BOWING TO THE LEAST
NOVEMBER 17, 2010. Don your robes, pick up your candles, and shuffle down the aisle of the new faith.
A central aspect of education has become one of serving the needs of children who only know they want to be entertained and catered to.
These are children who have taken on the appearance of miniature adults who sense that society has swung their way. Their nameless and faceless battle has been won.
They have achieved a status which has no relationship to achievement.
From the point of view of the adults, who need to justify and rationalize their capitulation, this is a “special generation.” These children have come into this world with astonishing wisdom. They are the prophets and deliverers of the future. They have been touched by a miracle the universe has granted.
Schools must be built that acknowledge that fact and make learning beautiful. After all, small gods will be sitting in the seats of rooms.
And if, by some error of judgment, the facilities are not up to the highest standards of comfort and accommodation, education will be stifled and set back.
Rather than delivering the substance and details of subjects, the schools should be technological temples devoted to the transmission, by osmosis, of the blooming fruits of the culture.
Perhaps I am exaggerating. But only because the ideal has not yet been reached.
How can a course be taught, if the textbook is old and a bit ragged—when, all around us, we have glossy cars and razor-thin laptops and little buds for the ears? Why would children so insulted want to learn?
If a point to be taught in a classroom requires that 30 or 40 examples be strained over by the students, four or five will do, because to push on further would be inelegant and tiring. The teacher would “lose” the students.
Somehow, a course needs to be instructed so that teacher and student can skip around from one interesting tidbit to another, never tempting the onset of dreaded boredom.
Education is there to serve the needs of the children. This simple formula must be understood and interpreted to mean that the impulses of the children come first, and through that mesh the teacher will navigate, assuming that the child is already brilliant and correctly instinctive.
If the teacher stumbles and fails, it is his fault. He transgressed. He violated the native intelligence of his pupils. He must retrace his steps and start again.
Not only in education, but throughout society, serving the needs of others is the prime directive. The only argument is about how this can best be accomplished.
The genius is the person who can anticipate all possible needs of others and take steps to fulfill them.
History is rewritten to prove that all innovators were working from a deep concern for the mass of humanity. They knew what the people required, and they enacted solutions. This was the only basis for invention and creation.
In that sense, the Collective was always the first and final goal—according to the revisionists. The individual creator was merely a carrier and an empty vessel. When he had been filled to the brim with understanding of the Collective’s needs, he leaped forward and gave humanity the next great breakthrough. His distinction was his emptiness. He had no personal desires. He had risen above that morbid level of living and thinking.
And now we have The Children. Civilization must bend to that collective will. It must gear its efforts to the inchoate needs of the purest among us. It must worship at that altar.
And if the worship is not learned well enough, then we can turn to the animals and trees and the rocks, and we can elevate that religion. We can find what we looking for in the substance of stones.
We can always dig deeper and discover a more fundamental illustration of the Collective and deny the individual in more massive and persuasive ways.
We stand at these gates. This is the promise we are buying and selling.
Intense and personal desire was always the flaw. Peace will only come when we have negated it to zero. Then we will finally be able to pass, back and forth, the coin of the new realm. A nothing that transcends all struggle. An amnesia that passes all understanding.
Children will stand at the front of society’s classrooms and explain this nothing in their ingenious ways.
Equality will have been reached. We will exist in a pleasant fog of an unending summer morning.
Like butterflies, we will flit three seconds here, three seconds there. We will occasionally feel the diffused sunlight reflecting from our wings.
JON RAPPOPORT
Jon is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults. To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com