It is time to try to say the obvious in a way that it it is in fact obvious. There is a strong relationship between the efficacy of our educational system (or lack of same) and the outcome of our attempts to govern ourselves wisely. The present problems facing us as a nation are easily explained if we look at the way we have let our educational system rigidify. Anyone who has even taken a quick look at how the human mind works will be able to see that we have some real problems in the ideas behind how we educate ourselves at every level. One of the surest attempts to rebut what I am saying will be to recite the recent list of Nobel Prizes awarded to people in our system. You may be surprised to find that I see this as evidence for the point I am making. You see if the system is in need of reform then the Nobel Committee is also a product of similar ideas and will reward that which it sees as conforming to its model. Please read on and I'll make my case.
The purpose of education is in fact many fold. The basic idea is to provide knowledge to give a basic understanding of what we think we know and to provide skills and attitudes that foster the gaining of further knowledge. This is only the beginning. Then whatever we learn we must be able to process the information and retain it in a form that will be useful in the future. We need to be able to solve problems and live together in harmony.
The processing of knowledge has many facets but one in particular is damaged severely by the way we have chosen to do things. The compartmentalization of information has become effectively complete. School is a list of "subjects". Politics is a list of "issues". Links and connections are never mentioned in the same way these lists are. That is the essence of the problem.
Dynamics and change are looked upon as special when all of life is really fluid and a set of interrelated processes. Problems that have strong ties to other categories in this artificial sorting we have produced are treated in isolation.
The compartmentalization has become so well accepted that reality, the fact that all this stuff is linked, is a strange notion to most.
Let's take an example that is the hot topic today: "Health care" whatever that is. Your "health" is not something apart from yourself. It is you! Taking care of yourself, your basic, fundamental well being is what it is all about. Society has abstracted this fundamental aspect of your being from you and set it up to be subject to policies and procedures as if it were a possession instead of who you are. This has been carried to the extreme of having significant noises made by some people out there that it is worth having a Civil War over the outcome of the present actions.
There are good guys and bad guys seen by everyone. how is that possible? How were we brought to a point where the must fundamental idea in our Nation's founding values, the right to well being, is now an option and under heavy attack?
It doesn't just happen. It has causes. those causes are deeply rooted in the way we have been taught to think about things in separate boxes.
Why is it not obvious that this thing we have abstracted from our well being and called heath is a product of how we were educated in the first place? Why is it not clear that we can not address this abstraction without putting it back into the perspective of the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breath, and the way we choose to respect or deliberately damage our being?
The body has been separated from the mind. The parts of the body are the domain of specialists who are organized in the system so as to very effectively loose the vital information about how it is all connected and independent. We are given chemicals or cut or irradiated to affect select parts when things go wrong. These interventions are never the magic bullets that they are sold to us as being.
The security of our ability to earn a living, have shelter, and some way of fulfilling our basic potential has become a negotiable thing at best. Each aspect gets cut apart from the rest and put in its box. Then we try to do what we can with those pieces in the boxes.
The problem is deep and requires revolutionary changes. This is one we will never fix using the broken tools we were given.