What the Future Holds

Contrary to what the education lobby would like us to think -- the whole reason for education is to get people capable of learning on their own, so that they can do it all the time, whenever they need to -- without paying tuition to the keepers of the information, and creating endlessly more, high-paying jobs for education bureaucrats (controllers).

At least 50 years ago, real educators created "learning machines" so that students could drive (direct) their own learning, but the technology didn't exist to make that leap, because the machine couldn't learn from the student also -- which is now programmed into the instruction, and that's why it is more appropriate and effective, than the one-way transmission of information -- just as the old media publications also suffered from the one-way communications (propaganda). Now, people are used to interacting as co-creators in the learning/information exchange, which is the primary skill of learning in the 21st century.

All the specialized subjects were merely "tools" for this process of learning -- and not sacred information in themselves. Language is in fact, merely a tool -- but a primary tool for communication, just as math is a tool, for conducting rigorous and products experiments by which we hope to enrich our experiences and efforts -- and not just to parade our knowledge and superiority, for no other good purpose.

The future of health is also the same way. We won't continue to add more professionals to take care of more people but more people will have to take better care of themselves first, and then consult the experts when they are stymied -- and not as a first resort, because there are not unlimited resources, and never was.

In the new world and new age, people have to learn for themselves, and by themselves, what the future will be -- as they discover it. The "teachers" can only teach us the knowledge of the past -- but we have to individually discover the future that is not simply the repetition of the past. So learning has to take on this greater significance and effectiveness, and not simply repeat the ways that are failing, as though they could not learn from their own failings, because that is the most essential lesson in learning, and not simply repeating things as they've always been done before, no matter how predictably and reliably they fail.

That is not intelligence.