Education, Opportunity, and Happiness for All

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(This is a book I'm writing. Robdemanc asked me to post it.)

What is education and what is its purpose?

Most Americans say that education is what you get from a college or University and that it provides a good job. A job that pays enough so that they can buy all the things they will need to be happy; a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, a nice car, a motorcycle, maybe even a boat, and a sufficient investment portfolio so as to support a retirement lifestyle. This is the American Dream. Or is it? These days, many Americans think that the American Dream is about amassing material things and that it is these things that cause happiness. But I imagine that they don’t think about the massive amount of debt that one must take responsibility for while amassing their material things or the increased travel expenses caused by living in the suburbs, not to mention the added stress of experiencing traffic during the commute from the suburbs to the city. I don’t think that these things make anyone happy and studies confirm this. Those running the banks and oil companies are happy though.

So what is the American Dream really about? It is the ability for Americans to improve their own socioeconomic status; to have the opportunity for financial freedom so that they do not become debt slaves. It is about social mobility, the movement of people in a population from one social class or economic level to another. So the American Dream is about wealth, not debt. So why is it that most Americans think that buying a house, instead of renting, is an investment worth investing in? The argument I was given was that the real-estate asset offsets the mortgage debt and since the asset value appreciates at more than lets say 7% annually and the mortgage debt costs much less than that, then we’ll win big time. So why didn’t this work? Why were there so many foreclosures in the recent recession? Its because this argument is fallacious. Homes do not necessary appreciate. They can depreciate too. All one has to do is review a home value over time graph and notice the highs and lows while realizing that during the highs, we must not think that they will last forever because lows will soon come. And if you do not have a reserve of cash to pay the mortgage during the future lows, then you will be foreclosed upon. So much for your investment. Oh and now you are on the streets. I can only imagine how stressful this can be. I would rather keep my investments separate from my home. I can not lead a happy life knowing that my home can be taken away from me if my investments don’t do well. I want my home to be a sanctuary. We should not consider our homes to be investments.

So how do we realize the real American Dream? First lets look at this from a sky view; lets consider what opportunity was like throughout human history.

What was opportunity like throughout human history?

Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, explained that since the dawn of human civilization, thousands of years ago, the poor have had to struggle with a lack of social mobility. He points out that slowly over the ages, families that were wealthy continued to acquire more wealth and those that were poor were relatively much less successful at amassing wealth. Marx theorized that over time, all civilizations naturally go through phases; Tribalism, Feudalism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, Socialism, and finally Communism. He believed that the poor would be so discontent with their situation that they would eventually revolt resulting in the socialization of the resources necessary for mass production. In his era, the 19th century, the rich were called industrial elitists. He believed that Capitalism would lead to Socialism through revolution. And that in a socialist economy, since everyone had and took advantage of a strong opportunity to improve their socioeconomic status, over a long period of time they would become self-sufficient and would no longer need government to intervene in social matters. He theorized that people would slowly dismantle the government until their was absolutely no government left; that the people would govern themselves void of any government. It sounds like a dream but his theory is very accurate, although I do not agree that revolution is the answer nor do I agree that revolution is a requirement to release the stranglehold that the rich has on the poor. I believe that with the advent of the Information Revolution and the dramatically reduced capital requirements of manufacturing, we no longer ‘need’ oligarchs to provide jobs for us. I believe that we can produce them ourselves. But we are not there yet. We must first experience an Education Revolution; that is to say that we must bring the Information Revolution to every human being. I explore ideas to achieve such a goal in Chapter XX. So that sums up social mobility on an all-time and worldwide scale. But there was a blip on the graph, a sign of hope that occurred in early America. They were ranked first in social mobility among the world population. But today we rank tenth in the world. Why have we dropped behind 9 other developed countries?
Why has American dropped from 1st to 10th in social mobility?

In this modern society, in the richest country in the world, where it seems that anything is possible, why have we not figured out how to improve or at least maintain social mobility? Why are we going in the wrong direction? It is because we lost the culture knowledge that education is what produces opportunity and that opportunity causes happiness. Today our cultural knowledge is that the goal is materialism and that is what causes happiness. So we learn to get a good job. And we learn that to do that, we must get a degree from a good university. And to do that, we must get good grades in highschool classes and standardized tests. And to do that we must study ‘how’ to take tests and do the assigned homework. Notice that we are not taught ‘how to study.’ No one teaches us how to learn new material. No one teaches how to read with comprehension. They do a lot of practice but absolutely no instruction in the systematic process of learning to read and learning in general. Actually there are books that teach how to read and how to study, but they do not exist in the classroom. The class room is full of text books, none of which teach how to learn. So where are these books that teach how to learn? Well you can buy them at the bookstore and you can check them out from the library, but they do not exist in the classroom. This is very passive. It seems that none of our tax dollars go toward teaching our young the tools necessary to learn. But throughout this educative process, at least for those of us that are ‘lucky’ enough to go to college, we will have amassed huge amounts of debt that would take a sizable portions of our lifetimes to pay off; say 3 or 4 decades or so. So even our education has been capitalized. This is great for those running the banks and Universities though. They must be very happy. So what was it like in early America? In Chapter XX I explore the cultural knowledge of early America.

