We live in a society that likes to think that its most important resources are the physical ones like gold, diamonds, oil, or just about anything that can be translated to a dollar amount. However when it comes to the intangible resources we slough them off as if they aren’t important – something that we can worry about later.
The most important intangible resource we have as a society is the education of our children and right now it is in a state of crisis in the US, and to a degree in Canada as well. Like everything else in our society it is seeing massive waves of change and not all of them are for the better. As these waves of change come crashing down around us our children are increasingly finding themselves adrift in a world that has continually downgraded its responsibility to the future by denying children the best of class education that they need, and deserve.
As Alvin Toffler, noted American futurist, wrote in Revolutionary Wealth:
Perhaps the greatest case of wave conflict in America will be paid by nearly fifty million children currently compulsorily enrolled in schools that are attempting to prepare them – and not very successfully at that – for jobs that won’t exist. Call that stealing the future.
Education is about far more than jobs. But the schools, with minute exceptions, also fail to prepare students for their roles as consumers and prosumers. Nor does this system, by and large, help kids cope with the rising complexity and new life options they face in sex, marriage, ethics and other dimensions of the emerging society. Least of all does it succeed in introducing more than a tiny fraction of them to the enormous pleasure of learning itself.
This is what happens when education becomes more about the bureaucrats running the system and the politicians looking to constantly make brownie points. This is why we have states like Texas looking to influence the rest of the countries schools through the textbooks used in classes. It is able to do this because it is the second largest purchasers of textbooks, next to California, and the Texas school board want to adjust what it calls a liberal bias.
