One of the most critical pieces of our collective ‘experiment’ of having the citizens of the country, rule the country, and to ensure its continuation, is to make sure the citizens are knowledgeable enough to make reasonably good decisions. This of course requires an educated populous, or so our founders believed. Various culture and countries certainly believe in education, but it was usually limited to the wealthy, religious, but not the general population. There was a minimal need to know many things, especially if you had no power about how the country was being run. That was left to the King, of course.
At the time of our country’s founding, public education in England was a relatively new concept only having started in the mid 1700’s. It is important to realize that the founders viewed this as a critical component of self-governance. Since our country was founded from a revolution against England, and England had just begun public education, it is natural that they would see public education not only reasonable, but, in fact essential for a country embarking on the unknown ‘experiment’ of self-governance. Thus, they concluded educating the citizens to be of paramount importance for this new form of government to succeed.
There are, in the statement above, two essential ideas that have to be understood for this concept to produce positive results.
What does “making sure the citizens are knowledgeable enough” mean?
What does “make reasonably good decisions” mean?
Let take the first question, first.
How does one become knowledgeable enough? To ‘know’ something, has a variety of meanings in the dictionary, but we will focus on “to have understanding of”. The biggest issue with knowing something, is that, in today’s world this implies certainty, as if what one knows is an indisputable fact. All one has to do is remind ourselves of times we were certain of some issue, only to find out later that we didn’t possess other ‘facts’, and that had we known them, we’d come to a different conclusion. Sound familiar? We’ve all done it, if we’re honest. Of course, it is difficult to admit it when we are wrong.
So, if we are honest, when we say we ‘know’ something, what we really mean in an everyday practical use of the term to “know” something, is to be highly likely we are correct, based on the facts we have at hand and how we think about them, to come to a reasonable conclusion in the time we allow ourselves to make our decisions. We are inundated every day with situations, that in one way or another, demand decisions from us. Researchers have estimated that the average person makes 35,000 decisions each day! That translates into us making a decision in less than every 2 seconds during our waking hours. We haven’t the time to ponder each one ad infinitum.
So, we conclude that what we ‘know’ is limited to the information we have available to us at the time of our decision. We do not have the time to know something for certain. If we are honest, we admit that we, in most cases, decide by being ‘pretty sure’.
The point here is that even to be ‘pretty sure’ we need to know how to think through issues and decisions that we have to make. Not the easy ones, like how to spell a certain word or its meaning, or that 2+2=4 (each of which allow us to communicate rapidly), but the difficult ones, should parents decide what is taught in school or should the education professionals make that decision?
This is what education is supposed to be teaching our youth today, how to think through a problem, not to regurgitate only one answer. Unfortunately, it appears to be failing this responsibility. The easiest example is the recent proclamation by a young high school student that Martin Luther King. Jr. freed the slaves. How is it possible in this day and age that someone could get that historical fact so obviously wrong?
The second question was how does one make reasonably good decisions.
Functioning maturing human beings possess at least both emotion and logic. If you observe people, you might notice that, unfortunately, many people make their decisions emotionally and then rationalize their decision to make it comfortably fit into their world view.
A simple example of this is when we become fixated on acquiring something that we believe will make us happy, but perhaps is outside our current means to acquire it. New clothes, a new electronic gadget, a new car, the list is endless. Our emotional choice to acquire it will likely motivate us to conjure up ways to adjust our current life style thus allowing us to make the purchase. “I’ll give up buying soda for a couple of months”. Many times, our decisions are driven by our emotions first and we only use logic to rationalize our already-made emotional decision.
Our emotions frequently tend to defy the natural logic and make us ignore the practical consequences of those decisions. Sometimes that is okay, but an experienced and honest person will admit, that the consequences of making emotional decisions, especially based on negative emotions, mostly end up bad for us.
Most of us come into this world with a fully operational set of emotional abilities. The first one we use is that ‘cry’, telling our mothers we need something. What we don’t come fully equipped with is the accumulated (and sometimes updated) knowledge of all of our predecessors. Most of us learn this knowledge in school. Acquiring this knowledge is critical to maintain our ability to think through our decisions and not only rely on our emotions to make them for us. As our society continues down the path of more technology, based on the logical laws of physics and bio-medical science, so far found and yet to be discovered, it is critical that our schools teach our students to understand their emotions and to not become victimized by their uncomfortable ones. They need to learn how to think for themselves, and not program them with only one thing to think.
Teaching students how to think and not what to think, is how we preserve the continued success of the greatest experiment of self-governance in the history of the world.