The atmosphere has changed dramatically since early America. The Universities have had to cope with classes of students that over time are increasingly less logical. The public school system is getting worse by decreasing standards. This in turn produces worse results and in turn the standards are decreased in order to pass enough students. This is a spiral effect. Spiral effects don’t end well. They end in catastrophe. How can the spiral effect be stopped? I explore this in Chapter XX.

Back to the American Dream, or rather the fake American Dream. It is about a house in the suburbs rather than education. And that is the point. It’s the lack of education that caused most Americans to continue to believe in the silliness of the fake American Dream. What was the fallacy in the real-estate argument? It assumed that real-estate appreciates at a constant rate. A livein house no longer sounds like a sound investment, does it? And when one considers the cons of living in an investment, such as maintenance and being more permanently grounded, having one more contract with one more corporation. Some people might think that this is anarchy talk so let me dispel this preemptively. Each contract that a person enters into comes with it rights and responsibilities. One has the right to enter into a contract with a lender to get a mortgage. This is the freedom that American’s enjoy. But they also have the responsibility of meeting all of the obligations as stated in the contract that the person neglected to read. But how could someone read it anyways? It isn’t understandable and even if it was, most people can’t very well comprehend what they read. How can a society function properly while most of its members are not able to read their own contracts? Sure they understand their rights to have things. But how can they understand the responsibilities that come with those rights? Thanks to President Barack Obama, we have the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. This helps solve the first obstacle of making transactions more transparent by enforcing that contracts be more understandable. What about the second obstacle?

Consumers still need to be able to read and understand their contracts. For this reason, its imperative that everyone acquire a sufficient education, one in which individuals would learn enough logic so that they could become productive members of society. They would learn the logic of being a member of society. This is the logic of sociology. Pedagogues call it citizenship education. They would have the knowledge that with rights come responsibilities. And that with those responsibilities come risks. They would understand how to evaluate risk. To be able estimate it. And how to weigh monetary things against non-monetary things such as the value of the flexibility that comes with renting and the bonus of having to pay little attention to maintaining a home.

Back to social mobility in today’s America. Lets consider the recent recession; a slump in opportunity.

What caused the recent recession and the resulting slump in opportunity?

Its clear that the recession was caused by shady practices by corporations; as in the rich. Our economic system seems setup for us to fail. And when we fail, they gain. And our government had to bail out the corporations using our tax dollars. But they are the rich. Why do they need our tax dollars to bail them out? And why were we not bailed out after the system derailed and foreclosures rose? Even Americans that did not get lulled into overstretching their finances were affected by the recession. These Americans, and also the Americans that did get shafted by these consumer financial plans that the rich invented for us, got no such bail out. But we need the bail out more than they do. So it seems that during recessions, our government socializes the corporations’ losses; this is what is called socialism. But during the corporation’s good years, they keep all their profits; this is what is called capitalism. The oligarchs want capitalism when times are good for them, and socialism when times are bad for them; and in both situations, we are the losers while they are the winners. But they can not have it both ways; we will not allow it.

But things don’t seem to be improving. Little has been enacted by congress that would serve to prevent such recessions in the future. Americans are not satisfied with the outcome. There is a problem and it has not yet been resolved. So why not? Aren’t our representatives supposed to be working on this? Aren’t they supposed to be ‘representing’ us? They don’t seem to be doing anything, at least not for us. They seem to be helping out the corporations plenty though. Why is that? They spend their time discussing fake issues that no Americans actually care about. Well… now Americans care about them. But that’s only because the media put it in their minds first. This is what is called propaganda. The ideas that they are implanting into us become part of our cultural knowledge so it is then passed on to each successive generation. And the propaganda is no longer needed to infuse these infectious ideas into our minds because society does it for us. That is until someone introduces an agent of change. What could stop these infectious ideas from infiltrating our children’s minds? How do we stop society from infecting our children’s minds? I explore these questions in Chapter XX. For now lets get back to the goal of education. Lets consider the real opportunity that education brings.

