This week I have faced people asking me and my friends about our Education on a Social network.
The question did not come in the form of a curiosity or an exchange like 'hei dude, where did you go to school?', no, the question was for the purpose of proving we have no right to talk about a world change, because we did not take the allegedly prescribed "World Change" course and have therefore no qualifications to address the point that we have realized that there is a systemic problem across all facets of our society, and since we are the System, it must be up to us to stand as The Solution to this problem.
Of course what is implied in such questions is that we are not 'intelligent' enough to even notice that there is a problem, because it is only through education that one has 'broadened' up enough to see a problem.
I don't see it this way, education is like filling up a hard disk and everyone knows that once a hard disk fills up, processing time slows down, not only, but the education received implies that what we look at must be decoded through that set of ideas and opinions, which could explain why for example most Economist know diddly squat about how Money is created, we went past the Tooth Fairy idea about the Money System and how we must become willing to sell everything, including body parts, for that most valuable return, just to embrace other no less outlandish economics believes: market "forces" (Jedi talk), free market economy (for those who have the freedom of a Capital), public debt (collective delusion) and then the most rationale of solutions -austerity, for the already poor.
What can we say about where we got with all our high and mighty beliefs in De-Value of Education?
That we are highly and mightily dumb? Yes, that would be a fit description of us Humans.
People of 'high' education who read 1984 and failed to notice we are living it, have nothing to brag about.
I saw another point as I looked at Education today, it's like the second best thing you can have for value in this world, the first is Money. I watched a documentary called 'Born Rich' made by one of the heirs of the Johnson and Johnson family, where some of his multi-billion dollar friends came across as 'not the cleverest cookies in the jar', we have some women who are in the spotlight just for having Money, the Hiltons, the Kardashians, I don't recall any of them lecturing about Physics or Economy but in their case, it is irrelevant. I don't recall either someone asking about their education, because Money was the guarantor that they indeed had a Value, a declared one, the Family Money they belonged to, their Worth was defined by that.
Incidentally some of the questions we were asked as a group contained both discriminants 'declare your education and/or your monetary value', this was the essence behind them.
Because in this world what we failed to see is that we are born worthless if not into Money and from there we have to build up our Worth/Value. Is it possible that those inquiring about our education were not born rich? I would say it is an almost sure thing, if they were they would not feel the need to show their second best Value/Worth credentials: Education.
But how can Education be a measure of Worth if not everyone has the same chances/choices to access it? Isn't then a discriminatory factor just the same as money, specifically when Education has been pursued to close that Value/Worth gap perceived by those who want to have 'Saber Diplomas fights' to see themselves come out as winner, as worthier, more valuable?
What is the purpose of an Education that didn't make it clear to us that we were born Unequal because the system is rotten to its core as it developed from our separation from ourselves as a Whole Indivisible Unit, instead of promoting Inequality by each and every mean possible to make sure we never get united and stand together for the common good?
I have asked a question on Quora about Galileo - relative to Education:
If
Galileo had spoken with 'more educated' people would he have been able
to convey the reasoning behind 'the Earth is round'? Would Education
have been the key to a higher chance to be understood or not?
.1 ...."Rather,
what Galileo got in trouble for was the idea that the earth moved
around the sun rather than vice versa. And I doubt that more education
would have helped because (i) much of what educated people thought they
knew on the subject had been wrong and (ii) the case relied at many
different points on recent, new observations many of which were
contributed by Galileo himself. He was among the first to make and use
telescopes in astronomy. He went a long way to founding a new theory of
mechanics. Etc, etc. To some extent the discoveries were ripe for the
picking but to have gotten there first in so many areas is still huge."
.2 "The
people Galileo spoke with were highly educated. Despite our stodgy
caricatures of them, it took many of those cardinals who put him on
trial years of theological study to get where they were.
The problem wasn't their education. It wasn't that they were dumb or bigoted. It was that they knew exactly what they were doing. His ideas threatened their simplistic theology, which threatened their political power.
For over a thousand years, "God did it" was the explanation for most phenomena. When someone looked up at the stars, and asked why they moved around, "God makes them" was the answer. Following from this sort of logic, that answer eventually grew into a system in which Earth was the center of the universe because it represented Man's special relationship to God - it means that God loved Man more than anything else.
You may laugh now, but that's what they thought. Volumes upon volumes were written in the Middle Ages expounding upon these sorts of theology-based theories. They basically just made it all up as they went along because it didn't require any real scientific effort, and it benefited them to have people thinking that they had all the answers because all the answers came from God, which they were experts on.
