The Dosquatch Says…

Education is defined as “the imparting of instruction and knowledge in a subject or skill”. That is an incomplete definition. Were accumulated knowledge enough, Wikipedia would be the most intelligent being on the planet.

Knowledge is not enough. The mind is not a clay pot into which to pour the contents of textbooks. Unfortunately, that is how we treat our students. We have invited bureaucrats into the schoolhouse and allowed them to strip our Teachers of autonomy. We do this with vapid platitudes like “No Child Left Behind” and “Standards of Learning”. We cook up a test by committee, and we teach our kids how to pass that test and no more.

We are building automatons, bubbling in Scantron forms with glassy eyes, and we weigh their results against crafted metrics, measuring their worth for the beancounters. What we are not giving them is understanding or passion. Knowledge without passion is as dead as a book. Is it any wonder students hate school?

What we have lost from education is the reason for education. If it were enough to simply document knowledge, that’s already in a book and we have no reason to torture a child with it. No, it is not knowledge that is the goal, it is the application of knowledge. Not the ability to pass a test, but real application. Problem-solving skills. The ability to form and ask a question, and go about finding an answer by research and experiment. Life, as it turns out, quite often is not multiple choice. Scantron is one of the worst things to ever happen to the educational process.

We are taught that a full answer involves the five W’s – who, what, when, where, why. Somewhere along the way, we have lost why. The first four are the stuff of facts, the fodder for textbooks. It is alone in why that understanding lies, and this is as important to Education as Education is to Man. We neglect it to our own detriment.

At the moment, we neglect it completely.

Social Commentary, philosophy education, knowledge, school, why

Our cultural heritage is our knowledge. Many believe it is our stuff, our art and music and infrastructure. Buildings, monuments, fabulous whirly whizmagigs, but stuff is impermanent. Without maintenance, buildings will fall, bridges collapse, and whirly whizmagigs will rust away. Nature will eventually take back what is Hers unless we keep what is ours polished and functioning.

That maintenance is not a given. We can do that only because we have the knowledge… that knowledge is our most precarious treasure. Everything we know – everything that Man has spent centuries, millennia, putting together and passing on – that could all be lost in a single generation in the wake of a global catastrophe. We who hold knowledge are its shepherds, and we hold with it the responsibility to both past and future to see that it is passed along to the current generation. It must constantly be refreshed, or it will cease entirely.

Without education, our current treasures wither and die. Without education, there are no new treasures to take their place.

Social Commentary, philosophy education, future, knowledge