The World Built In the Last 150 Years Is Broken

The world we have built in the last 150 years is broken. We have made great advances but, in doing so we have lost the meaning in our lives and we created an education system that does not serve the students but industries that want workers. Now, as workers are being replaced by machines people panic because our education system failed to teach us how to live. Instead of bringing out people’s creativity, we have raised people to believe their purpose is to work for someone else’s creativity and this was a lie. [This is part 2 of Awaken the Lions!]

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Before we go on I need to say that I must reduce my posts to twice a week. I will post on Tuesday and Friday. I must do this because much as I would like to spend all my time with you I cannot. My wife’s disability was refused and I must expend effort to find a way to work at home, tutoring online so that we can make up for her lost income while we appeal – she cannot work and I am disabled so I am limited in what I can do. I can, however, still think – and teach. I was hoping that SabersEdge might help do that but, at present, I have only one Patreon supporter and that doesn’t even pay for the monthly expense of the website let alone justify my full-time work studying, writing, and finishing my blog posts. Depending on how much my other work takes out of me will dictate how much effort I can continue to spend here. However, I WILL continue because this is my passion and I feel called to sound not only an alarm but offer a solution to our current crisis. I just will not be able to write as often until some other source of income presents itself. I am sure ya’ll understand. These are trying times. So, Tuesday and Friday – I will endeavor to have posts up by 2:30 a.m. – Daniel Saber

Before we discuss solutions we must understand the problem and the problem is endemic to the way our society thinks and educates, the 1^st World restructured its education system on a factory production model about a hundred and fifty years ago. We compartment knowledge, as we compartment production in assembly lines, and we have created many technological wonders this way but we have also paid a cost and created technological and ecological disasters. There is a saying that describes our obsession with specialized knowledge:

Public education is, too often, about making us good factory workers. Sheep to be sheared by the system. Jesus once said, “The law was made for man, man was not made for the law.” Yet our education was not made to serve us it was made to serve our industrial system. Education was not always this way. It used to be about awakening the potential in each child.

“There have always been schools. People have always been able to seek out education. What we are talking about is the growth of mass public education…I mean education systems initiated by central governments..” [a product of the last 150 years or so to serve the industrial revolution with a labor force.] “The [Education] system was organized a bit on the principles of mass production, people were selected for certain routes…at certain points they were selected so some kids go this way and some go that way. Some were selected as more fit for manual work while others were seen to have a certain spark that might indicate academic work…you were divided into sheep and goats. A few people went on to university as a consequence. So, the organizational principle was very similar to mass production systems. It was based on standardization, conformity, and selection and it was also geared to selecting a particular type of commodity with a particular sort of product at the far end. So what you had evolving over that period was a kind of pyramid. There was a broad base of people who were doing.. who were being educated to a certain level of basic numeracy and literacy. There was a group slightly higher than that who would go on to administrative work and certain sorts of managerial type jobs and then a group that would be educated to take on these higher leadership roles. And the system was composed in that image…and like any system of mass industrial production, it was predicated on generating a fair amount of waste materials because not everybody was suited to the task that they being groomed for, and so they went to one side. And I think it was at that point we invented the whole idea of educational disability…Its one of the reasons why we need to move away from some idea of standardizaiton and conformity and recognize that individual achievement, individual values, individual potential in lives are as various as the people we’re talking about. Education has to become individualized. And if you standardize it your bound to create a catastrophe for some people that would be avoidable if you saw them as individuals.”

Sir Ken Robinson PhD – Author & Education Expert – Interview on Gaia – From Domestication to Transformation

This started in the late 19^th century. Instead of the one-room school houses, or small universities with gifted school-masters where more advanced students could help the less advanced and thus not only facilitate learning but also themselves learn both mentoring and community responsibility in the process. But now we segregate people by age and minimize social interaction. Churches have done this too in Sunday school. Yet modern studies, thru millions of dollars of expense, demonstrated that people learn best as they live, inter-generationally with the younger learning from their elders. Every society but our modern one uses this inter-generational and mentoring model to maximize individual development. Instead, we now endeavor to standardize, regulate, dictate, and confound creativity and individual expression to achieve conformity and obedience producing an assembly line mediocrity in our schools. Before the industrial age, such individualized attention educated our world and every generation produced its geniuses. Educators taught people to think and to develop a coherent worldview that created success in life and the teachers my children remember, the ones I remember, still do this. The ones who spoke to us, taught through thought-provoking questions, and interacted are the ones I remember the most.

