What Compulsory Education Needs To Be

From 200 years back, compulsory education was by the industrialists - for the industrialists. Times have changed. It now needs to be by the people - for the people.

I'm right into liberation in education. But realistically a civilization needs a compulsory component, to teach the important basics to lay down a sustainable society.

The most obvious example is the need to teach the language of the civilization, so people can communicate efficiently with the masses beyond their local tribe. There's a reason why your parents were so anal about your spoken and written English - it was to ensure that your tendency to 'devolve' to the wayward local dialect did not get the better of your need to be universally understood. This acquired discipline is an example of 'civilization training'.

Another excellent (and pertinent) example, is the need to teach the young the basics on how economic development works. They need a factual explanation on why we are materially rich in the modern industrialized world, and how exactly it happened. If that education were given--and in the right, honest way--it would be very difficult for socialists to gain traction in the free world. This is because the masses, in first understanding how economic development actually works, would not need to be told what questions to ask when idealists try to sell them a dubious ideology. They will already be asking them.

The young also need to be taught about the humanities, such as the facts on child abuse and serious deprivation, and more specifically how it affects the developing brain and, in turn, the far-reaching social impacts of generating anti-social personalities. This is a well overdue 'update' for our modern Rome - education culture is still well behind science. So compulsory education needs to be about more than creating tax-payers, it needs to be about creating good people, and people who know how to create good people.

A nationalized compulsory sector also needs to teach on the right level, to avoid politicization. For example, in New Zealand today there's a push to teach about the historic New Zealand land wars. This is asking for trouble, as the room for political blame-gaming is obvious. It would be best to keep this kind of education strictly scientific. For example, talk about how over-population drives resource insecurity and in turn the drive for geographical expansion, which in turn leads to wars which are (usually or originally) a competition for resources. Also talk about the psychological impact of war and how it traumatizes and represses a society, which over time leads to militant and even savage cultures, etc...

Compulsory education should focus on developing an impartial understanding of humanity and history. That is what a sustainable society should want - and need. Again my point is that compulsory education needs to operate at the right level. Keep it strictly objective and fundamental - no partisan politics.

When you don't teach the young what they need to know, to protect themselves and their society, and to facilitate its intelligent progression, you obviously risk degeneration. All of us have a duty to pass on essential wisdom to youth. But in saying all of this, we need to teach for real. I assert that this will only happen when the young (and old) are free to think and digest important material in a real way.

The following image makes my point bluntly.

In our current education system we remove appreciation. Appreciation is where we don't just comprehend, but sit back and think about the material and maybe discuss it. It only happens when we care about more than scoring points on a test, and when we're not responding to immediate time pressures. Unfortunately, as it seems, our existing education system is designed to create the somewhat sterile mind fit for a bureaucracy or a trade. Information in modern schooling is only superficially learnt and does not induce a mature world view.

We like to say we're educated because we have certificates that tell us that, but I do not believe modern education means what we tend to think it means. Information must be genuinely digested to achieve the kind of education that goes beyond crude materialistic objectives. And again our current system is if anything designed to suppress that process. It's about creating economic soldiers for the economic machine.

So not only do we need to rethink the content of compulsory education, to preserve our civilization, we also need to rethink how education should functionally work. Do we really still need that giant army of narrowly-tuned institution workers? Maybe we did in the past, but with modern [and rapidly advancing] automation we don't need them now, or certainly not at historic scales. Again, we can rethink education, and in my view doing so would be timely and wise. If we don't want to end up like Venezuela or some kind of Nazi Germany, that is.

                                                   -Andrew Atkin