Knowledge is wealth in its purest form, fully possessed by and inseparable from the individual. As noted in previous sections of this essay, the application of deliberately obtained knowledge to complex situations establishes the sovereignty of the individual. Variety is wealth insofar as it offers an array of options which may be combined in countless ways to confront the problems of living in the world. Variety in knowledge offers adaptability, and adaptability is the key to survival and prosperity at all levels. Ultimately, resilience, rooted in such flexibility, is the real meaning or value of wealth, of any kind.

Without the interaction among particles, among diverse forms, forces, materials and beings, nothing of the universe we know could exist. It is the collision, the mechanics, the action and reaction, the combination and differentiation among existent bodies that makes life, gravity, beauty, freedom and invention possible. Within the intelligent recourse to variety, there exists for humanity a maximum possibility for resilience in changing and adverse conditions. Inherent in this variety of choice is not only existence, but the possibility of freedom. Choice is not freedom as such, but together with intellect, offers us the possibility of really approaching it.

It could be said that all social ills are the direct result of insufficient communicative agreements between and among individual people and the constituents they represent, whatever the political structure within which those ills arise. It could be said that most political structures are the direct result of insufficient eloquence, having led to the use of force where it would otherwise not be suggested at all. In order to engage in dialogue, or in heated disagreement, we need to have an agreed semantic base, use shared measurements, make common assumptions about the world —we live on the Earth, it is round, it has a geological history, there were civilizations that pre-date our own, trees that shed their leaves in winter and those that don’t are categorically different—, so at least we know what concepts we agree or disagree over.

Culture, the vague and potent mix of ideas, traditions, changes, principles, language, will and expression, which defines all civil structures and to some degree all human communication, is an abstract category within which we conceptualize the intelligent diversity of a society. The more numerous the contributions, the more tolerant and open the means of administering and delivering cultural expressions of all sorts, the more knowledge there is available, the more possibility for new directions there is, the more resilient a system of human interaction within which those cultural expressions occur, will be. To benefit from such diverse inputs, from such productive oppositions, frictions and propositions, is to gain vital cultural and organizational resilience, to increase the wealth —as against decay— of a community, is to project its future potential as far as possible, in as many directions as possible.

Taking the ability to reason as the basis for a civilization’s deep resilience, we should emphasize reasoning and knowledge as wealth, as the bases for wealth in the life of every individual. Our education policy needs to work toward methods that do the most to stir the creative process of learning in the widest number of young people possible.

More from “Laze & Malaise in Mass Culture”

Part 1: With or Without Ideas
Part 2: Navigational Tools (Point of View)
Part 3: Fate, Victimization & Sovereignty
Part 4: Do we have an academic culture?
Part 5: Culture & Resilience: a Redefinition of Wealth

[from Cave Painting, at Casavaria]

The bases for sustainable economic and educational prosperity are: 1) informational freedom; 2) the ability to think critically; 3) an understanding of the distinction between truth and presented fact; 4) an ethical approach to knowing about others and otherness. Reason, the self-starting process of asking what we know and how we know it, must be the aim. If we aim only for testable results, we will limit students’ ability to help to make the world in an intelligent and vibrant way.

As Joseph says, getting this component of the educational process right is “to increase the wealth —as against decay— of a community, is to project its future potential as far as possible, in as many directions as possible.” How else can we build a just and sustainable future?

Education spending R.O.I.
Education funding is one of the highest-return forms of investment of public funds in the lives of ordinary people, helping to create great opportunities for economic improvement and ultimately generating significant increases in tax revenue for states and municipalities. The other side of this coin is that steep cuts to education spending have a downward spiral effect, often causing the most qualified and effective teachers, those whose experience is also needed to properly train the next generation of career educators, to retire. The effect is a rapid and exaggerated deterioration in the overall quality of education in the affected communities.

Community-building
Education is more than just wealth of character; it builds wealth in the community. Higher levels of education, not just in terms of the quality of local schools but the long-term opportunity for children emerging from a given community, and therefore of their families more broadly, tend to correlate to lower levels of crime, higher levels of earning potential and an expanded capacity to build assets and savings, all of which feed back into a virtuous loop of security and prosperity.