Studies have shown that people with a coherent worldview are more purpose-driven and flexible in their approach to problems and life’s situations and they achieve success. They are the lions among the sheep while those whose education emphasized, structure, order, conformity, standardization, and testing are fragile and appear to have trouble thinking for themselves. The majority of humanity will follow along and do what they are told is right. They “go along to get along” rather than think for themselves. But on some campuses, it is worse than others with unthinking mobs attacking those who dare to have an independent thought. While lions think for themselves and act upon truth and not propaganda they are hated by the jackals and feared by the sheep.

The Lions are the ones who have broken free and made it, not because of the system, but despite it. (For instance Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, and Bill Gates – none of them completed college – but (whatever we may think of their views) they “made” it – Bill Gates started Apple Computers in his Garage and other Western “success” stories, including Elon Musk, defied our system and expectations excelling not because of our education system but despite it. Our education system, like all factory systems, produces mediocrity while individual artisans produced works of art. SabersEdge.Online is about training up young lions for the future and through Patreon I hoped to have the more individualized contact people need to excel. To excel and become the lions we need but who our society has tried to make into sheep. Lions who know deep down inside that something is dreadfully wrong in our world today. Lions who know they were made for something more.

Educators once understood that thinking and endeavored to bring out the creative and productive individual that rests in all of us. The goal of education was to develop it and not teach things. Too many teachers, schools, and Federal Programs have focused on things and are producing sheep who cannot think for themselves and remember nothing from their education because it did not really teach.

I remember substituting in High School many years ago. It was an English Class and I had a minor in English that included studies in Old English (that is the language of Anglo-Saxon England that is more akin to German than modern English.) When I got to the class I had a folder of worksheets to pass out. I thought, “Ah, the teacher, not knowing who would be the substitute gathered these so that anyone could just pass them out and not have to worry about following a lesson plan.” But I passed them out and noticed a distinct lack of interest in the class. “Do you want to do your worksheets or would you rather talk about where our language came from?” That was the beginning of a class where I talked about the origins of English and how languages change over time. How there is continuity in the change and all things are related to what has come before. They aren’t just random rules that someone made up. After class, a cloud of students came up and said, “Our teacher just passes out worksheets, grades them, and hands them back. We learned more today than we have all year.” I found that profoundly sad. But I was to learn that it was not an isolated problem. Our current public school system may have been a good concept but its implementation has created in these poor victims/students an ignorance that endangers our whole society. This is a problem that would not have developed if we had not standardized our errors throughout the nation, and all of the Western Civilization for that matter. Such a system is not education. But if it is not education what is it?

Let me tell you a story I learned from Sir Ken Robinson:

Many years ago a wonderful woman who was a child in elementary school was identified as learning disabled because she couldn’t conform. She was in constant trouble. She didn’t pay attention, she fidgeted, and got up and wandered around. Finally, they contacted the mother and said “Gillian has a learning disability and you should take her to a specialist.” The mother was devastated but dutifully took her child to a specialist who got to know Gillian as an individual. All the while as he talked with her and her mother he was watching Gillian who was sitting on her hands and fidgeting, trying to stay out of trouble. The specialist then got up and brought the mother out of the room and said, Gillian, I need to talk to your mother privately for a moment. He brought the parent out of the room and as they left he turned on the radio. There was a one-way mirror. He and her mother watched and, with the adults gone, the minute they were out of the room she was on her feet moving to the music. The child danced all around the room, on the couch, on the tables, all over, because she had been sitting still for too long. He said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t disabled, she’s a dancer. Get her into a dance school.” She then went to the Royal Academy of Dance, and Gillian later said that when she walked into the room she couldn’t believe it, “It was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still.” This girl couldn’t think sitting still, she thought by moving. Indeed our whole species is designed to be active but we have created a society where everyone is sedentary. We sit at home, we sit at school, we sit at work, and we sit traveling from place to place. This has never occurred in human society and we are suffering for denying our biology. Nowadays our schools advise medication to suppress the dancer and human in us. Had they done that to Gillian we would have lost a brilliant mind. Had they done that then we never would have had the brilliant dancer who traveled the world with the Royal Ballet, who then went on to form the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and who made millions in Hollywood and ultimately choreographed “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera” on Broadway. It’s perfectly reasonable to feel that today she would be told to sit down, sit still, and take this medication and not only her, but all of society would have lost a brilliant dancer to conformity, standardization, and medication.

