Basically, what it comes down to, is a major rethink of what “education” means.
I’ll give you an example. I know people who argue against teaching foreign languages in public schools in America. They believe that the rest of the world should have to learn English, we should not have to learn another language. But what these people are doing is demonstrating their own incompetence with this belief. The greatest advantage to learning a foreign language, apart from being able to communicate with more and varied individuals, is the abstraction. The brain’s synaptic connections for higher level thought that are reinforced by the process of having to subject language to additional filtering. The ability to perform abstract thought and consider subjects as a whole rather than simply how they affect your immediate situation.
Of course, mathematics is exactly the same. Over and over again my brain-dead peers in grade school would ask the math teachers “when will we ever use this in our lives?” The teachers would react by giving situations; engineering situations, accounting situations, etc… But that wasn’t the right answer, sorry teachers. The right answer was that the abstractions that are being created in student’s brains would affect every single decision they make for the rest of their lives in a positive way by allowing them to see situations more completely.
That kind of education affects the subconscious more than the conscious, but isn’t that exactly what we need to work on? The future of education demands a focus on abstraction and decision making principles. Better ability to reason out decisions and to understand those decisions appropriately.
Most other developed countries are now ahead of the United States in terms of education, and in some cases such as the middle east and Persian countries we are literally being pummeled into nonexistence because their education is so superior to ours.
Americans like to sit around and think “why are these people coming to America and taking our high level jobs, calculus can’t really be THAT important!” But if you look at it the way I am describing, it IS that important, because their brains function inherently differently than someone who blew off calc instead of embracing it. Not to mention the fact that they often have 2 or more languages under their belt.
We have to get away from these recent generations of Americans who will decide how to vote based on the small talk of their peers or media sound bites clearly taken out of context. Or worse yet, blind political party affiliation with no actual independent research. Just because your ballot asks you about 27 issues doesn’t mean you have to vote on 27 issues, only vote on the ones you INTIMATELY know and understand, because if you cast random votes you are affecting the whole system, and your effect may have been conditioned and staged by others attempting to exert influence over you in a harmful way.
We have to understand that higher level reasoning and rationing affects every single decision we face in our daily lives in a way that we can’t always comprehend. As a result, living by some principles will help to steer our lives in a way that simple minded thinking in absolutes cannot. People who think in absolutes are fools who dream in black and white, people who live by principles are the leaders who dream in color.
Education has to refocus itself on these issues. I have been so disappointed to learn that most American grade schools have abandoned computer science programs for instance, and instead offer more classes in basic word processing and applications. It’s painful to hear the public backlash against mandated foreign language courses. Or all the students who take the easiest possible courses in order to maintain a 4.0 grade average, for a shot at the best Universities. If education is truly working, all students should be getting b’s and c’s because that means all students are being sufficiently challenged. The criteria needs to change. A grade of “A” means a student is being under-educated and is actually a bad thing. At least in my “perfect” world it would be, haha.
Maybe my perfect world could never exist. In this blog, education is the last thing. But the final lesson is that in all of our lives, education, whatever we choose to define it as, should ALWAYS, thoughout our entire lives, be the first thing.
