Bring in the Harvest, Already!

For more than a century in the developed world, and increasingly in the developing world, people have been carefully tending a garden of knowledge (formalized educational structures at multiple levels) and watching it grow. Lavish resources and time have gone into its care, much discussion as to the quality of the care itself, and plenty of accusations whenever the soil was not "properly tilled". All of this focused energy has produced quite a bumper crop of...? It's there, in the fields everywhere you look, and occasionally some folks have even gone out and brought back a bushel or two for their supper. As for the rest, it's ripe on the vine and about to fall off...

While many think of higher education as the actual "garden", K-12 is - or at least should be - a vital part of the same reality. After all, K-12 is supposed to serve a clear purpose beyond "day care": for one thing, why else would it require so much administration? Yet education, today, remains a murky component of actual wealth creation. Not only does it still rely on redistribution; even more problematically, all levels of education are mostly treated as a passive product offerings instead of active, engaged and ongoing economic activity between individuals. A portion of what occurs in more exclusive classrooms pays off in careers and challenging responsibilities: others, not so much. But the fact remains that we collectively set aside mass amounts of resources for this public endeavor, whether through taxation or one's own finances. What's more, the fact that education acts more as passive consumption than investment is a problem for today's demographic realities. Instead of becoming better integrated with our economic lives, benefits of education were simply taken for granted. Because people have been slow to clarify and utilize education in more direct social formats, some now question the efficacy of education in a general sense.

And that very real investment should pay off - it never should have been treated as an object of passive consumption and local activity with no clear purpose. By the way if it were not already apparent - simply turning education over to yet more institutions of private providers does not "fix" this social issue of economic integration AT ALL. After one's education is "complete" comes the first job and something becomes abundantly clear: all that planning isn't quite on target. Oh and something else, there's a chance one might not be - in institutional terms at least - "adequate" for the task, simple though the present task may seem. The very thing that was supposed to matter, in fact our personhood and humanity are caught up here - our full range of skills and abilities - we end up devaluing because we have no realistic way to offer to others directly. So we remain hopeful that our institutions will find it in their "hearts" to include us, somehow. But alas, they have already walked the fields today to remark on and sample the harvest. Indeed they are already talking about sowing less seeds for the next season (less money printing), even though some people have not yet been allowed a chance yet to sample a bushel (long term unemployed).

This is not exactly a rant against educators, who are caught up in systems beyond their immediate scope of influence. Life is not about any single given focus, and most of those who take part in our education try to provide the broadest perspective possible. In fact, a good deal of what we learn in those classrooms could actually benefit other people, other situations, other sets of circumstances which cry out for more attention than they ever really receive. But we are looking at such a reality through the lens of exclusion, because that was the way our interdependent institutions were set up in the first place. Doing more with less meant not everyone had to make the most important decisions; not everyone had to negotiate. But these vital functions were factored out of too many individual responsibility sets. That meant too many people forgot how to perform these vital functions in their daily lives. Without them...sure enough, much of the remainder of learning tended to fall from the vine.

The real problem is actually one that educators did not so much cause as they simply followed in the other institutions they observed: that of exclusivity. Because education was not perceived as organic integration with community, it became yet another individual special interest like everyone else, vying for attention in group settings which would slowly become overwhelmed by the demands of their own institutions. If this does not quite make sense in educational terms, the reader can be forgiven for wondering why I speak of education in this manner. No one can reform education without reforming ideas of work and wealth creation at the same time. So any thoughts of making education less expensive, private enterprise or whatever do not address the real problem. Education is but part of a process of society struggling to become more inclusive. And when the institutions hold all the power, there simply is no way to harvest the fields, which have far too much food for the institutions. While our institutions quibble how to deal with their bumper crop, people are starving while the bumper crop goes to waste in the fields.

It's time to let people come back into the fields. Some might say, no, free markets don't work so that can't happen. Well, free markets and government institutions in this instance are in the same exact gridlock! Neither one of them have enough incentive to grant people economic access (partaking of the produce when it is brought from the fields). Rather than just bringing back a little food for them (welfare, "guaranteed income" and "universal income" proposals) why not just allow them to actually go back out into the fields amongst one another, where the bumper crop actually is? Our institutions spent too much time creating and supporting these gardens, to just let the fruit all die on the vine because no one can figure out how to apportion it. We do not give humanity a lot of credit, if an individual who gains knowledge and skills resources for 12 years is still not deemed worthy to help others or to help oneself either - which only leaves too many of us economically helpless for no good reason (prostitution, anyone?). People really need the right to educate one another, and the right to heal one another, for their survival.  Just in case the reader isn't quite convinced such rights matter, two points to remember: when we do nothing, we devalue ourselves, and we devalue knowledge in the aggregate. Really lousy ramifications follow in myriad ways. Civilizations were lost, for less.

What, then, needs to be done? Find ways to embed knowledge use, by everyone, more deeply into the daily fabric of our lives. Wherever present social contracts aren't capable of doing so, find ways to improve or reinvent them, rather than just lambasting the other person's idea of how the contract is supposed to "work". Don't allow disciplines to remain points of delineation instead of results. Don't allow important and vital functions of life to remain undone, if the "responsible" institution cannot fulfill them, even if the institution defensively insists that it is doing so. Don't allow the precious nature of our educations to be just a consumption good for the elite, because when the masses start to live without education integration in the totality of their lives, I guarantee you it is a horrible sight. No I don't care what institutions are "slacking" on the job, it could be any of them. It's time to turn our love of knowledge into a tradable good before people convince themselves it's not even worth caring about knowledge. Am I perhaps a little too passionate about this matter? You bet your a** I am...it's the first thing I started writing about, 30 years ago.

I am a Student of Life, as I see it and know it. That's what I told myself, the day I could no longer go to the university that I loved.