Road to Techno-Speak

Do you remember when people talked with each other? When they walked down the street and looked into faces and spoke? Do you remember when people cared about people problems and not just for self aggrandizement? Well, those days are just about gone and anyone who has any insight needn’t ask why. It begins at the beginning.

America sends its children off to school each morning with the hope that they will someday evolve into this well rounded human being. A human being that will not only be self sufficient, but hopefully make some meaningful contribution towards the welfare of humankind. If that’s the parent’s goal, then its best to keep them home.

Education today is not a human centered endeavor, therefore; when the mold is being shaped in schools it becomes truncated. I say this because post-secondary education has devolved into three basic categories. Math, Science and Special Education.

The “special interest” in society, mostly business interest, have decided that technology and capitalism are society's saviors. They feel the science of technology is needed to attempt to solve problems like global warming and environmental pollution that doing business has caused. Business also emphasizes science to try to curtail fears of disease and dying while pharmaceutical companies rake gigantic profits. Math is needed to maintain the ideals of capitalism and world-wide supremacy through the use of technology and its concomitant idea of progress. Society then needs the combination of the two to create weapons of mass destruction/control and also expand itself to places like Mars.

The third prong, special education, is for those children who had no particular interest in Math or Science. They usually find technology basically boring, unless it has entertainment value. They are the children that didn’t make the math-science cut in the early grades and tracked into a kind of social anonymity. They are mostly those “right brain” children, the ones who like to talk, have music jumping around in their heads and dream. A great many of the children “No Child Left Behind,” is leaving behind.

The marriage between academia and business with ideas of “world leadership” as its bride’s maid, creates a milieu of “societal darlings” that fit the capitalist script. Special Education children are left looking inside. With the nature of humans needing some type of recognition, not to mention financial rewards, in a society that creates anonymity, allows buying into the techno-scientific culture very easy. The focus, rewards, and accolades goes to those who can best memorized texts and regurgitate them hopefully with a different spin. Creativity in the realm of human development becomes obfuscated. People become limited in their desire to have eclectic “human-centered” conversations because they are programmed to indulge in and appreciate techno-speak. Interpersonal relationships are often carried out in the ambiguity of chat rooms and cyber space. One can even go to war or have sex while participating in the ultimate human degradations of killing or sexual objectification while on line.

As I mentioned earlier, anyone with insight needn’t ask why. However even with insight, I still ask why. I ask why parents send their children off to molding factories known as schools without understanding there total implications. I ask why parents can’t grasp that society is getting worst, and making the connection that creative human interactions through a varied curriculum are all but overlooked in schools in favor of the push for math and science geniuses. But given the rash of violence in schools, it seems that gun toting has become a substitute for creative interaction. Why can’t parents figure out that no matter how much math and science their children learn or become techno savvy, it is basically useless because education must be for the life’s amelioration, not its alienation.

Education should be well rounded to include and have equal appreciation in our society for the arts, legitimate open social sciences, cultural and physical education. Each must share a universal prestige placing math and science in the venue of students who have that aptitude and placing the arts, social sciences, cultural and physical education in the venue of students with those aptitudes. I believe this will also lessen the need for “special education” classes. I would further suspect that if society doesn’t abandon this very slippery slope towards almost total technological dependence, it will experience simultaneous human interpersonal erosion. I think American society or any society can’t afford such and should really examine its sacred cow education by starting at the beginning.