That has been our societies reaction to too many active minds and active people (it was the reaction the Lincoln Public Schools had to my son and why I homeschooled him – they wanted me to drug him so he would sit still. I taught him to think and had another friend say to me. “You have a remarkable son, he is a joy to talk to. So many young people today can’t really carry on a conversation. He has an active intellect and sharp mind.” – Yet the school insisted he had ADHD and needed to be drugged. He didn’t need to be drugged. He needed to be challenged.

If you don’t fit in in our society, if you cannot find meaning and purpose in its meaningless consumerism, instead of changing the society or questioning our norms you are advised to take pills to crush your soul, smother your creativity, and suppress who you are so you can sit comfortably in your box and not rock the boat. Almost as if acknowledging “You will never excel or be the person God intended you to be but you will fit in the box we have for you.” Baaaaaaa, stay in your pen, don’t try to roar you might scare the sheep.

“I feel this for an awful lot of people, that if you stereotype people against a very narrow view of ability, then you automatically generate a very big conception of inability and, at worst, a disability. A lot of what goes on in our school systems is not the result of legislation. It’s the result of habit and ritual. There is nothing anywhere really, in most of our systems that require that we educate kids by age group. We just do it because we think we have to. But we don’t. And outside the schools, we wouldn’t think of doing that…communities are inter-generational. We don’t have to divide the day into subjects. We just do. There are lots of grade schools that don’t do that and have wonderful success as a result. Creativity is one of the defining characteristics of our species. It’s one of the things about us that makes us human. We create the lives that we live through the possibilities we see and opportunities we take or the ones we step away from by discovering talent and the passion and the purpose that goes with it. That’s what the Gillian Lynne story is about. Creativity, in other words, isn’t some exotic byproduct that happens to be present in a few people. We’ve come to think of it that way. But it’s not true. Creativity is the pulse of human life. We live in a city that wasn’t here 150 years ago like this. This is being created by the interplay of millions of minds working together, collaborating, we are all of us now based in the great net of the world wide web and all of its works. This is new to our generation. Creativity is what contributes to the nature of our humanity. We can use it or we can misuse it. So, to me saying that education should cultivate children’s creative capacities isn’t kind of an appeal to have some extra hour of free play-based activities on a Friday afternoon, though I think we should have free play-based activities on a Friday afternoon. It’s to recognize that there is a set of capacities here, which isn’t separate from, but it’s integrated with everything else that we do.”

Sir Ken Robinson PhD – Author & Education Expert – Interview on Gaia – From Domestication to Transformation

Progress in education is about recognizing the Life-Truths that humans determined centuries ago. Truths that have stood the test of time in human societies. Modern society thought it was beyond these truths. They have been called many things but whether you call them life-truths, natural laws, or life-laws, they regulate the entire universe, the animal kingdom (of which we are a part,) and have characterized human society for millennia. Yet we, in our hubris, act as if a couple of hundred years of Enlightenment invalidated thousands of years of civilization and millions of years of evolution. Rather than learning to bring out the greatest parts of our nature we suppress the parts that limit our usefulness to the mega-corporations. While Jesus said that man was not made for the law but the law was made for man; we have attempted to reconstruct man to fit into an industrial world that wants to limit our humanity to being nothing but a commodity or a resource. Instead, we must preserve those truths that have weathered the test of time, adapt them to our own time and situation and build a future so that new generations don’t have to bumble around and start from scratch and so that we don’t suppress the best parts of upcoming generations denying not only them but all the world of the gifts they possess.

Only by recognizing the potential that rests in every one of us, and realizing that potential, can our society reach its potential. For this reason, we must recognize that open play, recess, and activity are as essential to education as STEM or the 3 r’s because we are corporal creatures. Our bodies were designed to move and be active. Our education system today is literally in-human; denying the basics of human biology and the life truths that used to be acknowledged by teachers and taught in our readings and societal stories. All these have been cut out by modern, highly educated fools, that considered them useless. I remember an account of American teachers going to Sweden and looking at their grade schools and middle schools and asking “How can you get anything taught with all the time you spend on recess?” The Swedish teachers were surprised because theirs was not such a human-denying system, “How can you teach anything without it?” Our society is at war with human nature on nearly every level and any society that fights against the Natural Laws and Life-Truths that have characterized human existence for millennia will eventually be destroyed by its own obstinance and error. Indeed we are approaching such a day of reckoning.

But, again, we must close today. Next time we will look at a solution to this mess. If parents and the Lions in education are brave enough to rebuild what was broken.