Society's Failings

The modern society is a technological marvel, and a governance miracle. Governmental systems do a pretty good job in ensuring that people get their basica amenties and not cause large scale disobedience, and have generally done a good job in maintaining inter-state relationships.

Except that the modern society is also a hot-pot for all sorts of fail. In many ways, it would appear that we have not stepped out of the middle ages when we look at the lowest common denomination of the populace. It is indeed true that literacy rates today are much better than those that wre about 300 years ago, yet we don't find that people are any more intelligent than before. I wonder what education is really about the last few years, and honestly, I do not find a satisfactory answer.

The naïve answer to education is that it ``raises people's awareness of the world and world at large, and thus increasing their ability to make rational decisions that further improve themselves''. In many circumstatnces too, we find that education is seen as the de facto poverty cycle breaker. Except it does not seem to really be the case. Education is a noble attempt in raising people's awareness---this I do not disagree, but in the ensuing steps taken to meet the ideals of education, our society seems to have taken a step back as a whole.

Look at the current financial crises. Who were the ones that inspired its occurrence? It is not your daily person---many of the folks who contributed to the mess are those who were supposedly ``educated''. The Chinese have a saying 聪明反被聪明误, which translates to the smart being blinded by their smartness. That is, what I think, to be the most apt description of why the financial mess came about in the first place.

While I'm not propounding that we should all adopt a centralised control system to deal with society and its failings (think about the ``no-child-left-behind'' policy that practically plagues the public education system in the United States as a valid counter example to a centralised approach), I'm trying to say that the education system has gone beyond the concept of ``education'' into a numbers game of sorts. How many people out there who score perfect grades can actually apply what they supposedly have learnt in real life? Sure, there's probably a sizeable number who can do that, but what about the others? And why are there still school drop-outs then, given that we have learnt so much about how to teach people?

I think the core of society's problems boils down to one word: choice. In many sitautions, the infrastructure is there for people to take that step forward, yet they do not. I think that the issue is that the people choose not to move forward. I can back this up with carefully chosen examples; let us go back to our flogging child, i.e. education. Sure, education expenses are expensive, and the costs are expect to rise even more every year. And yet, there are also a multitude of programmes that provide the funding necessary for a student to make it through school should he/she choose to work hard and demonstrate potential. And the natural argument against this is: define ``potential'', and how about those who don't really have ``potential''? Well, the answer is refreshing simple: there's education opportunities of all sorts, the academic one is but one of the few that are available.

Not everyone can be a scribe or priest or any of those academic people. That is a fact of life; people are all born under different circumstances. But in the context of society, everyone has an almost equal chance to learn to the best of their abilities and then work on towards doing something that they are proud of themselves. While I'm not a fan of affirmative action, I cannot deny that affirmative action has created opportunities for the economically underprivileged to actually take the step forward and rise through the social fabric. But yat another question returns: how many actually make good use of these opportunities?

Choice. People always have a choice, it is whether they want to take it or not. There are many things in life that are determined by choice and decision, which is a strange thing since I just stated that one of education's goals is to teach people how to make better choices, with the premise that rationality is a good metric in determining if the choice that one is taking is indeed ``good'' or not. Hence a chicken and egg situation, where people need education to learn how to make better choices, and people need to make the right choice to embrace the opportunities that education provides.

Maybe there's no way out of that problem; ignorant people will want to remain ignorant, and the smart alecs will ruin themselves (and everyone around them) with their shenanigans. But I hold a glimmer of hope for the everyperson, to be able to slowly see what the best choices that they ought to make. Ignorance is probably the single most deadly thing that a person faces in today's society---many of the bad decisions that were made by individuals or even groups of people are based on being ignorant of some aspect of what they are thinking about. For example, religious extremists and fundamentalists are deliberately ignorant of how their narrow interpretation of their teachings do not commensurate with how the world currently works---all these just leads to the clashes between them and the rational people who populate target group of society that the extremists/fundamentalists do not see eye to eye with. A similar argument holds between the extreme liberal and the extreme conservative. The key to a society's success is probably that of moderation.

People will most definitely take me to task for that last statement that I made. Moderation---no one will openly want to admit that, since it almost implies that these people need to admit that not all of their teachings are right, when they have been told for countless ages that their teachings and ideas were absolute. I'm always very sceptical at an ideology that propounds very absolute terms of ``correctness'' and ``goodness''. That and the hard-coded dogma that the ideology prescribes. The problem with dogma is that it is usually temporally sensitive---something that might work in ancient Rome, for instance, can be almost completely irrelevant in a modern city like Chicago. Blindly applying ideas is probably the single largest cause of many of society's problem.

Which brings us back to education. What should education be? Should it teach what we want our progeny to hear, or should it provide choices for them to understand all the perspectives in as an objective way as possible to train them to learn how to make valued judgements? Should it be a fact-recall type system or should it be so general purposed that the students end up knowing the most generic way of doing something that they forget how to apply the concepts in real life?

Again, I beg of moderation. Some ``core facts'' ought to be kept in the recall format, concepts that can be safely classified as being part of the ``basic human archetype''. Good candidates for such concepts are things whose unknowing state can cause the person to not be able to function at all in the modern society. However, when controversial issues are concerned, the gist of the arguments on all perspectives ought to be demonstrated to the student and let him/her decide which is more compelling in his/her perspective. Note that by ``controversial'', I do not mean something like the evolution vs creationism debate; I'm explicitly referring to issues where there is strong objective reasons to support either hypothesis. Things that involve some manner of ``magical thinking'' and/or belief systems ought not be presented as facts of the case in the schools.

But who am I kidding? The educators are humans, and are thus subjected to the usual biases that occur when one's belief system is challenged by the empirical sciences.

So at the end of the day, are we, as a society, doomed? I highly doubt that it will be the case, but if we keep adding kludges to the current education infrastructure, I'm pretty sure that we will be engineering our downfall in time to come. The time of change is at hand, and should the human race want to survive for another thousand years, reforms in the way we do things ought to be considered, and at the very least, the lowest denominator of society be brought up, so that people can actually start living in the twenty-first century.