Education

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire (WB Yeats) Into useful ideas 

Not so long ago further education used to be free and students subsidised, to ensure society had the some of the appropriate skill set and working class people had some opportunity to succeed in their chosen career path.

In contrast the neoliberal education policy today is to ensure each working class student will leave further education with a debt of tens of thousands of pounds and lesser chances with the wrong post code or accent.

This type of education only leaves most students prepared for a world of debt and slavery. 

The education system is as much to do with managing boredom. Look at how kids run away from the school as fast as possible when it is finished. Knowledge is not intelligence, intelligence comes when knowledge is shaped into useful ideas. Knowledge is not wisdom wisdom is the application of interpreted knowledge. Our teachers are not allowed to teach interpretation, their days are filled teaching to memorise a static set of facts to pass an exam. The education of both the student and the teacher is diminished to a conforming level of boredom. Sure there is always the exception, but only through the struggle and determination of those who challenge the orthodoxy of an industrial age education system.

The common good

In western societies human beings are being more highly educated and at increasing cost to acquire more knowledge, but they are then employed to do less. Pehr Gyllenhammar (Chief exec Volvo)

The government doesn’t know what to do with young people. What good are they to a neoliberal agenda? Apart from service industry zero hour contracts. What must young folk be thinking in the transition from youth to adulthood. Even the privileged teen on leaving university. So much education and so little to learn. So much learned and so little to do with it. The education system has become a nanny for our youth. Further education to keep them off the street, till such times that they find there is no job to fit their training, only another training course. 

Our children are part of our common good

It is not only the responsibility of “the parents” to look after our children and the “education system” to teach our young folk. It is everybody’s responsibility. We are all responsible for the education of all of our young people. Until our education system is designed to teach students about the work that is needing done, in the infrastructure of our communities, in the environmental catastrophe heading their way, in the economical and political circumvention of the political structure by corporate power, we all need to be responsible for the mentoring of our young in a common good.

That is. If we wish to live in a society that looks after our interests we need to look after everyone else’s particularly those who come after us. Because that will be the society of our children. And the effect of how we act now will be what forms their history.