Are the People Getting Too Smart?

It used to be that people believed everything the “experts” told them to believe -- but in this new age of unlimited information sources, and not just those who can afford to buy all the “professionals,” there isn’t enough money to buy off everybody, who may be even better-informed because of a compelling personal interest. Most problems are not solved by dispassionate and disinterested professionals -- but people with a personal stake in the outcome, which needn’t make that interest and success necessarily bad or invalid.

I think that is one of the grave errors in information processing that has become a crisis ready to turn the page on the old notion that information was something only “objective” people could do -- so we have those who have never invested a single penny of and on their own, proclaiming to be the experts on investing and finance -- because they’ve never risked anything of their own, but had read all the books in the safety and security of a tenured position that absolved them of any requirement to learn anything from actual experience!

Society produced too many of these instant experts -- with gaudy credentials and certificates as proof that they knew something -- when they only knew how to fool everybody else into thinking that they did. That was the distinction between “professional” schools from classic “academia,” before those distinctions got blurred -- and success in the profession, overrode and even derided concerns about truth. What one was taught at professional schools, was how to act like every other professional -- and not independence of thought, which is the categorical imperative of a student worthy of the name, which every great teacher must always be.

But somewhere along the line, the vocation of student was no longer the job description of the teacher -- but was regarded as that which the teacher graduated from -- which makes them worthless as teachers. For the only thing one can truly teach, is how to learn -- and those who are no longer students, but think they never need to learn anything anymore to fool anybody else, is the reason their students have learned not to learn. Yet this is mostly what our education systems produce -- teachers no longer capable of learning anything themselves. That is what children are for -- to learn all those things they don’t want to learn themselves, and to past that tradition on to every succeeding (failing) generation.

That is perpetually the crisis of education. Education has meaning, purpose and power if it can teach even the oldest -- to learn, to change, to adapt. If it doesn’t have that power, than what good is it even among the young? -- who really, are born into the state-of-the-art information -- and must be coerced and compelled to learn all that is no longer valid and true, as history, culture and “correctness,” that in time, will become increasingly political and arbitrary.

Thus it becomes more important to learn how things used to be, have been, and always must be -- than to discover what is possible and true right now, as though everything that is no longer true, never existed as fact. What it is important to discover are the facts right now, and not to have opinions about “facts,” that might never have been true at all, but just widely taught.

That should be no excuse for why there is no time to teach the relevant and urgent.