What’s the Big Idea?

When I used to go around campaigning, the most frequently asked question was what I thought could be done with the failing public education system -- that has not only been failing in Hawaii but everywhere else in the US -- for at least the last fifty years! The answer is very obviously not “More of the same, at twice the pay!”, as their mothers and fathers will advise, in order to be a dutiful child as well as elected official.

Public education in its present form has outlived its usefulness -- in its emphasis on the young who need it the most -- rather than graduating to the concept that it is even more valuable for the grownups. The young are always learning -- because they don’t know any better -- and thus are eager to find out.

The older people on the other hand, usually think they know everything, and so don’t want to learn anything new -- and that is the ignorant state of mind, that only will not learn anything new, but will impose the false upon the true.

The fact of the matter is, that most children enter schools already knowing how to operate computers and cell phones -- which are the basic instruments of accessing all the information in the world. It is the older minds, conditioned in a previous generation, that doesn’t want to learn these things, and are resistive to them -- even though they are the greatest beneficiaries of this new technologies, especially that of learning cutting edge new ideas -- that makes the extended life span a new lease on life.

Meanwhile, the traditional schools are passing on the academic tradition as though that was a value in itself, rather than that they should be educating people in living the real challenges of their lives -- instead of Latin and the other remnants of a classical education, which they think indicates high achievement and intelligence.

There is no time to learn all these things the contemporary teachers argue because their time is already overburdened teaching reading about dragons, princesses and other fictions -- rather than the more practical instructions on filing a tax return. “That would be a practical and vocational education not worthy of their high calling in life," they sniff.

One could not have high status, these teachers maintain, if one knew what everybody else did; no, they think it is more important still, that one display “high intelligence” in knowing what nobody else does, or cares to know -- except as an ostentatious show of this “brilliance.”

It is because maintaining this status quo and social hierarchy is much more important in the world of education than empowering its citizens to be able to think without the professional educators -- who still believe they are living in a world in which, they are still competing for the highest grades and the most pay -- as an indication of their worth.

The values have to be rethought and retaught -- in this greater understanding, from the oldest to the youngest -- and will never come to pass, if education is only for the young, because they don’t know any better.