What real opportunity does education bring?

According to Professor Harry Brighouse in his book On Education, the goal of education is not material possessions. He argues that material possession does not deliver happiness and he presents much convincing evidence to prove it. He explains that the goal of education is human flourishing. He argues that human flourishing requires self-governance and economic participation. Lets consider both.

Self-governance seems like an oxymoron. Citizens elect a few of us to government positions and it is these few that govern the rest. So why would the rest need to self-govern? It is simple. How can the rest elect the few when the rest have no clue about what is going on in government, i.e. how the few govern the rest? We can’t. It is impossible. So how can this be alleviated? Professor Brighouse argues for instituting citizenship education in which all American’s learn the basics of governance so that the rest can hold the few accountable for their governance of the rest.

As for economic participation, don’t we already participate in our economy? Well we do but not in a libertarian way. Consider our public school system. Have you noticed that much of the education is centered around placing students into specific industries? Have you also noticed that most people’s jobs have very little to do with the knowledge gained during their educative years? As Professor Brighouse points out, the future of technology is what determines job opportunity across industries. An education system can not project what jobs will be required in the future. Why? Because no one knows what technologies will change the landscape of the future. So how exactly can an education provide opportunity for economic participation if we don’t know what the economy will be like in the future? The answer is very simple. An education must provide a person with the tools to learn knowledge so that when new jobs arise, that person can quickly learn how to perform the job. So what are these learning tools?

What are the learning tools necessary to have opportunity for human flourishing?

There are a lot of ideas about education so where do we start? The first question to consider is: Which theories have been the most successful? So how do we determine which theories have been the most successful? That is simple. Which theories produced the best minds in history like the greats of Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and early America?

Ancient Greece brought about the Socratic Method and Aristotle's’ 14 classic fallacies. With the Renaissance came The Enlightenment, as in Humanism and the Scientific Revolution. And early America brought with it not just education, but social mobility on a scale that had never been experienced in human history. So what did they all share in common? The Classical Education; the trivium and quadrivium. This is the education that the elites of the West have been giving their young since the middle ages. It was an education based on the classical principles created by the Ancient Greeks. So what are these principles? I refer you to Dorothy L Sayers, a school teacher, who in the 1950’s wrote an essay titled, ‘The Lost Tools of Learning’:



It helps to compare the classical system to our modern American system. The term ‘subject’ doesn’t even have the same meaning within the two systems. The study of logic doesn’t even exist in the modern system. The American system teaches the term logic but little about how to apply it. Logic is applied with in certain subjects but it is only taught in its very derivative form tweaked for those subjects. For example, Algebra and math in general is a type of logic, but are we taught how to apply that logic to anything else besides math problems? No. Why not? How can we apply the logic that we learn to every part of our lives if we were not taught to do so? We can not leave such things to chance, especially when we already have a system, as in the classical one, that doesn’t leave such things to chance.

Lets now compare the reading materials between the two systems. The modern system employs textbooks while classical employs the Great Books. The Great Books were written by the greatest of humankind, the greatest of role models like Socrates (actually Plato wrote Socrates’s work), Aristotle, Plato, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Ivan Pavlov, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, etc. So who writes text books for the modern system? Regular people. These are writers hired by those in control of text books; corporations. They are not great. They are not role models. The writing style and facts are directed by those corporations. Those corporations are owned by oligarchs. What do oligarchs want? More money and power. Whose concerns are they looking out for when they create textbooks? Ours or theirs? Obviously their own.

So why did we drop the classical system for this new inferior system? The process started about 20 years after the American Civil War with the introduction of forced public schooling. Who orchestrated that? The industrial elitists of the time such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. For more information, I refer you to The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto, a former New York State Teacher of the Year. I imagine that many American’s will be disgusted with the notion that I’m eluding to. In response to that, I’ll include a bit of biography about Mr. Gatto so as to provide credibility to him and this very upsetting notion. Mr. Gatto climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called "An Evening With John Taylor Gatto," which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries. In 1992, he was named Secretary of Education in the Libertarian Party Shadow Cabinet, and he has been included in Who's Who in America from 1996 on. In 1997, he was given the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for his contributions to the cause of liberty, and was named to the Board of Advisers of the National TV-Turnoff Week.

How exactly should people be educated following the classical principles of education?