Also not well known is that most scientists agreed with Galileo at the time. Not that there were many of them to begin with, but the idea had been around since the Greeks, and the general feeling was that it was probably right, despite what the Church had to say. The Church was okay with this because no one had actually proved it, so they could keep getting away with saying the same things and maintaining their primacy in peoples' lives.
Once Galileo came along and did just that, they realized it challenged their power base. If people knew the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, what else would they think the Church was lying about?"
The problem wasn't their education. It wasn't that they were dumb or bigoted. It was that they knew exactly what they were doing. His ideas threatened their simplistic theology, which threatened their political power.
For over a thousand years, "God did it" was the explanation for most phenomena. When someone looked up at the stars, and asked why they moved around, "God makes them" was the answer. Following from this sort of logic, that answer eventually grew into a system in which Earth was the center of the universe because it represented Man's special relationship to God - it means that God loved Man more than anything else.
You may laugh now, but that's what they thought. Volumes upon volumes were written in the Middle Ages expounding upon these sorts of theology-based theories. They basically just made it all up as they went along because it didn't require any real scientific effort, and it benefited them to have people thinking that they had all the answers because all the answers came from God, which they were experts on.
Also not well known is that most scientists agreed with Galileo at the time. Not that there were many of them to begin with, but the idea had been around since the Greeks, and the general feeling was that it was probably right, despite what the Church had to say. The Church was okay with this because no one had actually proved it, so they could keep getting away with saying the same things and maintaining their primacy in peoples' lives.
Once Galileo came along and did just that, they realized it challenged their power base. If people knew the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, what else would they think the Church was lying about?"
Another Education question I placed on Quora
If
History is written by those who 'win', how can we be sure that the
whole education curricula doesn't follow a specific purpose to give a
certain view through which we will be forced to look at the world?
" Uhhh
... it *IS*. If you want to learn history, the last place you will
find it is in the history curricula of any school that you have ever
attended. Howard Zinn's "A people's History" is probably one of the
first real history text books ever written. Other history books like to
focus on personalities like Hitler, Napoleon, etc.
Think about the US invasion of Iraq. It was openly run and exposed as a pure vicious invasion of choice with no purpose whatsoever, except to give G.W.Bush a premise upon which to run a re-election campaign in his second term. The truth of this matter will *never* be incorporated into any mainstream history book. It will go down in history as some kind of liberation of Iraq that maybe was more messy than it should have been, or some sort of pablum nonsense like that.
Think about the US invasion of Iraq. It was openly run and exposed as a pure vicious invasion of choice with no purpose whatsoever, except to give G.W.Bush a premise upon which to run a re-election campaign in his second term. The truth of this matter will *never* be incorporated into any mainstream history book. It will go down in history as some kind of liberation of Iraq that maybe was more messy than it should have been, or some sort of pablum nonsense like that.
Make
no mistake, the part that Orwell got most correct in his book 1984, is
the part where we rewrite history according to what is convenient to the
propaganda of people currently in power."
So, basically, here we are praising Education, that would be like in 1984 supporting Big Brother for all the wonderful opportunities given to us, meanwhile we miss out what is going to ourselves and the world.
We ask 'what can we do about this system? What about changing it to one that would consider ALL as integral parts of it and honor all living beings just because they are Here, alive and breathing the same air we share. And someone asks 'how would you handle the microeconomics transactions -come on show us what you have got', is this a sign of common sense?
2.5 billions people don't have access to sanitation, close to 1 billion people starving every year, we are enslaved by a Fiat Money system where banks print Money and then go and lend it to Government for an hefty interest - and while we are screwed up-and-down by the system, we are being razzled dazzled by such questions of seemingly paramount importance vs how do we stop this monetary system and replace it with one that works for us and not against us?
But such is the power of Education, and as we got enslaved with it and heavily distracted from what's going on, we demand others to join in, we tell them 'I can't hear you because you don't have the System Seal of Approval (show me) that says you can talk to me about a solution, to a problem I can't even see - show me your credentials, show me your numbers - your slave numbers' then I will clear my mind to make space for what will certainly be the common knowledge we share, because you proved we belong to the same Club, and have been fed knowledge and information that, thanks god, doesn't rock the boat or in any way threatens the system we have come -through hardship and struggle- to embrace and surrender to.
So, solutions to the world we live in won't come from the system that has been set up by those who own it, that would seem pretty rational if one could give it a moment of reflection, we'll have to expand beyond the borders of the knowledge we have, hope that some who may not have been too infected by the Propaganda may come along to share what they could see as they were free-er than us to look into solutions that were never explored before, and hope, we may have the guts to stop ourselves from reacting to the perceived Mutiny we have been trained to stand against, just long enough to Hear.
Equal Money - Not Communism, Not Socialism, not a Solution considered before, like ever.
Check it out.
Thank you very much Ele, great blog!
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