IMAGINE

All change requires, to use a worn out phrase a “paradigm shift.” In order for America to rise again we need a change in focus at the very foundation and what better place to start than with the educational process in the U.S?


As for me, I think there’s far more to Shaw’s message than what we get on the first pass; “Youth is wasted on the young.” I am completely convinced that the same is true for education, it is wasted on the young, not because they don’t want it or because they’re lazy, in the U.S. education is NOT education rather a mass communal attempt to teach conformity in preparation for production and contribution to the GDP.

 

For those of us who have had an opportunity to carry on conversations with a person who has been educated in another country, the difference is not only noticeable, it’s stark and it’s not a simple matter of being better in the sciences, math, etc., it’s knowledge literally of global proportions. People in other countries understand the roles they play in the massive community of Earth and they understand it far beyond the warped perspectives we’re taught in our schools. In essence, the United States IS NOT “the most important,” “the best,” “God’s chosen,” “the shining light of democracy.” We’re part of a picture much larger than “ME,” me being the U.S. and until we educate our citizens for the sake of knowledge rather than production, we’ll remain isolationists by design, whether or not we wish to be isolated.

 

First: The extreme nationalism shoved down our throats should never enter the picture in our education, yet it permeates the very air we breathe from day one of our education. This is indoctrination of epic proportions NOT education. Our history lessons are a scam, intended to blind us with hegemonic lenses so dark, we can't see beyond the noses that hold them to our eyes, our schools are bastions of political discourse absorbed through surreptitious, perhaps even sinister efforts.

 

Secondly, consider this: Our educational system as we see it today was developed (coincidentally????) in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution. Both are products of the mid 19th century. Coincidence? I think not! Our system was designed to mass create producers to fill the frenzied development of factories. It was the new tool for the corporate elite; human capital at their disposal, people who were once very independent and self-sufficient, a type of people that DO NOT work well in factories, offices or production lines. Orwellian robots, mass-produced to in turn mass-produce.

 

In the late 19th century when our current “system” of education was being developed, many very well educated people were adamantly opposed to the direction the system was being designed. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example: “We learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life….I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.”

 

Emerson understood the connection between successful, effective education and individual interests. He feared, rightfully so, that we were heading down a path of mass production; an assembly line mass-producing human Model Ts rather than an effort to turn out human Bugattis.

 

In the U.S., our propensity towards mediocrity is a harsh representation of our failed education (and it has NOTHING to do with failing teachers, but with our singularly designed system); our wide-spread intolerance, social class position and indifference are results of missing pieces of the knowledge puzzle, because we’re guided towards conformity and confusion rather than individualism and confidence.

 

Who truly enjoys “education” at a young age and why do we not enjoy it?

 

From day one, we are force-fed disconnected groups of “stuff.” We’re expected to digest that stuff from what the education bureaucracy assembles and in turn, we assemble what the bureaucracy wants, in factories, offices and assembly lines. Many children are not pre-disposed to be assembly line workers, accountants, finance advisors, etc. yet they’re forced into a mass of producers much in the way George Orwell envisioned in his novel 1984. We have become exactly what he wrote of, an oligarchical, collectivist society with two interests in mind – produce and consume. And the sad thing is, the vast majority of Americans don’t even realize that we are now his vision come to life.

 

I was a product of our “wonderful” educational system. I learned absolutely nothing from school; until I was ready, in my mid 40s. It was then that I understood the correlation between life and education and that education is not a means to an end or for production, but a means to a better world on the whole. Connecting life’s experiences and an understanding of the purpose of education comes early for some and later for others, but in our system, we ignore the individual’s propensities and give him/her what we want them to have. And how convenient it is that it fits so well into the game of the powered elite and the corporations in which we produce the wealth for them!

 

We don’t enjoy education because it is forced upon us in a manner that many, many children are not predisposed to learn or accept. Later on that subject in a moment.

 

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder:

 

We all know what that is by now; we all know that many combat veterans suffer from it; we know that people who have been subjected to horrific incidents suffer from it: 9-11, airliner crashes, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc., but there’s another cause of PTSD.

 

“Posttraumatic stress disorder is more prevalent than previously believed, and is often persistent. Progress in estimating age-at-onset distributions, cohort effects, and the conditional probabilities of PTSD from different types of trauma will require future epidemiologic studies to assess PTSD for all lifetime traumas rather than for only a small number of retrospectively reported "most serious" traumas.”

 

PTSD is not simply a symptom of “major trauma,” often people experience PTSD who are placed into situations for which they are not psychologically "wired' to handle and that can include situations as seemingly benign as an artist forced into a highly structured, repetitive environment, i.e. processing the millions upon millions of parts for machines sold in mass across the world, or processing mail. Getting the connection here? Some people “go postal” because they cannot handle the stress of a highly structured and monotonous process when their propensity is towards something else. We’ve all been there, mostly unknowingly so. School!

 

Why don’t many of us enjoy the educational system? We’re forced into a highly structured, monotonous situation designed for one thing and one thing only – production. An artist is forced to grasp algebra when all he/she wants to learn is how to be a better painter, sketcher or sculptor. A philosopher is forced to learn how chemicals interact. An anthropologist is forced to learn poetry and a scientist is forced into literature, etc…..

 

I firmly believe that our very educational system is the root cause of our social disorder, just as in Orwell’s 1984, we are rebelling against a society in which we don’t matter, against an unseen force, the oligarchy of the elite corporatists, who need producers, not individuals. Gun violence is not about guns anymore than violence committed with a knife is about knives it’s about a social illness that is so prevalent in our culture that our culture is on the verge of destruction.

 

Soldiers are forced to act against the most basic human level of decency there is, to preserve life, by killing others and most often doing so without apparent reason in the individual’s mind and sadly, PTSD is often manifest as a result. People who go through the mundane routine of turning the alarm off at 6:30 AM, taking a piss, brushing our teeth, shaving, showering, dressing, grabbing a donut on the way to work to perform for 8 to 10 hours, returning home to make an attempt towards normalcy for a couple of hours, only to restart the process over and over experience the same phenomenon. “Going postal” is PTSD created by a routine in which we must participate in order to survive in a society built around mass consumption and many of us are simply not predisposed for what this oligarchy is forcing us into.

 

In John Taylor Gatto’s “The Seven Lesson School Teacher” he enumerates exactly what teachers do today:

 

1. Teach confusion  
2. Reinforce class position  
3. Promote indifference  
4. Create emotional dependency  
5. Force intellectual dependency  
6. Instill provisional self-esteem  
7. Create paranoia 

Everyone who reads this blog should read Gatto’s essay on this matter and you too will see the reason as clear as the air you wish you could breathe, our society is imploding upon itself and it’s not because we’re born to be violent, we’re taught to be violent through total disregard for our conscious selves, our metaphysical lives and it begins taking place the moment we walk through the hallowed doors of our educational institutions.

 

Can America rise again? 

 

Certainly, but we must start at the very foundation and rebuild. Simply placing bandaids over the sore spots do nothing but hide them from view, they will remain sore regardless of how many bandaids we apply. Starting over is going to be a necessity and one very basic block of laying that new foundation is education. 

 

Teaching children to contribute to the world in a manner that is best suited for them will ensure success, reduce violence and will surely make them better world citizens through understanding beyond our own borders. Our democracy will thrive, for we’ll be a nation focused upon people rather robotic producing and consuming users with no regard for others. Teaching one to be a human being of their natural choice is far simpler and much more important than forcing a human being to be an object of absolute obedience and conformity, blind to all but the needs of the "machine."

 

IMAGINE! What we could do if all our educational efforts went towards a better world rather than a fatter wallet.