Learning to be sheep
I was discussing methodology of teaching with a coworker today. My opinion on education may portray me as a someone who thinks they are better than anyone else. Some people already have prejudices against me and they don't want to hear my side of the story. That's fine by me because I could really care less. For someone with an open mind and on the nonjudgmental side of things, I invite the correspondence. I'm also not going to try and fill this with fancy verbiage that a trained 'educator' would feel entitled to use to prove their expertise.
My experience in this opinion I have comes from many sources. Military schools, college courses at different levels, training seminars, vocational studies and even corporate training. Post elementary education seems to consist of an interpretation of actual facts and truth, to be communicated to minds of minimal knowledge with the intent of creating a foundation in which an individual can think critically on and formulate into their own understanding of truth and fact.
Assuming that statement makes sense, I have a feeling that too many people accept the first level of education as the final answer. I'm not one to be impressed by a PhD or some upper level university transcript. Studying material and passing required classes says nothing about your education or the credibility the rest of the world sees.
I could be eluding to the concept of street smarts or maybe even as simple as common sense. However you want to define it, too many people are lacking it. I don't think it's a character flaw in any way. I believe it's a product of the style of education that our society has created. We are taught to be sheep. At least in the western civilization that I am familiar with. As humans in the current society, we are generally being taught to grow up with a formal-ish education, strive to settle into an income level to our desired lifestyle and provide for ourselves and our immediate family structure. Everything else comes after that. (If time and resources permits of course).
Maybe it's good that a majority of the population becomes sheep. It suits certain people just fine to fit in with the status quo. And I don't mean it in a bad way either. I believe the movers-and-shakers of this world have had an understanding that what we are taught is simply guidance into a certain lifestyle. It is up to the individual to decide what to do with it. To be taught and live by the fundamentals of a particular topic is fine and dandy if you believe there is a limit to knowledge. The fundamentals however are really the starting point to beginning a discovery well beyond our wildest imaginations.
If we live by what we are taught, then we will get nothing more out of life than what our teachers have. If we can learn to not only challenge our teachers, but learn on our own, we may find knowledge that can advance us onto the next level. It's the first step I believe, in making real change in this world. I think simply about the person that discovered penicillin. The knowledge they received from others only gave them the ability to discover something that quite possibly changed the world. A hang up I see with the education system now, is that people are limited in their ability to discover new things because they are being flooded with this apparent knowledge that is supposed to give them greater things in life... For themselves, not necessarily for others.
The human race as a whole seems to be grinding to halt. Laziness and complacency prevent us from becoming anything greater than a species that prides themselves on happiness created by artificial means. The materialistic things we strive for really does nothing for our race. Seems that nothing really changes in this world without the movement of money. Something mankind has created. Whatever happened to accomplishing something without the hassle of payment? They say we don't have the 'money' to go to the moon anymore. So what? Do we have the capability? Do we have the physical resources? Absolutely! So why as a human race are we so stuck on only doing things if it benefits us directly?