Education
Saturday • December 12th 2020 • 5:36:03 pm
Education in the context of an individual is the path to wisdom and greatness,
in the context of the whole world, however, education is a path to World Peace.
Education is a very unusual thing,
it enhances everything it can touch.
To borrow from movies,
education is our loading program.
To borrow from computers,
education is our operating system.
Without education, we reset back to some 20,000 or 50,000 years ago,
we end up living in villages and inventing gods to help with harvest and afterlife.
Organized and mandatory education is a recent invention,
it works up to middle school where teachers begin hiding inexperience behind abstractions.
When teaching a class of multiple students there is only time for lowest common denominators,
everything gets hurried along and those who can't understand something begin memorizing.
Within a few years everyone is temporarily memorizing everything to be sure they graduate,
those who try to learn, are graded down under the threat of being held back and repeating the year.
Nobody is learning anything useful, everyone is memorizing,
and teachers, grades, and threats of being held back only reinforce memorization.
That is not education,
that is memorization, acting.
Our loading program does not load,
our operating system does not initialize.
System crashes,
and fathers eagerly send their boys to kill boys of other fathers.
Politics becomes infested with pretenders, actors, con-men, and simple liars,
voters simply don't think about electing people who show wisdom, who share books.
Lack of modern knowledge and the stress it begets will slow people down,
it will be difficult to become wise, it may not be possible to become great.
Failure to propagate modern knowledge, seems to take the shape of,
an uneducated majority, and a tiny educated minority without any voting power.
Once the failure of education takes hold,
nothing can be done to fix the anomalies that occur afterwards.
The only way to help things along is to avoid the emergence of anomalies in the first place,
and that means having a functional educational system.
If it is not possible for a nation to teach its children,
if the dream of organized, mandatory and standardized education is not realistic.
Personalized computer based, self education must be put in its place,
the transition can be made easy by transitioning from grades to money, credits, or bonds.
The initial computer based curricula would grow the same way the world encyclopedia did,
a little bit at a time, from all directions, as students are rewarded for following their curiosities.
I write this in year 2020 when it seems that all our old mistakes have reemerged,
but what is actually going on is that mis-educated people are self assembling into desperate groups.
We are seeing groups self-reinforcing each other's beliefs based on color of skin,
they come together to form communities because of an imaginary superiority a color.
We have a nation that treats women with he permanent legal status of a minor,
of someone who is less than 18 years old, and politicians do not know to become enraged by this.
We have two nations that feature concentration camps,
and the Land of the Free that practices torture under the guise of enhanced interrogation.
All of this is happening because of failure of schooling,
inability of politicians to build.
Now, let me close with a heart warming thought experiment,
which deep down I hope some magnificent nation a thousand years in the future may try for real.
We can all agree that, education is an investment in a nation's future,
and that pretending to teach children by forcing them into memorization can destroy a nation.
Let us say that, in this thought experiment, unless a better program is in place,
countries should pay their students for achievement, not with imaginary letters but with real money.
Students in elementary should be getting paid just as much money as college students,
and the amount that they bring home should be equal that of a prestigious job.
After all what is more prestigious than the child's real knowledge,
a child will soon become a politician, investor, leader, and inspiration for others to follow.
Making some $200,000 a year in 2020 money, is an amazing way for a nation to show respect its students,
and it will proudly display how much more important they are in proportion to the defense budget.
Graduation, would leave a student not with crippling debt that can't be erased with bankruptcy,
but with just about $3.2 million dollars in their account, that is how a graduate should start life.
The cost of this is irrelevant, these are hundreds of trillions of dollars per year that simply add to our national debt,
this is what it means to have a country.
What we see today, is poverty, children going hungry, fake education, ineffective politics,
and research and legalization of dangerous drugs for the purpose of erasing stress, and PTSD born from poverty.
We cannot allow ourselves to live in the fantasy land,
where it is OK for one nation to teach their children that another needs to be destroyed.
We cannot allow ourselves to live in the fantasy of a limited number of abstract virtual pieces of paper,
that sometimes make children die of starvation.
Humanity, has outgrown the type of primitive small town thinking that we see today,
it has outgrown it probably more than a hundred years ago when large cities started growing.
For those of you who are still laughing at my though experiment,
take a lesson from the way early internet social networks would reform themselves.
Initially switching to more automated, more statistics and probability oriented systems,
would set their platforms on fire and cause waves of disturbance, but that is how things adapt to growing larger.
Call it growing pains, call it Love of Humanity, call it a nation at a stand still,
in process of not just erasing poverty but creating an overabundance of wealth for its students.
Out of Love and Wisdom,
out of Greatness of Vision, and of yearning for other nations to follow onward to World Peace, Safety and Equality.
And my final words are a question, if you created a thought experiment that represented the sad state of affairs today,
what would that thought experiment be about, and what would it be trying to prove?