I refer you to the methodology that I loosely followed at the late age of 33, The Well-Trained Mind; A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Jesse Wise and her daughter Susan Wise Bauer. I also refer you to my additional principles as a sort of piggyback onto their pedagogy and methodology, How the Mind Learns: A Theory of Knowledge Employing Philosophical and Symbolic Logic (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ztt ... t?hl=en_US).

Chapter XX: What did early Americans know about education?

Early America was a time and place in which American cultural knowledge included one very important fact: ‘Anyone could become a great person like George Washington or a Thomas Jefferson, or a Ben Franklin or a James Madison or an Isaac Newton. It just took a lot of hard work to train the mind with a great education, a Classical Education, as in the trivium and quadrivium.’

The vast majority of early Americans knew a good education was the key to unlocking the opportunity of becoming great. Hence our cultural knowledge included the fact that 'education causes opportunity.' And this just happens to be when social mobility was peaking in America. It was clear that a stronger education was the key to increased social mobility. So why are we now number 10 in social mobility? What did they know that we no longer know? Why don’t today’s Americans think that anyone can become a great person? What was the cultural agent of change that erased this piece of information from our culture knowledge? For the answers to these questions, I refer you to ‘The Underground History of American Education,’ by John Taylor Gatto. Mr. Gatto’s historical account is massive. One of his pieces of evidence was an excerpt from George Washington’s autobiography. George Washington failed math twice in school. Then he taught himself math by reading a book and then became a land surveyor, a job that requires much in the way of mathematics. He wanted to be able to speak articulately and elegantly so that he could hold his own against the European Gentry. So he created and implemented a learning method whereby he would read a great piece writing by one of the greats. Then he would write notes in his own words based on the piece. After a long time afterwards, so much so that he had forgotten the original piece, he would then attempt to rewrite the original piece based from his notes. Then he would check the original piece again in order to examine the differences between his version and the original. George Washington later became one of the greatest diplomacists of all time. He helped America gain diplomatic advantage while convincing each of the European powers to concede a bit. Reading George Washington’s excerpt made me realize that anyone can work hard and become a self-made genius, or rather lets just use the term great person; as in a person that accomplishes much and who is then studied by people all over the world for the rest of human history. How come our public school system did not teach us how to study this way? How come I wasn’t taught that George Washington was a self-made man? Read Mr. Gatto’s book.

How does one acquire a sufficient education to be able to function as a great person? What did these great people have in common? Most importantly, they were well-trained in logic. The classical education is grounded in the idea that a mind must learn logic. Why? Because once logic is learned, then methods are easier to learn. Why do we learn methods? Because once methods are learned, then situations are easier to manipulate even if one hasn’t learned the specific situations. Its best to illustrate this with an example. Consider that a father wants to teach his precious little girl to ‘stay away from the oven,’ and ‘stay away from the fireplace,’ and ‘don’t touch lighters.’ These are situations. These should not be taught this way. Instead they should be taught together with rules and logic. So he should say, ‘the oven is hot, so stay away from it because you could get burned,’ and ‘the fireplace is hot, so stay away from it because you could get burned,’ and ‘lighters make fire, and that’s hot, so stay away from them because you could get burned.’ Many people will say that young children don’t have a large enough vocabulary in order to understand such things. But that is not the point. The point is that they slowly learn it, bit by bit. Each time that I explain a situation with its accompanying rule and logic that govern that situation, they learn something this time that they didn’t learn the last time. While this isn’t measurable each time, it definitely is measurable over a longer period of lets say a week. How can a teacher measure what their students are learning? Well that’s easy. Listen to them. Pay attention to detail; argument structure, sentence structure, and vocabulary. Meena is not even 5 years old and she is a pretty good negotiator now. Occasionally she beats me and asks a question that I can’t answer. And so I have to give in. She’s beginning to ask Socratic questions.

Last edited by rombomb2 on 10 Dec 2011, 2:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

tl;dr

I'm sorry. I didn't want to do it. But I was asked personally to post it.

The main problem I see with the typical Great Books curriculum is that it takes only Western Great Books into account: Why discount Confucius's Analects, Ibn Al-Haytham's Book of Optics, Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays or the namesake Āryabhaṭīya? Why teach students just Latin and/or Greek; why not offer Sanskrit, Classical Chinese or Classical Arabic? The Great Books movement as it stands now seems unsuited for the modern world's cosmopolitanism.

I think you are correct to say that education is key to mobility and that material gain bringing happiness is a falacy. It sounds like you are trying to address the idea that the masses have been "dumbed down" in order to support those in power. It sounds controversial and I wonder if a publisher would be averse to taking it on. I don't know much about American education but in the UK it is pretty much as you describe it here. We are pushed through school like we are in a factory and little regard is given to individual abilities. Unless you are at an elite school like Eton and go to prep school or finishing school.

