Teachers and survival

Think about it. Civilization is always just one generation away from losing everything we have gained and falling back to the stone age. Fail for just one generation to pass on what we as humans have learned at such cost over the millennia and we lose almost everything. Even the books we might leave behind would be unintelligible to descendents who didn’t understand the complex context as well as the words.

Look at the African countries where war has disrupted the passing of cultural knowledge for a generation or two. Whole cultures are disappearing, and the children who are left (often abducted and forced to fight in one of the armies) are feral. It could happen to us too.

Could you, starting from scratch, make even the simplest, commonest thing on your desk? Could you make a paper clip, for example? Do you understand the metallurgy required to make the metal? Do you understand the geology required to find the ores, or the mining engineering required to mine them, or the chemical engineering required to smelt and refine them, or the mechanical engineering required to make the tools to draw the wire and bend it to shape, or the electrical or mechanical engineering required to provide the power for these processes? And how much more complex are antibiotics and automobiles and computers and radios and printing presses and electric generators and rubber and plastics and ……

Could you, starting from scratch and with no tractors, no iron tools, no oil-based fertilizers or pesticides, no fancy packaged seeds, grow and store and prepare enough food year in and year out for yourself and your family, summer and winter? Could you keep them warm and clothed just with what you could grow or hunt without a rifle or factory-made bow? Could you keep them healthy and nurse them back from illness just with what you can grow or find growing wild?

Our civilization’s infrastructure is now dependent upon tens or hundreds of thousands of specialties, each of which takes years to master. Fail to pass all those specialties on to the next generation and we promptly die back to small, ragged, starving bands lead by the nearest thug.

If we really thought about it, we would encourage our best and brightest people to teach the next generation, give them the best infrastructure support we can, pay them handsomely and accord them the highest status, because the future of our whole civilization depends on them.

At higher levels of education (college and beyond), we do this reasonably well. But for the very critical early years, up through high school, we entrust this vital task to underpaid, overworked people endlessly hassled by bureaucracy (No Child Left Behind), manipulated by unions, and used as pawns by politicians and school boards. And as a result something like half our high school graduates can’t even make change correctly or identify our country on a world map, let along master the more advanced skills needed to keep our civilization going.

Clearly we have our priorities wrong!!