[Vision2020] NYTimes: The Uneducated American

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Friday 09 October 2009 13:29:06 Glenn Schwaller wrote:
<snip>
> Why has nothing worked?

This broad and bland, not to mention over-reaching, question overlooks what 
may be the obvious observation that things could be worse.

Suppose society did not educate persons at all. What might result therefrom? 
Thomas Hobbes has suggested "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is 
worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of 
man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." -- Leviathan, chapter 12.

So one reason for education is to inculcate within individuals some higher 
sense of self-control -- an extension of toilet training -- with the goal of 
avoiding multifarious problems that could ensue. Society educates people to 
avoid problems, and associated costs, that would occur without education.

To the extent that one can look at contemporary society and notice that it is 
not completely chaotic, one might suggest that something must have worked.

The question arises whether things might be better with more education, and, 
more specifically, what sort of education provided to what sort of persons 
for what purposes. Beyond education as a means to avoid problems is education 
as a means to facilitate contributions to society's well-being. Less crime 
and more prosperity may be partial measures of success, individual stable 
lives and personal satisfactions notwithstanding.

Relatively high levels of education are a twentieth-century phenomenon. 
History of earlier times suggests education was primarily for richer, upper 
class persons who need not deign to soil their hands with trade work or 
manual labor, even in a society primarily comprised of small farm agriculture 
subsistence. Contemporary society has urbanized itself away from farms, and 
though the elites may still disdain efforts beyond commanding the hired help, 
most people find themselves faced with multifaceted needs to engage in a 
complex and dynamically changing set of social conditions.

The existence of dynamically changing social conditions, and the necessity for 
many individuals to be aware of those changes, suggest that society needs to 
organize itself in such ways as to best facilitate not only dissemination of 
information about change, but also to educate individuals concerning the most 
appropriate ways and means to respond to change for the benefit of society 
and themselves.

So, it seems to me not only appropriate, but necessary, to reorganize public 
education toward providing more and better services to adult learners who 
have passed out of the juvenile social promotion system that attempts to 
educate while providing collective means for social control of adolescents. 
One way that at least part of such revitalization of individual education 
could be provided via public institutions would be to establish institutions 
for adult learners to allow them to accomplish, or to re-accomplish, tasks 
associated with what are deemed to be minimum acceptable education standards.


Ken