Kubica, 1998;Astor, 1985).
Mengele is generally seen as a -lone lunatic‖ scientist dissecting prisoners alive for his own entertainment. Nothing could be further from the truth. The American author Robert Jay Lifton notes that Mengele's published works were in keeping with the scientific mainstream of the time and would probably have been viewed as valid scientific efforts even outside Nazi Germany (Lifton, 1986). Records have been unearthed that Mengele's work was supported by elite researchers attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics (Diver, 2005). You might know this institute as -Max Planck‖ institute today (-Max Planck Society‖, 2019), one of the most prestigious scientific institutes in the world.
In 1997 the Max-Planck Institute decided to fund research into its murky past. As the director of research for the project, Dr Heim, noted -It was formerly believed that scientists in Germany were oppressed by the Nazi regime, that there were only a few guilty people. But in truth, these doctors were in paradise‖ (Diver, 2005). For scientists who ‗just' conduct research, the freedom to do anything can be intoxicating. And the example of Mengele's experiments is a great example of how research for the sake of research is not innocent, but to the contrary, pure evil by definition.
During World War II, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute regularly received human body parts from Josef Mengele to use in studies intended to prove Nazi racial theories (-Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics‖, 2018). Mengele's research was also used by other scientists and until very recently so (Diver, 2005). -Mengele was sort of set up‖, said Professor Robert Proctor, an American authority on Nazi science. -There was some very important whitewashing after the war. The leading philosophers and theorists of the Final Solution went free‖. The working group commissioned by the Max Planck Society reported that it had established direct links between leading academic centers and Dr Mengele's laboratory (Karacs, 2001). Scientists whose research was somehow connected to the research of the Angel of Death include Verschuer, one of the world's leading human geneticists after the war, Butenandt, a pioneer of the contraceptive pill and Adolf Butenandt, whose work on sexual hormones and protein belonged to the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the 20th century (Diver, 2005;Karacs, 2001). Many of the scientists who collaborated with Mengele in his research made scientific careers in the Federal Republic of Germany after the war (Müller-Hill, 1999).

CONCLUSION
As it is evident from the above, modern cultureexpressed mainly via science and education as the main protagonists of enlightenmenthas little to offer to ethics. Despite the huge progress in many fields of knowledge, we are still able to conduct the ultimate evil, if the circumstances allow it. The problem lies not with our education, but with our belief in it as source of ethics. Education today simply passes on knowledge based on the current norms, which are purely materialistic, and which change over time. But ethics cannot be built on quicksand. Shifting foundations usually mean that there are no foundations at all.
It is the actions which distinguish ethical men from unethical ones, according to Rousseau. And this is the heart of the problem: science and education are just ways to distract humans from their true ethical callings by placing too much emphasis on the analysis of what is ethical.
We may have not defined what the source of ethics is, but we have definitely defined what it is not. As Horace said, we have been deceived by the appearance of good 7 , and ever since we are driven by this deception into dark places while believing we are following the light. The only way to find our way back to morality is to stop trying to analyze it and start practicing it. The only way towards a moral life, passes first through the notion of living morally, while every attempt to understand ethics ultimately leads to the deconstruction of ethics through the fallacy of knowing. The post-modern era of criticism needs to stop criticizing and go back to a more ‗primitive' and more genuine view of the cosmos beyond understanding and knowing. Morality is about living. Remember that the word of Jesus was accepted by simple fishermen. This, as any other point in Scripts, is not a detail to discard as trivial. As Rousseau said, a man cannot be truly ethical unless he lives by ethics. And at the end, this is the main teaching of Jesus: To live by the word of God, instead of just analyzing it and knowing it. Pharisees were too good at that. And yet, they were the first to be denied the entrance to the kingdom of God. As Oscar Wilde said, "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught"...