Readin', Ritin' n Cypherin'

You've been with the professors
And they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well read
It's well known.

But something is happening here
And you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?
-Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

What is education?

Looks like the current, near-global paradigm is stuffing kids into a room and filling full of the exact same information, sprinkled liberally with propaganda. At some point, they are encouraged to 'specialize' into so field or another and then spend the remained of their matriculation focusing on one thing.

Seems to me this is completely bass-ackwards.

Once upon a time, there were different schools of thought. There were platonics, aristotelians, nihilists, religionists, and scientists. There were weltanschauungs and competing viewpoints. That model produced legendary thinkers who drew upon multiple disciplines to gain insight and inspiration.

Somewhere along the line, we got derailed into this conformist model, where everyone must learn the same mountain of 'facts' and the same interpretation of those facts, and then, to the exclusion of all other information, begin a career building walls to protect just certain 'facts,' to the exclusion of all other 'facts.'

From where I sit, this seems to have produced legendary morons.

During my college days, the most memorable moments were when I tied some historical event to a scientific break-through or social change. One really good writer to this kind of thinking is Daniel Boorstein, who could effortlessly connect the invention of sewing machines to the development of credit cards, or so it seemed.

Things like transcepts and flying buttresses led to explosions in architecture and grand works such as the Hajia Sofia and Chartres cathedral.

The concept of the photon led to pointilism and ultimately to digital photography. Photography freed paitners to explore impressionism, cubism and geometrics.

Knowing little things can be fun also, like knowing that 'terrific' comes from 'terror,' which comes from the Latin, which equals the Greek 'deimos,' which is the root of 'demon' and a moon of Mars. The moons of Mars are called Phobos and Deimos, which can be translated as 'fear' and 'loathing,' which was a popular title for Hunter S. Thompson stories. Not to mention that the names were suggested by Johnathan Swift in 'Gulliver's Travels,' 200 years before the discovery of the moons.

Swift also wrote a famous essay called "A Modest Proposal," in which he advocates eating the children of Ireland as a means of alleviating poverty and unemployment in 17th century Ireland, which oddly sounds like the EU's current proposal to fix Ireland's current economic crisis. Thus, the 'war on terror' is a 'war of the worlds,' and a war on the children of Ireland, and everyone seems to think that just terrific. Reductio ad absurdum ipso facto annuit coeptis.

See how much fun it is?

One can successfully argue that thinkers such as Einstein, who was mired in his focus on calculations, has done more damage to physics than the Newtonian/Keplerian schools ever did. But what's worse is that schools teach Einsteinian space/time as gospel, when in fact nearly every observation of the Universe dispels the theory. Yet, competing schools of thought, such as Eletric Universe are roundly dismissed because the people who conceived of it weren't physicists.

Modern banking and economics, the core and root of the global money mess, are the product of a man called Keynes, whose mental masturbations have become dogma, thus trapping economists into thought boxes from which they can not escape. The Austrian school, on the other hand, is derided and ignored, though its paradigm makes far more sense and is historically sound.

And so the Box Paradigm is perpetuated across time. Schools pound one viewpoint into a child's head, and then for life they are trapped in an artificial construct of someone else's making. If they dare think outside the box, they are failed and relegated to ditch-digging for the rest of their lives.

Finally, not only do we force children to constrain their thoughts within narrow boxes of perception, but we do so by stuffing them in boxes 8 hours a day. No wonder we can't seem to produce great thinkers any more. The most exciting thought exercises in a modern school occur when globalist change agents come and pretend to have think-tank like sessions, but where conclusions are masterfully steered towards pre-ordained 'facts.' Case in point: Al Gore.

With the judicious application of multi-media and internet, combined with platonic dialogues and true investigative thinking, we could be producing Leonardo da Vincis by the hundreds. We could realize a tremendous New Age of Wisdom by teaching children to really think, to investigate multiple lines of inquiry, to open themselves to new connections and conclusions.

Instead, we close their minds, lock them in Schroedenger's Box and throw away the key. We continue to bus them into boxes and stuff them full of 'that's the way we've always done it' and hope for a better future. No wonder we are mired in one pile of stupidity after another.

Given the modern tools available, and simple discussions that cost nothing, children could be taught to really think. They would be encouraged to make connections where none existed before. They would stretch their minds to apply a 'fact' from one discipline to solving a 'puzzle' in another. The most prized degree would become a PhD in Everything, rather than some increasingly narrow line of thinking that leads ultimately to a cul-de-sac. Children would join dots rather than separate them, thus causing an explosion in true understanding of the Universe!

But, alas, perhaps that's the point: we can't have people thinking now can we? They might devise some way to extract energy from the ether for eternal free power. They might devise modes of transportation that are cheap, private and don't require vast infrastructures to operate.

They might become free individuals, sovereign and whole, answerable to their own God and unhindered in their exploration of our vast and wonderous Universe.

We can't have that, now can we?