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Educating For Our Changing World
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Q1, 97 #346 ->
Educating For Our Changing World
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Published in:
- The Northwest Technocrat, October 1963, No. 212
- Technocracy Digest, 2nd quarter 1984, No. 272
- The Northwest Technocrat, 1st quarter 1997, No. 346
This is an abridged version of the original (1963) article.
In an era when North Americans should be rejoicing from the fruits of their own inventiveness, change is lapping with an ominous threat at all our doorsteps. What threat? It is a gnawing fear of the future. As business failures multiply; as the unemployment rolls lengthen; as little farms are swallowed up by big ones, and as war continues to hang relentlessly over our heads, every segment of our society seems to stand on the quaking ground of uncertainty.
Workers "especially" face increasing uncertainty as job opportunities diminish, and relief and security funds are dissipated. As jobs are taken over by technology, workers are finding, today, that they are not fitted for many of those technological jobs that are said to be available. Retraining and reschooling do not seem to answer their questions either, as there are simply not enough jobs to go around. We hear on the news that maybe 1500 jobs are being created -- but how is that supposed to give jobs to the many thousands of people being laid off.
Fortunately, of late, North Americans in increasing numbers are beginning to re-examine critically our economics in all its aspects and to assess its effectiveness in relation to their own lives. Manifestly something is bringing a threat to them and some have concluded that if our own way of life creates problems that it is incapable of solving, the solution must be looked for elsewhere. And most North Americans are not expecting to find the answer in some worn-out, discredited and foreign social system. They are looking for an efficient North American solution to our North American problems.
The advance of technology is no longer limited to the fields of production where it has been making such devastating inroads in the blue-collar jobs. It is also making deep inroads in areas never before invaded. The white-collar workers in the managerial, supervisory and service fields are falling before the computers like wheat before the reaper, and not only in the business world. Clerks, accountants, typists and stenographers in administrative offices of cities, counties, states, municipalities and national government are rapidly losing their jobs to technology.
In this re-assessment of our society, one of the functions which should be getting an especially hard look is our educational system. Since our problems are rapidly multiplying, we must conclude that our educational system also is involved in those problems. And to confirm this conclusion, more and more voices of anxious educators and government officials are being added to those who warn of the dangers of ignoring our educational trend. They point to the over-crowded classrooms and inadequate facilities. The deplorable results of such faults can often be found in our increased unemployment, delinquency and crime. And since the educational system is the fulcrum upon which the whole society rests, failure in its cardinal objective -- that of giving youth the means by which it can make its way in our changing world, can only mean that it has also failed society as a whole, and that it must be changed.
Unfortunately our education system, along with most of the functions of our society, is closely tied to, and controlled by, business-oriented politics which, by its self-perpetuating nature, hampers and obstructs social progress. This is not new. Such control has always existed in our society, and, in the interest of maintaining the status quo, is the very warp and woof of the Price System. But as long as the advance of science maintained a slow pace, this control exerted little damage to society as a whole or to education which was then more or less adequate to its task.
Of late, amid mounting conditions of deprivation and breakdown that are building up, and in the absence of any valid reason for war other than the usual palliatives of business and politics, there is a heartening stir among our youth, who are objecting to this. No doubt in our manic obsession with preventing social change at all costs, the concept of social change will for some time remain a vile and communicable disease, unless youth take destiny into their own hands by actively objecting. In which case, schools will be compelled to prepare our young for the world that exists for them, instead of turning out the largest crops of brainwashed mediocrity the world has ever witnessed.
There is no doubt that for the failures of our educational system, North American youth pays the heaviest price. Coming through this mental reducing plant they are not only squeezed dry of initiative, but emerge with a negative outlook born of frustration and fear -- being completely unready for the world that confronts them. Granted, that they are technically prepared for a job they may be able to find, but they have not been prepared to meet the tremendous and constant changes taking place in our world today. The basic trends of their world are largely unknown to them, and when they lose their job, an eventuality which is overtaking millions of our North American workers per year, the very foundations are ripped out from under, then leaving them helpless.
The lack of challenge in our education shows up in the bright youngsters who drop out of school; they are lost not only to themselves but to society forever. And one must shudder to contemplate how many doctors and how many scientists, how many technologists, engineers and others with their needed skills are thus lost. It could be that one of them would find the needed cure for cancer.
Other grim statistics pertaining to our youth cast doubt upon the worthiness of our education. Evidently, so lacking in the teaching of the fundamentals of social living and those elements that go into the building of character, our youth fall prey in unbelievable numbers to dope-addiction, juvenile delinquency, venereal disease, illegitimacy, crime, insanity and suicide, all of which have increased staggeringly in recent years.
Technocracy states that it will not be possible within the framework of the Price System to support an educational system which is consonant with the needs of our technological age. Government assistance to education will continue to be anathema so long as politics and business are in the saddle; and there will remain, in connection with schools, the same old invitation to venality and crookedness, even though their results are disastrous to society and youth. An instance of the tight control in education can be seen in the medical field where many youngsters aspiring to enter that field are thwarted in getting the education necessary for it. This has come through the interference to organize medicine in an effort to keep its own product, medical care, scarce, and therefore costly. But of late there have been outcries from the furtherseeing members of the profession. Doctors, and nurses too, are following the money!
Technocracy has recognized all the foregoing social ills. It has emphatically warned that none of those ills can be overcome except through a complete social change involving the entire North American Continent; and that until this is done, only symptoms of our outworn system can at best be ineffectively dabbed at.
Technocracy also recognizes that change will not come easily to the minds of people. Although North Americans have come through an unprecendented transition from a hand-tool to a technological age, we still resist the very thought of a scientific social change. We are not alone among the various species in this reluctance to change. We share this dubious honor with the dinosaur, the mastodon and the saber-toothed tiger, each of which died as a species rather than change. But North Americans will soon be called upon to make a choice as to whether we will go on to annihilation or reverse our direction toward survival.
Our choice, either intelligent or stupid, will depend upon the sum total of our knowledge of the facts pertaining to our world. And this in turn depends upon the education we receive.
Through the ages, those who sought to bring progress through the enlightenment of minds were often pilloried, burned at the stake, or exiled. But Technocracy wishes to point out that this did not stop either progress or relentless change. As modern North Americans who have reached an entirely new plateau of living, higher than even our grandparents knew, and in which we accept without question shiny cars and household gadgets, we will have to learn to accept yet another fact; that in order to keep what we have achieved, we will have to go the full way with science. There is no place to stop. It will not be easy for many of us to overcome a reluctance; and for this fear and hesitation, our schools are to a considerable degree responsible.
It is thus that our youth can learn not only to serve their own needs and the needs of their society, but also to set an example for the rest of the world -- and it is about time we got started on this! For until we have cleaned up our own social chaos, what we say to the rest of the world cannot be heard above the noise of what we fail to do!