The Collapse of Society

So many times growing up, I heard kids complain that the material we were learning in school was not “useful in real life.” At the time, I was doing well in school. I was receiving benefits from the system in place and increased self-esteem, so I saw reason to defend it.

I genuinely thought that the kids who were saying this were just being lazy. “Of course this information is useful,” I thought. “Why else would we learn it?” In the back of my mind, though, I was incredibly nervous.

“If this information is so important in the so-called ‘real world,’ I’m not going to be able to actually make it.” The reason why I came to this conclusion was because I could barely remember anything after I took an exam. And year after year, I would only remember a small fraction of the information I was supposed to remember the previous year.

I wondered if the same was true among my peers, but admitting this fact to others made me feel like I was admitting I was a fraud in some fundamental way. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I would fail in life anyways and there was no point in genuinely learning any of the material.

I stopped being fully present in my classes because the majority of them bored the hell out of me. And then I started memorizing vast amounts of information right before every exam, instead of trying to learn it deeply, only to let it completely leave my mind moments after I turned it in.

Because I got good grades, I still felt this responsibility to defend the system. Maybe it wasn’t until my grades started to slip in college that I understood the arguments my peers were making when I was younger. “Why am I really learning this information?” I wondered, “Is this useful in any tangible way or is it merely extraordinarily expensive busywork?”

Surely school had to be for something? Preparing kids for adulthood? But now that I’m out of it, I realize much of the information I learned in school is not only long forgotten, but the majority of it was useless anyway! We don’t learn skills that are useful to us in a survival sense. We merely learn how to be subservient, non-questioning employees who are expected to respect authority figures and live by arbitrary societal rules.

If, in order to survive, we need clean air, water, nutrients, shelter, and sleep, then why aren’t our education systems teaching us how to fulfill those needs? Why is there such an emphasis on history and math when our air is polluted, water is not evenly distrubuted, hundreds of millions of people are malnourished, homelessness is a pervasive problem, and overworking and over-stressing take away our ability to sleep soundly at night? Really, our current “core classes” are pretty extraneous in comparison. Surely survival skills should be the baseline of our education system.

Instead, we monetize these basic survival needs and that forms the basis of our economy. Wealthier areas have greater access to clean air, fresh water is a luxury, healthy food is restricted to those who can afford it, shelter is not guaranteed for everyone, and comfortable, safe, warm, and quiet places to sleep are more widely available in privileged areas.

Then we work jobs that maybe give us meaning, exchanging our time and energy for money and then our money for basic essentials. But if we didn’t monetize survival needs and taught people how to provide for themselves, we would not need to work so much to stay alive. There’s no reason why a third of our lives need to be spent at work.

Imagine how our lives could be different if we spent less time working. If kids only learned basic survival skills at school and then spent the rest of their childhood learning organically through hands-on exploration, perhaps they would actually absorb what they learned instead of immediately forgetting it. The education system as we know it could look completely different. And these changes would cause major ripples in other systems that structure our world as we currently know it.

This is not only important for humans, but also for the entire planet. We are focusing on the wrong information and destroying the environment, speeding up the rate of species extinction, and getting closer and closer to the downfall of our own civilization. If we hope to turn things around, it is vital for us to rethink the ways we think, the information we’re taught, and let go of what does not serve us.