Reward Discipline, Expand Access
Standardized testing tends to work on the assumption that all minds represent the same knowledge in the same way. Though psychologists, cognitive scientists and educators, all know this to be false, the false assumption continues to dominate our thinking about student preparedness and performance. There is no particular intellectual faculty that is cultivated fully by a focus on test-taking, but cultivating a disciplined approach to study and learning, with a mind to the individual’s right to long-term preparedness for opportunity, adaptation and innovation, is necessary for today’s students to face the big challenges of life in the 21st century.

Great points Joseph,
Our education today is severely lacking. Our curriculum’s are created where in each grade you learn a little, don’t know why, but are told to learn up to a certain point, and then you get the rest in the next grade. It’s a linear style education which doesn’t offer students the environments or applicability needed to survive in today’s society. How many of us just studied enough to past the test? Why do we place so much emphasis on standardizing testing when not everyone tests the same. I was always an A / B student, but put a timed test in front of me and my scores didn’t show my true aptitude. Or that there is so much emphasis that teachers only teach to the tests and not the aspects of education that allow students to become well rounded and critical thinkers.

Our education needs to be more “progressive.” We need to start educating our students to be problem solvers and innovators. We can’t drive innovation or expect our students to be able to adapt to our ever evolvig society if we aren’t allowing our children and future leaders to understand how to explore and challenge the status quo. If technology is becoming such an integral part of our society, why is it that some schools don’t have computer labs? Research has shown that students that are introduced to and participate in arts are more well rounded and understand how to approach issues in versatile ways. But why is it that our country continues to remove art programs. They say its funding, but any real business person understands ROI, and that if you invest your money wisely you get that great return. So if we begin to really invest our resources in our youth / students they will be more than prepared to help keep our country on a competitive edge. Other countries do it, and have surpassed us in education rankings. They pay their teachers greatly to ready their future generations, they supply their students with the appropriate resources.

There are two visions of what education can provide, as a service: it can provide the opportunity for integral cultivation of the full human self, with the aim of yielding productive, conscientious citizens of a dynamic, free society; or, it can produce workers to take their place in a faceless workforce, where individual rights are subsumed in the thrust of the major forces that govern society.

For most of our history, we have understood the value of citizenship-focused education, a humanizing process whereby the individual is introduced to higher-order critical thinking and the ability to formulate and pursue knowledge in new and unique ways, but the trend toward standardization and processization of our educational system has shifted the focus away from the humanizing effects of education and toward the idea of an able workforce.

There was a time when this attitude was considered to be the misguided, dehumanizing domain of totalitarian states and Communist dictatorships, but bottom-line-obsessed corporate accounting model for education is yielding similar effects, with the caveat that the most affluent can escape the declining mainstream thinking and do better for themselves and their children.

A proposed way back to humanizing, democratic educational priorities, aimed at cultivating an awakened electorate:

1. Give no short shrift to any of the basics: language, art, athletics, music, math, science and history—Make sure everyone is able to find their forte and excel…

2. Cultivate critical thinking—Teach students to use their knowledge to apply their minds to creative problem solving and an understanding of what it is to challenge convention responsibly…

3. Don’t privilege quantification over qualification—Numbers don’t always tell the story; up-front costs can be deceiving: education spending has higher ROI than other public spending, but the bottom line has to be whether students are becoming better, more complete human beings, not whether the numbers used to evaluate the system tell us we have a more valuable workforce…

4. Honor the educators—Teaching is not an easy business; it takes years to really master the art, and the science of what works best evolves from year to year and from student to student. The teachers are the front-line change agents who do the hard work; honor their service.

Unless we do all of the above, we are not taking seriously the challenges and the complexity of the educational process as such. We can do far better than we are doing, but silver bullets fired by consulting firms are not the answer; the answer has to be on the ground, in the community, and sustained by funding that shows a solid, civilization-wide commitment to doing the best by our common humanity.