Education is always outdated.
Schools teach the knowledge of the past. Society evolves by gathering those furthest behind, and thus, it takes time for it to articulate something truly new. What was taught two thousand years ago, a thousand years ago, and now are entirely different. What would we choose from the education of those times for today? Perhaps a little from the philosophers, a little from the poets. But with today’s mindset.
Education is like old soil; it should be provided in a way that allows reconstruction.
We teach children the past.
What we do in education is to give them words, and words belong to the past. We cannot teach the future, but we can prepare them for it by involving them in daily issues and real life. Can we teach them the meaning of life, how to invent, or create masterpieces? Certainly not. A constructivist education that enables them to shape themselves is essential. For this, we used metaphors like the ancient bow and arrow, then toy blocks. Now we can use clay as a metaphor. We give them clay from the past, shaped in a way they can sculpt and mold to build the future.
Everything changes, but education and societal institutions lag behind.
The world has progressed a little further; even the sun has moved slightly toward the center of the galaxy. The galaxy itself isn’t static. The knowledge and practices of the past have passed. However, societal institutions are so strong that their adaptation takes time. Their strength weakens their future. Many political, religious, and familial institutions face the threat of extinction for this reason. Institutions begin to update themselves when they are weakened and in pain, but when they cling to excuses and live in the past, they disappear.
We update institutions by updating ourselves.
Isaac Newton gifted us with a mechanics that allows us to predict physical movements, overshadowing all prophets and seers. Just as he predicted objects, we try to predict people. While objects leave behind objects, we leave behind other people. To achieve this, we write about how we influence others. If we correct ourselves and choose our interests wisely, humanity is corrected. If we surround ourselves and our environment with the right perspective, right behavior, and right thought, the world changes.
Small daily discomforts eliminate great troubles in life.
We often find constant concern too burdensome and settle for simple answers to ease ourselves. We take pride in being on one side of the political spectrum, belonging to a religion, or possessing a certain character trait. We can unequivocally say this is wrong because the rest of the world says otherwise. These simple choices unknowingly make us suffer. However, if we avoid clinging to easy answers and adopt an attitude of questioning and finding the middle ground in every debate, we can avoid a dark life. Human eyes are conceptual inquiries; to see with the mind, one must use their intellect at all times.
We live in an era where arrows can be redirected after being shot.
Education, religion, and politics are like arrows drawn by different hands. Yet, humanity itself draws independent arrows, and through reforms, these arrows can be aligned onto the right path. Stray arrows often belong to groups that have fallen into simple answers and failed to use their intellect. Simple answers are only found in mousetraps; they kill, and if they don’t kill, they torment. Here, we are speaking of formal education, not learning or personal development.
At a minimum, education should involve questioning concepts.
Propositional knowledge is now accessible everywhere. The knowledge of being human, however, is about transitioning from societal brainwashing to individuality. This inevitably means constructing new structures with the same codes. A simple and effective method is to ask in every classroom and setting which simple answers we have fallen into — in other words, to identify our fundamental errors concerning humanity. Nothing is as simple as it seems.
