We: Our Declaration of Interdependence
Chapter Two: Our Education
This is the second Chapter in the book, We: Our Declaration of Interdependence. Click to read the introduction to the book, or the 1st Chapter.
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. — Nelson Mandela
What is the role of public education in creating and sustaining a world of unity and cooperation?
A population with better education has less unemployment and reduced dependence on public assistance programs. Education reduces crime, improves public health, and fosters greater political and civic engagement. It is hard to imagine what our world would be like without public education’s contributions to human development and the tapestry of civil society.
Our world has grown increasingly complex. Only one in four CEOs of the largest multinational corporation believe their organizations’ leaders have the knowledge and capabilities to manage the current volatile, uncertain, ambiguous, and complex (VUCA) world.* The problem is not a lack of knowledge. Our public educational system was not designed for the VUCA world. Public education was developed during the Industrial Age to develop people who could successfully perform repetitive tasks. The emphasis was not on developing creative problem-solving skills.
How best to educate our children is one of the most divisive issues of our time. Teaching has always been political. Public education is a tool to shape a civil society. Public education has historically used a didactic style. The teacher gives lessons to students in the form of a lecture. Students listen and memorize the information. There is minimum interaction between the students and teachers. The students are not encouraged to form their own opinions and thoughts. Although most teachers strive to be neutral and teach the facts, bias is an inherent trait of didactic education.
As we shifted from the industrial to the information age, public education evolved and began to emphasize critical thinking and creative problem-solving. At the same time, more parents began to choose home-schooling or private schools. General support and funding for public schools also decreased.
Publicly funded and governed education is threatened, negatively impacting the primary goal of public education. We cannot experience the stability and power of a civil society without quality community-supported, citizen-governed, and publicly-funded education.
Current fights over our public schools, including fights about curriculum and the books that belong in the school library, are often arguments between us and them. We have strong opinions and little or no consensus. Our neglect of public education over the past generation contributed to our inability to address our wicked challenges.
Is it possible for a deeply divided society to create an unbiased educational system? We disagree about what is true. We have different values and beliefs. We live in a post-truth world or a world of misinformation.
Given the intensity of our social and political divisions, there is no consensus on what we should teach our youth. Neutrality or resistance to any change is a political choice that bolsters the current power structure while marginalizing and ignoring many students’ fears, interests, and concerns. We are diverse, and so are our children.
One of the primary objectives of public education has been to prepare people to do repetitive work. Public education was partly hierarchical because it was designed to shape minds to follow instructions or orders. The emphasis on standardized test scores was well-intentioned. However, it solidified a culture of right versus wrong thinking. Even multiple-choice tests narrow the options. There have been educational programs that encourage creative thinking, but funding for those has decreased over the past decade.
Although a small percentage of private schools provide excellent models of student-centered civil society-building education, most are reactionary efforts to indoctrinate students in authoritarian or religious dogmas. Often, private school curriculum encourages and supports civil divisions. Authoritarian religious education frequently employs scapegoating to intentionally teach students they are better than other people and, even worse, that other people are evil and destined to go to hell.
Didactic teaching supports power hierarchies; the teacher is more powerful than the student. Didactic teaching supports right versus wrong thinking. This core dualism thwarts the imagination and creativity of our children. It also explains the distress some parents experience when their children are didactically taught one version of history, especially when it is not the history they were taught; or the history does not accurately teach the experience of their ancestors.
A paradigm can be defined as a worldview or viewpoint of reality. Paradigms are complex frameworks of assumptions, values, practices, concepts, and rules that shape our thoughts and actions. Paradigms operate primarily out of our subconscious. When we educate our children, deeply rooted, primarily subconscious paradigms develop that influence their adult lives. Public education forms, shapes, and transforms paradigms.
