Philosophy of Education

Haiku of the Day:
lover of wisdom
in knowledge's well swim deep
waters becoming

Age and level are the demons of our pedagogy; no person ought ever be deemed too young or old regarding enlightenment. When we call education to a period of life, implying that one's learning is ever through, we deceive ourselves and destroy the capacity of our society to grow. This shows in consumer behavior as well as occupation, the majority limited as to what they know by those standards which are socially reinforced -- mandatory education, occupational specialization, and work experience, supplemented with a healthy dose of whatever the market will bear. As a result, competition for the highest quality at any price is mistakenly preferred to a universal baseline from which one can climb as life calls one to do so.

How we live our lives is dictated by the education system we have, when the education system we need should be dictated by how we live our lives. The days of training in a single field for a single profession are gone, as are the days of expecting a single wage earner to support a household. To repair this we need to build skills from an early age that are as applicable to life outside work as they are to basic job skills. We must also keep education in the lives of adults, making every working person more capable, not less, of filling today's new jobs than they were the year before. This is how we fill the good jobs with good people, put good workers with outdated skills back to their most gainful purpose, and guarantee that our children grow up atop, not beneath, the rising tide of global education.