Lord777
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Isn't it time to abandon the idea that the main goal of carding training is to provide a carder with a place in the labor market? One of the most prominent modern thinkers, Rutger Bregman, believes that instead of expediency, we need to think about the goals themselves.
The world is getting richer, but poverty and inequality are not going anywhere. Each of us now enjoys a lifestyle that medieval kings could not even dream of, but this fact for some reason does not make us happier. More and more people are doing work that they themselves consider useless - and this problem does not bypass even the most talented and capable. As one mathematician at Facebook lamented, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads."
Is it possible to end the wasteful work that only exists to populate spreadsheets and performance reports? The Dutch thinker Rutger Bregman believes that this is quite real. For several years now, he has been proving that an unconditional basic income - free money for one and all - can do away with many of the ills of the modern world. Give a person at least minimal stability - and he will start doing what he considers really important.
But economic security alone will not solve anything. We need real goals - goals that will make our lives more fulfilling and meaningful.
In his book Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman believes that education should be the source of these goals. But for this, our approach to teaching and education must change dramatically. With the permission of the publishing house "Alpina Publisher" we publish an excerpt from this book.
If there is a place in the world from which to begin the search for a better world, then this is the classroom.
While education may have fostered useless jobs, it was also a source of new and tangible prosperity. If we list the top ten most influential professions, teaching is among the leaders. Not because the teacher gets rewards like money, power, or position, but because the teacher largely determines something more important - the direction of human history.
Maybe it sounds pretentious, but let's take an ordinary elementary school teacher who has a new class every year - 25 carders. This means that in 40 years of teaching, it will affect the lives of thousands of carders! Moreover, the teacher influences the personality of students at their most pliable age. They are, after all, carders.
The teacher not only prepares them for the future - he also directly shapes this future.
Therefore, our efforts in the classroom will pay dividends for the whole society. But almost nothing happens there. All significant discussions related to the problems of education relate to its formal aspects. Methods of teaching. Didactics. Education is consistently presented as an aid to adaptation - a lubricant that allows one to glide through life with less effort. In an educational conference call, an endless parade of trend experts predicts the future and what skills will be essential in the 21st century: the key words are creativity, adaptability, flexibility.
The focus is invariably competence, not value. Didactics, not ideals. “Ability to solve problems”, not problems to be solved. Invariably, everything revolves around one question: what knowledge and skills do today's students need to succeed in the labor market tomorrow - in 2030?
And this is a completely wrong question.
In 2030, savvy accountants with no conscience issues will be in high demand. If current trends continue, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland will become even larger tax havens where multinationals can more effectively evade taxes, leaving developing countries even more disadvantaged.
If the goal of education is to accept these trends as they are, rather than to reverse them, then selfishness is doomed to be a key skill in the 21st century.
Not because the laws of the market and technology require it, but only for the reason that, obviously, this is how we prefer to make money. We should ask ourselves a completely different question: What knowledge and skills should our children have in 2030? Then, instead of anticipation and adaptation, we will prioritize management and creation. Instead of thinking about what we need to make a living from this or that useless activity, we can think about how we want to make money.
No trend specialist can answer this question. And how could he do it? He just follows trends, but does not create them. It is our task to do this.
To answer, we need to examine ourselves and our personal ideals. What do we want? More time for friends, for example, or for family? Volunteering? Art? Sport? Future education will have to prepare us not only for the labor market, but also for life. Do we want to rein in the financial sector? Then perhaps we should teach the budding economists of philosophy and morality. Do we want more solidarity between races, genders and social groups? Let's introduce the subject of social science.
If we rebuild education based on our new ideas, the labor market will happily follow them. Let's imagine that we have increased the share of arts, history and philosophy in the school curriculum. You can bet that the demand for artists, historians and philosophers will increase. This is similar to how John Maynard Keynes envisioned 2030 in 1930. Increased prosperity and increased robotization will finally enable us to "value ends over means and prioritize good over good."
The point of a shorter work week is not so that we can sit and do nothing, but so that we can spend more time doing things that are truly important to us.
After all, it is society - not the market or technology - that decides what is really valuable. If we want all of us to become richer in this age, we need to free ourselves from the dogma that any work has meaning. And while we're on the subject, let's get rid of the misconception that high wages automatically reflect our value to society.