We don’t have a shared public school system. We have public schools, private schools, and home-schooling. These educational systems contribute to deeply divided paradigms. We feel separate because our education and upbringing have shaped us with differing and competing paradigms. These paradigms drive our cognitive dissonance and other psychological self-defense mechanisms. When we are defended, we are not experiencing our WE. When we remain open, our paradigms can change quickly and dramatically.
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual, it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigms harder than they resist anything else. — Donella Meadows
The primary obstacle to addressing humanity’s existential or wicked challenges is our inability to collaborate with people with different subconscious paradigms. Paradigm pluralism in public education has the power to transform our world. Fostering a publicly funded educational system that promotes paradigm pluralism is the most effective lever to resolve our wicked challenges.
We need only look at changes in educational policy since the 1990s to understand how shifts in educational paradigms create social transformation. As our economic world shifted from the industrial to the information age, we started emphasizing S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education.
The acronym S.T.E.M. was coined in 2001, at the technology bubble’s peak. One of the benefits of the S.T.E.M. emphasis in public education was it involved students in more complex projects where they had more opportunities to apply their knowledge.
One of the challenges was the emphasis on S.T.E.M. education, which led to a neglect of other subjects, decreasing the emphasis on civics, history, music, arts, the humanities, social studies, and the natural sciences.
The increasing emphasis on S.T.E.M. also correlated with a rising gap between average compensation in the technical fields versus caring careers (teaching, childcare providers, caregivers, and social work). Since women have typically dominated these caring careers, the emphasis on S.T.E.M. partially explains our inability to decrease the lifetime earnings gap between women and men, even as more women entered the full-time workforce.
If men make more money than women, then patriarchy maintains power over women. Perhaps the emphasis on S.T.E.M. contributed to our increasing inability to understand and have compassion for other people. Maybe it even contributed to increasing military spending, especially given the impact of technology on our war strategies.
The emphasis on S.T.E.M. as the dominant educational paradigm fueled the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Ironically, Artificial Intelligence will likely reduce the need for S.T.E.M. workers even more dramatically than caring workers. The future educational paradigm must incorporate and celebrate our diversity.
Recently, educators have coined the term S.H.A.P.E. as an additional educational paradigm. S.H.A.P.E. refers to education that offers Social Studies, Humanities, and the Arts for People and the Environment/Economy. Combining S.H.A.P.E. plus S.T.E.M. is genuine educational pluralism, education with the power to overcome divisions and address real-world challenges. S.T.E.M. brought us the Age of Artificial Intelligence. S.H.A.P.E. plus S.T.E.M. will give us the power to use technology for the common good.
Educational pluralism acknowledges four principles.
- Quality education is a common good. It is valuable for individuals and the community.
- Education is not neutral. Children learn facts and information as they grow up, but their character also matures and develops. Education shapes our mental paradigms.
- Quality education must be accessible to all children and their families, not only the wealthy.
- Educational pluralism advances academic achievement (test scores, etc.) and develops a workforce capable of thinking outside harmful narrow or dualistic paradigms. It will create a workforce capable of addressing our wicked existential challenges.
A world where everyone knows we are all connected and our lives are interdependent needs an educational system that educates our children for the common good and honors our diversity. Children need to learn to appreciate differences in religious, cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds to overcome the harmful impacts of scapegoating.
A genuine appreciation of difference would result in fewer wars and mass shootings. Most of the world’s democracies (the U.K., Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, and many Canadian Provinces) already offer educational pluralism paired with robust regulations and a common core curriculum. We know publicly funded educational pluralism is possible and effective in building a civil society.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The book, We: Our Declaration of Interdependence, will initially be published on Medium. We are publishing as a free Medium publication, so please share a link on your social media accounts, and share it with family and friends.
Since we are writing about the forces that divide us, we understand that you may disagree with our perspective. You may even be offended. If so, please accept our apology.
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Writers are encouraged to submit essays to the Medium Publication We: Our Declaration of Interdependence. Articles should be written in the 4th Person or collective point of view. Avoid using I and me. Experiment with using We frequently. Please avoid divisive language.
