Despite the fact that the title of this thread
Universities and colleges, how would the right make them less "liberal"?
was really nothing more than and POV editorial disguised as a question, this thread is one of the more entertaining and thought provoking threads of the week.
The question of what to do about education is, of course, a social science issue.
So in order to address questions of what and how ought we to teach our children, we first need to ask ourselves
1. What will society probably need our children to know?
2. What do we want our society to look like?
So naturally, depending on what we think this society ought to be, our answers are going to be very different.
Anachronism's rather diciplined and heartless POV seems to me to be reducing humanity to something approaching an ant colony. It is, I think denial of what it really means to be human.
But his suggestion, that when he becomes redundant,
he will kill himself, is at least consistent with his POV about society.
Ants will kill themselves for the greater good in a way most people won't.
The GREATER PROBLEM, as I see it, is that the social contract we currently live under, a contract which manifests in our economic systems, our forms of governance, our educational systems, legals systems etc, are not in line with the meteoric changes that result from our techological advances.
This disconnect between social sciences and hard sciences has been the case since the industrial revolution.
And while we have managed to accomodate ourselves to the pace of tecnological change over the last 150 years, the pace of change now is SO RAPID that it is truly leaving most of us (and certainly most of our children) berift of a meaningful PLACE in society. (this in part explains why we are so materialistic and yet so unhappy, BTW -- something the hippies were TRYING to tell us in the 1960s)
In 40 years most of us will NOT be economically viable. That's a FACT, jack.
Now our masters can either create a smooth glidepath for this change or they can create one crises after the other (using both the invisible hand of market and war) to deal with the population redundancy problem.
If they use the value systems of the last 500 years to deal with our growing problems, then of course, we can expect that we will be in a constant state of WAR and economic crises.
The bottom line is that this WORLD does not have the resources for 7-10 billion people living the lives that most of the American middle class of my generation EXPECTED and that much of the developng world would like to emmulate.
And technology is NOT going to solve that problem.
Our technologically advancing society coupled with our 15th century economic systeemn, is, if anything CREATING or at least EXACERBATING this manifesting problem.
AGAIN I suggest to those of you who have bothered to read these musings of mine to read a book written in the 1930s about precisely
this problem.
At War with the NEWTS
by Karel Čapek
(the man who coined the term ROBOT, folks)
The
dog eat dog capitalistic economic system we have now (which worked
so well in the advancement of humankind in last 500 years) is not going to
work well for the masses in the techological/robotic society we are creating.
My complaint here is NOT about capitalism, it's about PLANNING for a future where our social contract no longer makes ANY sense.
And we are on the CUSP of that problem RIGHT NOW.
This economic crises we have RIGHT NOW is a small
but telling manifestation of the problem that I'm talking about.
