falling_jon

null[from the SG.Anarchy group forum. my thoughts, don't bite.]

I think that a major problem behind trying to put anarchy out to the public as a viable option, as a legitimate political and cultural backbone, lies in the ideals that back anarchy, in contrast to the inherit ideologies of our current educational system. Or maybe better put, some of our culture's inherit institutions are antithetical to the core concepts of legitimate anarchy.

Our current education system relies mostly on fact memorization, on "book smarts". Yes, at higher levels, cognitive ability and critical thinking are much more important, but for most of high school and probably a lot of college, this memorization of "established facts" is the dominant way of "eduacting" our young.

When it comes down to it, that type of education is counterproductive to the ideals of anarchism. The very act of accepting established concepts and "history" as we know it is an intellectual compromise to an existing "authority". We literally call our learned professionals the "authority on a subject"; it's right in front of us.

However, it's obvious that, in many cases, these established "facts" are not only created, but perpetuated and governed by those who have the most to gain from creating an education system of "establishment" in the first place. Kids grow up learning about how the injuns and pilgrims were all happy and helped each other at Thanksgiving... and it's not until college that people actually start hearing about the real history of colonization, Columbus, the "Indian Wars", etc... and even then, if you're not in the right major, you might NEVER hear about it. The US' relations with indigenous nations is a HUGE part of our history, from the first European settlers all the way until the present day, TODAY, and yet the majority of the population only hears the white-washed half-ass version as told in Kindergarten, the white-bread 100% healthy "Approved" version of that history. And they never have to think about it again (if they ever "thought" about it in the first place).

So there's the big problem... the very system that should be empowering us, our eduactional system, is antithetical to the ideals of anarchism.

So how does this get solved?

Us, or the passage of time.

As information and information technology continue to exponentially develop, education will rely less on number-by-number memorization of "established facts" and book smarts, and more on the management, critique, and analysis of information. Learning the hard facts verbatim will take a back seat to the skill necessary to process that information, and along with that shift in education's focus will come a reliance on critical thinking, the number-one weapon for those who really wants to throw off the ephemeral shackles of "authority".

Once critical thinking becomes a main priority in public education, and acceptance of "established scholarly bullshit" gets pushed to the back of the class, the concepts behind anarchism will be much more available to the average Joe Q on an intellectual level, since his own upbringing won't be 20 years of indoctrination into the mental slavery that is the concept of "authority".

This process of gradual educational revolution is already in the process of happening, as a subconscious reaction to the growing influence of technology and information technology in our culture.