Innovation, Public education, learning, new age, method, socialism, communism, democracy, capitlism,
As our modern society continues to grow larger and larger populations, and as mobility, connectedness and large scale integrations become fully realized, problems existing and able to exist must be determined. Agricultural ignorance by a majority of youth, large micro-isolated communities and food production as a means of wealth rather than communal well being.
Such that Marx said in his poignant attack on large scale capitalism, “ All economic systems dependant on vehicles, such as the tendency to complexity as America so proudly demonstrates, will fall from the simplest of economic phenomena.†As while we become ever more complex, like Marx predicted, we have lost something truly important, which is the basics our society was founded on. The question is not whether the school system needs to be improved on, that much anybody will agree on. Such that the question is not even what or how to improve on our remarkable institution, the question is, are we teaching the right material?
Out of every person that lives in Canada, only 2.2% have something to do with agricultural production. That is, one out of every forty-six people, not to mention that the demographic represented above was 31.7% in 1931 when it was counted for the first time. Have people started eating less? On the contrary, it would seem that we are eating rather more if we were to take the amount of food we eat as a ratio to the value of the work we due in terms of production.
Such that the question of education should be of practicality. It cannot be said any simpler than that, we have gone to long and been out of touch with our agricultural roots for so long, most would not know how to plant a potato, one of the premium staple traditional foods for many families. Far be it from my opinion to express a desire for Canada to be less competitive in the global economy. It would just seem to be common sense we have placed an luxurious amount of trust in the earth’s fertility to always produce enough food on such a industrious scale.
I see a future where the first unseen phenomena of agricultural impact will be devastating. All of this however, could be prevented with an education system adapted to meet criterion of potential problems before they actually happened. Even though I use the problem of production of food as a example, an education system adequately funded, agile and robust enough to meet the problems of the 21st century is a idea worth investigating. It would mean getting the common elements of everyone’s life into the classroom, taught by qualified teachers. Common elements, by definition, would be the simplest things first, like agricultural reliability, and the rebuilding of our communities, and maintaining fresh water resources. These all play a part in our daily lives, so why not also teach communal responsibility?
Let us redefine our way of thinking of what an education should be, and instead, let us be visionaries and boldly step ahead and take charge of the problems that face us daily!
Too long have our communities been becoming more and more isolated from each other, but also from the things that people used to do together. So much that education teaches us how to work, and sometimes how to play, it should teach us how to be communal. No longer do people take part in their own communities harvesting of goods, a simple and yet practical skill. What I long to see in our education system, is a easily accessible way to bring interconnectedness in a community, with the student involved.
Let us deceive ourselves no longer then, for our future is, as always, uncertain. We can plan and schedule forever, but there is a simple fact one should always remember about the future. It is not made entirely from the present, such that it is only largely made from now, just as today was mostly made from yesterday. If then, the future is uncertain, as is mostly human doing, we should plan to make the maximum amount of our population as useful as possible and be able to adapt to any scale of phenomena or change that might occur.
In conclusion, the future as it should be structured, is no longer some mass conglomerate entity, manufactured into a complex design of circuits and paths. Such a method is inefficient and demeans the value of our work. Our society working at such a naive level is unwise, acting as if we could put a number or measure to the usefulness of any person in our society. Nay, the future lays ahead in having many little cogs with human faces working effortlessly in a big machine. No longer should we have to look at people as a number, but a member of a fully functioning and self sustaining community. All of these people would then have one thing in common, which would be a steady and firm foundation via a practical public education system.