I was just reading a summary of the basic education vision in Finland for 2045, and I just feel it is too little too late.
The task of comprehensive schools is to increase competence and the willingness to use knowledge to advance the common good. Sound knowledge and basic skills are combined with ethical, social and flexible thinking skills, as well as the ability to guide one’s own learning.
Considering this is the vision for two decades down the track where they are finally starting to look at developing social skills for the common good and developing connection with parents, to build meaning, it should have really happened two decades ago. Instead of making the changes necessary to deal with the incursion of social media and the impact of the digital environment, they took a "wait and see" approach that leaned more into digital reliance, rather than handling what was the obvious outcome of an uncontrolled profit model that targets and influences behaviours, emotions, and creates a multitude of unrealistic expectations.
Of course, the argument is that it is the parents job to prepare children, and I agree. However, I also believe that "school" can bring a lot of value at the social level, where kids can get valuable experience and practice with human behaviour. It might not need to be a formal school of course, but with how much time we are spending alone in front of a screen and increasingly so, all opportunity to interact face to face should be embraced and leveraged.
Wellbeing should be the core focus of government activity, where innovation and industry are all geared toward delivering and improving wellbeing at all levels. Everything the government do, including incentives for business, should increase the demand on wellbeing delivery. We as consumers should be forcing wellbeing too.
But the thing is, that for many decades, we have been conditioned to believe that money equals wellbeing, that wealth is health at the societal level. And we have been happy to be brainwashed into this position, because it has meant that we as individuals can enjoy things that don't actually add to our own wellbeing as well. Rather than take responsibility for ourselves, we have pushed our health as a society to corporations who have zero interest in our health.
And unfortunately, while we can argue about government and corporations and individualism, the fact is that for any of us to truly be our best, we need others to improve also. We need to surround ourselves with quality. Quality food, quality information, and quality people. We need good people around us, ideally from before we are born, all the way through to our death. People who can support us, and people we are willing to support also.
Is the quality of the individual falling?
I believe so. Despite having the most information and tools at our disposal, we have overall degraded across so many of the aspects that bring us together. I know I have degraded personally, and it is far easier to keep the same trajectory than change course. And it is because of the ease of which we are able to avoid improving ourselves, especially in regard to our social selves, it sets up a huge challenge to overcome.
Complacency.
I think most of us have become complacent, which has increased the impact of the corporations even more, as we just go along with whatever marketing they push our way. Whatever makes our immediate experience more convenient has taken precedence, and this has affected every aspect of our lives, at every level, for everyone. Even as the numbers have showed the decline for years, rather than changing course, we instead doubled-down and kept right on going.
Changes in schooling won't do much, unless there are changes in every other aspect of our lives as well, where people start putting people at the top of the agenda, with the focus on improving wellbeing. We are not important in the grand scheme of the universe, but as a species, we are of utmost importance and need to start developing ourselves and our innovations to support the improvement of humanity. A tall order, that will likely amount to nothing, because it is much easier to do nothing, than what is needed to be done.
Just think about how hard it is to do the easy things you don't want to do, and then think how hard it will be for eight billion of us to do hard things we don't want to do.
Meaningless.
Taraz
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