education
health care
legal system
And these mostly suck right now. They need to be changed. The best one right I guess is health care. Education is so much more important though because it is the formative years of every single human being. I have no idea what it will look like but I am imagining a world where the other two cease to exist in their current forms. Imagine if you could walk or take the bus to the clinic like you go to the convenience store. Everything needs to be decentralized. The concentration of power and thinking and money is the worst fucking thing in the world. It's killing us.
Education has to give people a chance to learn. Teach people how to learn, and then fucking let them do it! You don't even need to teach people how to learn. They know how to learn, and they are only going to really learn about the shit that they are interested in. We are destroying spirit the way we do things - at best we are stifling it's potential, but no - people are sick (why do we differentiate between physical and mental illness?), they steal from each other, they kill each other, they fucking hate each other for reasons that are so superficial it's insane. It is absolutely insane. There has to be some metaphor for this....
We are obsessed with compartmentalizing everything. We have chopped the world up into pieces - yours, mine, whatever. It's not ours! It's not fucking ours. What we need is freedom. You can't even kill yourself. Now that is beyond belief - you don't have a choice about being born but you can't kill yourself. Not that I think people should kill themselves, I don't. But that's just one example of our society making legislation to try and control. We need to give up trying to control each other to the fullest extent possible.
Current controls that need to go:
- Prescriptive education - telling people what they need to know. Give them skills then set them free
- Criminal penalties for using drugs - why don't we fine people for crimes? Make some money instead of spending it all on keeping them in jails. Of course you want to lock up the dangerous people or send them to Siberia to work or something, but the people who don't cause any harm? It's a total waste.
- feel free to add to the list
Think about it in terms of time-value. Compare the environment's value to that of a human life. A human life lasts for approximately 75 years. The environment is responsible for the whole population on the earth's existence. We can't live on a planet that doesn't have trees, clean water, clean air, grass, animals.... the advent of big, urban cities where people are removed from nature, has caused people to think that we don't need it! The stuff is removed from another part of the world, processed - causing pollution and destroying some other place, and then shipped into the city. So the city people don't care about the environment because they are insulated from it. I suppose the cities on the gulf coast hit by the hurricane might disagree...
4 comments:
You should check this out
http://www.paulofreireschool.org/
It is a public school in Tucson for grades 6-8 and its founded on the principles of education that you mentioned - teaching kids how to learn, with its primary focus on social justice and environmental sustainability.
I think we are pretty far ahead of the US right now in some of the areas that you mention, especially health care and education. We are pretty bad with the environment though, we have so much space and so many resources (land, water, etc.) that we do not see many effects of our pollution. We are one of the world's highest polluters in terms of GHG (I think number 8 or something) and we have a tiny population compared to so many countries, we should be embarrassed.
I agree that we need to really reform our education system and focus on teaching kids the value of learning for its own sake, focusing on skill development and more meaningful concepts, but it takes time and a lot of the changes take a lot more work and a much more intelligent view of teaching and learning, which is hard to start because people are naturally lazy and, more importantly, many of these ideas sound great in theory but put into practice in the grit of the classroom they don't pan out so well. For example, it sounds wonderful to teach an adolescent male about the joys of learning but to actually get him to focus on something other than girls, alcohol, friends, etc (because of relatively simple yet powerful forces like hormones, social pressures, lack of genetic predisposition to sitting for long periods and listening, etc.) is really hard.
Sometime I think the same thing, that we need to reduce the control and influence of institutions, government, business, etc. in people's lives but then I look at all the shitty things people do to each other, like drug wars in Mexico, kidnapping all over LA, murders in Iraq, etc. and it is hard to have faith that people will make the right choices given the freedom. If you look back through history, most of it is filled with wars, imperialism, rape, plunder, etc. and it shakes your faith in everything...
Yeah but you have to ask the question Daniel Quinn asks in Ishmael - is it human nature, or something else?
He rejects the notion that we have to change ourselves. I do too. I don't think people are inherently bad, but they do bad things.
The problem is that we think we have to control people and tell them what to do. People are lazy because they don't like choosing from someone else's options.
And I'm not talking about teaching people theoretically about the "joy of learning", I'm talking about letting people learn about things they love. Things they are passionate about and will be self-directed in doing. The opportunity for doing this is presenting itself with our ability to get information, communicate, and move around.
Basically, people start dying inside when you restrict their ability to be themselves.
You mention the drugs and killings. The CONTROL that we try to exert over people is what CAUSES these things. Say the government controlled drugs. Sold the mild ones and controlled the others..... i don't know
Basically it's the Jurrasic Park chaos theory shit. If you try to lock up the dinosaurs, they will get out and kill you. If you try to keep people under control, same problem.
What we need - and this is classic education or training - is an incentive based system. Make people want to do the things you want them to do. The catch is, the things you want them to do have to mostly resemble what they want to do. Which means freedom.
The incentive not to kill someone is that you will get locked up or sent to siberia to work on the oil pipeline or KILLED.
We need a system that gives incentives, and when those fail there is personal responsibility. We hold people accountable. I'm not talking about killing drunk drivers who kill people - although some might want to do that. 1st degree, 2nd degree murder..... etc. You make them accountable for their choices. This isn't facism or totalitarianism. It's people deciding that they aren't going to allow certain behaviours in their society.
When people lose faith in the insitutions that are supposed to protect them, those institutions become meaningless, mere facades pretending to hold up the social fabric, when in reality it is in rapid decay.
they're putting fluoride in the water, man! the more lethargic we are, the easier we are to control.
let's not even get into prescription drugs and how they are fucking with the entire food chain.
and here we are, being taught right inside the box. at least 30 people in that room don't even know that there is a box to get outside of. and so, the whole cycle proliferates.
but ripples in the pond work in all sorts of ways. throw yourself in, and watch the spread.
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