What if I told you about a place I read about recently where a particular minority population is forced by law to work daily in labor camps without pay. They bus them in each morning and bus them out at the end of the day. They are forced to work crowded into small rooms with labor bosses constantly watching over them ready to punish them for the slightest infraction of the rules. They are not even free to use the restroom when they need to. At the end of the day they usually have hours of unfinished work they are required to take home and finish before the next work shift. This involuntary servitude sentence is court ordered and fully supported by the citizens of this country. Would you be outraged?
Well what if I also told you that the majority of these involuntary laborers are underage – pulled away from their families against their will? Would that feel wrong to you? How about the use of mind control tactics and social pressure control methods used to wipe out any individual creativity or desire for freedom. Most of the products of these forced labor camps become so conditioned that they spend their entire lives thinking that this situation is normal and expected.
Now what if I told you that this entire system was devised simply to ensure a steady workforce to create big profits for the industrial leaders of this country. These same big money interests control the government as well as the opinions of the populace at large through control of all the media. Would you want to live in a country like this?
Why is this important and how does this affect you personally? Well what if I told you that the country we are talking about is the United States of America? Now watch your brain try to shift and deny all the feelings you were just feeling when I tell you that what I am talking about is the American system of compulsory education. The minority involved is the young, and you were once one of those young. Every word of my description above applies to our system of education. Are you catching your mind trying to make exceptions and excuses? Mine did when I first encountered this perspective. In this country education is not a choice, it is mandated by law. You might try to argue that it is for the good of the people but that would be a lie. You might try to argue that children need to learn the stuff they teach in school to survive and have a good life, but that would also be a lie. The American system of education was created for one reason only – to produce an abundant supply of easily replaceable factory workers. This is recorded historical fact, but a fact not widely publicized.
The American education system was designed to meet a purpose that no longer exists. This country doesn’t need replaceable factory line worker drones anymore. Uniformity and sameness is no longer a virtue…yet each year we try to legislate more uniformity and sameness. It doesn’t work. This denies how nature does things. Skill diversity is how nature ensures a population survives…not sameness. The whole concept of testing and standards everyone must meet is about creating skill sameness, not diversity. Instead schools promote “cultural diversity” which actually only decreases harmony and connection between people in the larger cultural mix. Successful survival for a species needs skill diversity, not “cultural” diversity.
We are too scared to support a system based on developing skill diversity because only some skills are going to be successful while others will be failures. We are afraid of the risk that we might be one of the failures. No one knows what skills will be needed to succeed 10 years from now. We all want to be successful. Sorry, that is not possible in a changing environment. If everybody is a success today then tomorrow everybody will be a failure. Life does not slow down for our comfort. Life changes constantly. Life constantly needs different skills. It is not possible for us to educate our kids to be prepared with the “right” skills for success tomorrow because we don’t know what tomorrow will look like. Life is risky. There is nothing anyone can ever do to change that fact. The best we can do is support the fundamental natural curiosity of youth to find its way. We can support traits like adaptability, independence, courage, kindness, and respect. The best we can do is support our own curiosity in finding our own way.
So what can we do on a practical level? Plenty, there is no shortage of educational philosophies and “new” ideas out there. However none of them can have a chance to flower and grow as long as we continue to support the current outdated system. We have to let go of the illusion of control over outcome in our schools (perhaps even grow to let go of the control illusion in our personal lives as well.) Control of outcome only tries to create sameness. We can stop voting funds for more of the same and instead vote for greater variety, more alternatives. That means that we have to accept and embrace that life is expanding and transforming beyond our expectations and comforts. Trying to stop it by enslaving and controlling our kids is not the answer. Instead we need to add our wisdom to the uniqueness they are becoming.
I don’t say these things lightly. I was raised steeped in the American educational system. Both my parents were teachers. My undergraduate degree from UC Davis was in Educational Psychology. My goal back then was to develop a better way to teach teachers. These questions and perspectives were the kinds of things we would discuss in class back in the early seventies. Back then some really creative ideas were evolving in the education field. It saddens me that education has abandoned most of that creativity over the last 35 years. Those ideas didn’t fit the factory-line education mindset the lawmakers favored. Unfortunately bureaucracy hates creativity, individuality, and uniqueness, but it is bureaucracy that pays the bills. Each American taxpayer wants their child to be a winner. That forces to schools to try to create the illusion that there is an objective something, a goal to be won, that has more value than everything else…a specific goal that every child can achieve. That illusion destroys individuality, because with individuality everyone pursues different goals, everyone has a different outcome.
I came to the conclusion that education is just a small part of the larger process of growing as individuals. Mass education based on external ideals and other people’s agendas doesn’t work. So I turned to health as a service I could engage in that would work one-on-one with the individual uniqueness of each person. Modern American medicine is a product of the American education system – a one-size-fits-all mentality. They try to ignore your uniqueness – particularly big medicine like HMO’s and insurance. That is why I became a chiropractor. Back then we were all individualists who firmly believed in the important uniqueness of each person. Public policy may have to work with the sameness of people, but your health does not work that way, neither does your life. Embrace the fact that you are unique. As such your health needs will be unique. Your diet needs will be unique. You don’t look like the person next to you so why would you believe you need the same medicines, or foods, or exercises, or relationships as the next person. Be the individual you are and then share the unique talents you find with the rest of us.