Education is booming, isn’t it? All over the world. The illiterate masses are being educated, are becoming literate and the literate masses are being urged to become ‘more literate’, to get into ‘Higher Education’ , ‘Tertiary Education’ – go to College, go to University.
There’s apparently a wish by the government of Australia that 40% of school leavers will attend University.
But our Universities are unfunded, demoralised, devalued, lost, adrift….
No matter. The recent ‘bandwagon’ is Education and everyone is on it. Not Education as something we need to consider deeply and seriously and thoughtfully – something we need to decide upon the nature of and the content of in the interests of the nature and content of our whole reality, our whole society, our whole nation – no. No. Not Education like that.
But Education as a bandwagon. Education as a sausage machine. Education as a handy catchphrase. Education as a handy job maker and unemployed person soaker-upper.
As people become more and more devalued in our society this is attended by a commensurate need for people to obtain more and more ‘qualifications’, masquerading as ‘education’, in order to obtain work. And you need work in order to obtain money. And, of course, you need money in order to pay your life-long ‘rent’ for living space on our planet.
And in fact what as happening is that people are becoming less and less educated as ‘Education’ becomes more and more a necessary part of their lives.
They become more and more like indoctrinated, programmed, brainwashed sheep following orders and doing this, that and the other in order to pay their dues and continue their existence.
So where’s the upside of this horror story?
On the web.
All across the world the people now have access to instant information and an enquiring mind can enquire at the speed of light.
All over the world people without formal access to education are busy educating themselves.
They follow their whim, they follow their fancy, they pursue little trodden trails, they ask and have answered difficult and unpopular questions…. they discover things of all kinds… they develop their own ‘education’ which doesn’t have a name as a formal ‘subject’ or ‘area of expertise’.
Not that they couldnt do that if they wished and doubtless some of them do.
But the vast majority are ill disciplined (‘externally’ disciplined) in their studies and simply pursue where fancy takes them.
After sufficient time they are, shall we say ‘qualified’, they have ‘passed’ their own personal ‘course of study’ and are worthy of a ‘degree’ or ‘diploma’ or whatever formal recognition of what they’ve achieved.
Which they’ll never get, of course.
But what have they achieved? What was this ‘course of study’ they followed?
It was development of the self, development of the enquiring mind of an individual. It was self expression, self development. It was manifestation and nurture of the ‘self’.
In the round. Intellectually ‘in the round’ – unconstrained by artificial barriers of artificially defined ‘course content’ and ‘prerequisites’.
These people have responded to the information age and the 21st Century and its tools, its toys, its problems, its preoccupations, its dangers, its realities by collecting the information they saw as necessary for them to play their own part in all of this, for them to respond, to fit in all of this.
It is the people making the people into people.
It is not the privileged, the witch doctors, the self-styled ‘gurus’, the powerful vested interests, the fools, the charlatans directing the course of study of dumb sheep wishing only to have it all done with, finished, so’s they might ‘get out’ and begin earning money and enjoy status as ‘professional people’ or ‘qualified people’ or whatever….
It is not that. It is almost directly anti-that.
It is the creation of a new kind of person.
For the first time in the history of the world the unprivileged, the poorest, can enjoy more access to information and calculating power than was enjoyed by the genius of old.
The genius of old always followed their own line. It is they who manifested what education properly is: self study. You learn only by having a desire to learn.
Today’s mass learning, mass ‘education’, is force feeding pap into the mouths of dumb masses with no desire to know anything. It is not learning. It is not education. It is indoctrination or propaganda.
But the self-teaching individuals all over the world now are a return to the practices of the original geniuses here and there that brought about all the great advances, leaps of knowledge, understanding, methodology of the human race.
Where once there was a mere handful of hungry, capable enquiring minds able to find access to information and means with which to study and experiment – and thousands, maybe millions more who ‘withered’ on the vine from lack of opportunity – now there’s millions, millions who can find the opportunity via this wonderful tool, the personal computer and the web, which makes it all one vast computer.
And so the human race is leavening itself and bread is leavened from within by the presence of the burgeoning yeast cells so the human race is leavened from within by these burgeoning human cells growing themselves, feeding themselves, teaching themselves, penetrating without effort obscurantism, cant, hypocrisy, deceit, trickery, lies…. finding the truths and expounding the truths…..
Happening with blinding speed. So quickly. The World Wide Web, which stitched the world together had its humble first beginnings in 1990. From beginnings to the current situation in only 21 years.
21 years. Traditional (in the West) coming-of-age. Perhaps coincidentally this marks the time when the human race ‘comes of age’ and begins to be a coherent rational thinking organism for the first time, instead of a massive dumb organism variously exploited by parasitic organisms….
From this time on we can expect scientific insights – all kinds of insights – to come as it were spontaneously from out of the ‘mob’, from out of the WWW, from those self-taught and endlessly learning individuals and groups of individuals that have and are and will be self teaching and self realising and fully enjoying the miraculous possibilities of the web.
Truth will begin to appear. Truth.