I like your writing by the way, it was easy to read and has lots of informal sentences, though you may edit at some point.

Is the book all about education? What is your overall aim with the work?

You are right that many programs and schools based on Classical Education focus too much on Western Great Books. But The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, (http://www.welltrainedmind.com/) does not do that. The authors clearly express that the Great Books include all cultures, not just Western.

And by the way, I have a little bit different approach. This is what I did. In Dec, 2010, I started reading The History of the World on wikipedia. I read and clicked and read and clicked until I reached present day. It took 3 days. I skimmed a lot. Especially the things I was familiar with. Then I started over and did it again. This time it took much longer and I bought a bunch of books and read them. I made sure to study the author before the book. This is what the Classical Education calls for. In this way, I was falling in love with the author before falling in love with the books. This was so effective for me. Its such a simple formula. But then something happened. Its hard to explain.

I couldn't read anymore. I couldn't watch my TV shows anymore or even pay attention to the people talking directly at me. I couldn't stop the thoughts racing in my head. I started to have sleeping problems and anxiety because of it. I couldn't sleep because my mind wouldn't turn off. I knew that I had to write my thoughts down, this is what I've read about before. Writing my thoughts would serve to take them out of my mind.

So I sat down to write. And something else happened. The epiphanies were coming so fast that I couldn't bare it. First I was extremely excited, then seconds later I was crying, then excited again, then crying again. This went on for short bursts for days. I was having 3, 4, and 5 hour long thought storms. I had to lock myself in my room so no one would see me. I was very very manic. My mom eventually found out cause she can easily read my face. She was worried about me. She saw her father be consumed with his thoughts so she was worried that this was happening to me. I tried to tell her that there was nothing to worry about.

Anyway, this is what fell out of my head.
How the mind learns: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zttc-vzxF_Ckx0i40R7v2FkXUZvjjQOQcCwF80Y_Vkw/edit?hl=en_US

Thank you. Yes it definitely needs editing and it needs more authoring and writing. I have much more that is only in brainstormed bullet point format.

The book will include my theory of knowledge (which also needs much work). The book will be about identifying all the barriers to education and exploring ways to overcome them. The barriers are many and across all fields so the book will be lengthy. The book will be free to the world. It'll be online of course. And I'll start a non-profit to spread the knowledge to even those people that can not spend $10 for a book and do not have computers or internet.

I fear that the book will take a long time before completing though. I'm being pulled in a million directions so I can't devote much time to this. Also I don't have the necessary writing skills to make it perfect. This book needs a good writer. Someone like the author of The Well-Trained Mind. Do you know anyone like that? Would that person be interested in writing or even co-authoring?

Your writing skills seem fine. I would say your main work will be structuring the book, you will need to arrange your arguments etc in such a way that is easy to follow. Have you been to university? The way they teach how to write essays will be useful and also to read a lot of what are regarded as brilliant essays to see how they are constructed. One that comes to mind is Darwins Origin of Species.

But also you need be aware of what your overall statement of the book should be and keep to it.

Yes I've been to university but that was 13 years ago and I studied Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biology. None of this helped me with writing. My writing ability only improved recently after reading great writers like Susan Wise Bauer (The Well-Trained Mind) and Harry Brighouse (On Education). I'll read Darwins Origin of Species as you suggested. I'm going to reread Einstein's Relativity again too as I've heard the same argument about that book.

And yes I do realize that the scope of the book that I'm intending might to too big. And that some of the topics that I've included probably should not be included in this book. But that is why I want someone to help me. I'm not a writer. I'm a knowledgeable guy who needed to take the thoughts out of his head. So I starting writing. And what I've written seems valuable so I decided that it should be published.

Thanks for you insight.

Everyone is a writer. You have written, and have made a start on a book so that makes you more of a writer than most. In order to make the work acceptable it will need some kind of proof read, and because its a non fiction you will need someone to review the things you say. I am writing fiction at the moment, so would not be able to help, only in a general sense of giving critical feedback. So I could do that as long as you don;t overload me with stuff.

What may be good is to work out an overall structure - what are you going to argue? Make yourself a terms of reference for the project to make sure you stick within scope. Then work out all the arguements you need to make, and anticipate the counter arguments.

Have you joined a forum for non fiction writers?

What you've just described is basically what we do when designing software. Perfect.

No I haven't joined any writer forums. Now I will. Thanks.