Then we may realize that it is not worth being a banker in terms of value creation.
The world is getting richer, but poverty and inequality are not going anywhere. Each of us now enjoys a lifestyle that medieval kings could not even dream of, but this fact for some reason does not make us happier. More and more people are doing work that they themselves consider useless - and this problem does not bypass even the most talented and capable. As one mathematician at Facebook lamented, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads."
Is it possible to end the wasteful work that only exists to populate spreadsheets and performance reports? The Dutch thinker Rutger Bregman believes that this is quite real. For several years now, he has been proving that an unconditional basic income - free money for one and all - can do away with many of the ills of the modern world. Give a person at least minimal stability - and he will start doing what he considers really important.
But economic security alone will not solve anything. We need real goals - goals that will make our lives more fulfilling and meaningful.
In his book Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman believes that education should be the source of these goals. But for this, our approach to teaching and education must change dramatically. With the permission of the publishing house "Alpina Publisher" we publish an excerpt from this book.
If there is a place in the world from which to begin the search for a better world, then this is the classroom.
While education may have fostered useless jobs, it was also a source of new and tangible prosperity. If we list the top ten most influential professions, teaching is among the leaders. Not because the teacher gets rewards like money, power, or position, but because the teacher largely determines something more important - the direction of human history.
Maybe it sounds pretentious, but let's take an ordinary elementary school teacher who has a new class every year - 25 carders. This means that in 40 years of teaching, it will affect the lives of thousands of carders! Moreover, the teacher influences the personality of students at their most pliable age. They are, after all, carders.
The teacher not only prepares them for the future - he also directly shapes this future.
Therefore, our efforts in the classroom will pay dividends for the whole society. But almost nothing happens there. All significant discussions related to the problems of education relate to its formal aspects. Methods of teaching. Didactics. Education is consistently presented as an aid to adaptation - a lubricant that allows one to glide through life with less effort. In an educational conference call, an endless parade of trend experts predicts the future and what skills will be essential in the 21st century: the key words are creativity, adaptability, flexibility.
The focus is invariably competence, not value. Didactics, not ideals. “Ability to solve problems”, not problems to be solved. Invariably, everything revolves around one question: what knowledge and skills do today's students need to succeed in the labor market tomorrow - in 2030?
And this is a completely wrong question.
In 2030, savvy accountants with no conscience issues will be in high demand. If current trends continue, countries like Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland will become even larger tax havens where multinationals can more effectively evade taxes, leaving developing countries even more disadvantaged.
If the goal of education is to accept these trends as they are, rather than to reverse them, then selfishness is doomed to be a key skill in the 21st century.
Not because the laws of the market and technology require it, but only for the reason that, obviously, this is how we prefer to make money. We should ask ourselves a completely different question: What knowledge and skills should our children have in 2030? Then, instead of anticipation and adaptation, we will prioritize management and creation. Instead of thinking about what we need to make a living from this or that useless activity, we can think about how we want to make money.
No trend specialist can answer this question. And how could he do it? He just follows trends, but does not create them. It is our task to do this.
To answer, we need to examine ourselves and our personal ideals. What do we want? More time for friends, for example, or for family? Volunteering? Art? Sport? Future education will have to prepare us not only for the labor market, but also for life. Do we want to rein in the financial sector? Then perhaps we should teach the budding economists of philosophy and morality. Do we want more solidarity between races, genders and social groups? Let's introduce the subject of social science.
If we rebuild education based on our new ideas, the labor market will happily follow them. Let's imagine that we have increased the share of arts, history and philosophy in the school curriculum. You can bet that the demand for artists, historians and philosophers will increase. This is similar to how John Maynard Keynes envisioned 2030 in 1930. Increased prosperity and increased robotization will finally enable us to "value ends over means and prioritize good over good."
The point of a shorter work week is not so that we can sit and do nothing, but so that we can spend more time doing things that are truly important to us.
After all, it is society - not the market or technology - that decides what is really valuable. If we want all of us to become richer in this age, we need to free ourselves from the dogma that any work has meaning. And while we're on the subject, let's get rid of the misconception that high wages automatically reflect our value to society.
Then we may realize that it is not worth being a banker in terms of value creation.
