Developing Society, Developing Humans
I’m interested in how we can develop both society, and it’s members. Enabling it’s members, and thus enabling society. Many people have been pointing at various methods and systems that can, and should be employed to help develop humans. Below are some recent quotes from various sources, from techofuture philosopher, Alvin Toffler, Peer Production/Creative Commons Yale Law Profession Yochai Benkler, Decentralist/Anarchists Greene and George, and Utilitarian John Stuart Mill.
Future Shock, published in the 1970’s looks at Education, stating
the present curriculum…is not based on any well thought out conception of contemporary human needs. Should students spend as much time as thy do learning French, or Spanish or German? Are the hours spent on English maximally useful? Should all children be required to study algebra? Might they not benefit more from studying probability? Logic? Computer programming? Philosophy? Aesthetics? Mass communications?
Anyone who thinks the present curriculum makes sense is invited to explain to an intelligent fourteen-year-old why algebra or French or any other subject is essential for him. Adult answers are almost always evasive. The reason is simple: the present curriculum is a mindless holdover from the past.
Why for example, must teaching be organized around such fixed disciplines as English, economic, mathematics or biology? Why not around stages of the human life cycle: a course on birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, career, retirement, death. Or around contemporary social problems? Or around significant technologies of the past and future? Or around countless other imaginable alternatives?
A video I found today is embedded below displaying the still failing system.
My education of the world began outside of formal Education. Formal Education, beyond the basics, is useless to most of the population. We teach them of the past, and then time stops. We don’t teach children about learning, or coping, or what the future may look like, we leave them in the past, considering our job done when they know v=u+at, or a^2=b^2+c^2. I see the purpose of abstract thinking, however, learning it in such a way is almost impossible to intergrate with social issues that require abstract thought, such as politics, law, or philosophy. All of which are far more practical to daily life, making human beings, giving them the gift of thought, which is essentially the aim of education.
We have huge flaws in our thinking about copyright, the patent system. The current systems not only restrict and delay innovation to the elite few, who then charge large sums, and re-churn slight modifications, these systems are also unjust. Innovation is driven at those who can afford to pay, rather than those who are in need. This is discussed at length in The Wealth of Networks, who’s author Yochai Benkler, eating his own dog food, published the book under creative commons.
A system that signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access to these innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay, over-represents welfare gains of the wealthy and under-represents welfare gains of the poor. Twenty thousand American teenagers can simply afford, and will be willing to pay, much more for acne medication than the more than a million Africans who die of malaria every year can afford to pay for a vaccine. A system that relies too heavily on proprietary models for managing information production and exchange is unjust because it is geared toward serving small welfare increases for people who can pay a lot for incremental improvements in welfare, and against providing large welfare increases for people who cannot pay for what they need.
A little bit more utopian/decentralist, the systems of capital and land which is explored initially through the concept of mutualism, then the inherent inequalities of property.
Greene said; Mutualism operated, by its very nature, to render political government, founded on arbitrary force, superfluous. It operates to decentralize political power, to transform the State by substituting self-government. In times of economic distress, mutual money would be a bulk-ward against inflation and deflation - citizens cannot fail disastrously, for the real property is always there, rooted in the ground.
Henry George looks at “When all land is free (as it was for “settlers” who had displaced the native nations), those acquiring land will take the best first. And most people will take more than they need - holding out some for “the future”. To hold land idle without using it, George pointed out, is to “withhold” it from others who need it. The site-value of land goes up in proportion to the industry and jobs available near it. In the same way, land site-value increases as public services are made available to the residents on it, eg., as churches, schools, libraries, streets, public services, and utilities are at hand.
George proposed a double-pronged solution; let the local government collect the rent of land to pay for all public services, and at the same time, remove all taxation from labor products, improvements (buildings, equipment etc,), sales and income. To collect land values for community use, and to remove taxes from buildings, would benefit farmers and homeowners, whose values in buildings, equipment, and capital are usually higher than in land values. It would encourage the use of land, instead of holding it idle. The use of land would move up to that yielding more that subsistence, and thus raise the general wage levels for everybody. Access to land would be without purchase price. Shortly poverty would be eliminated; liberty and freedom would advance.
There also appears, in several realms to be a far outdated mode of the methods to help combat poverty. Concepts of money based charity/aid, along with government handouts may make people feel good, and on the surface it may work, but it sets up a system of dependance. I’m unsure as how this has not been fully exposed in 2008. It’s mentioned by John Stuart Mills in the Subjection of Women, written in 1869.
that if what they need is given to them unearned, they cannot be compelled to earn it: that everybody cannot be taken care of by everybody, but there must be some motive to induce people to take care of themselves; and that to be helped-to help themselves, if they are physically capable of it, is the only charity which proves to be charity in the end.
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