Education - Are We OK

Woke up this morning, thinking of what is wrong with me and then extending it beyond myself and see what is wrong with this world.

There is a lot online about how current education has 'worsened' and much of this tend to do the easy blame game, some degenerated into political comments. These are often of no help and in fact may deteriorate the situation. Here is my take on this and I hope it will be limited to this post. Too much noise on this.

First, the current education system is inherited from past policies, good and bad. Second, education goes beyond the classroom and the education syatem is very much an open system subject to external influences. Focusing on the first and ignoring the second will make us continue with the same mistakes. There is so much filth online accessible to anyone and external prohibitive measures often do not work. Have we been able to educate ourselves and our kids to guard ourselves against external negatve influences. We all have seen acts of bullying, violence, sexual abuse online and some are proud to exhibit them online (no shame or fear?). Remember the four letter word that has been adopted as part of vocabulary of many to express disgust, surprise or even feeling cool about it? Such expressions would have made Steve Rogers say 'Language'. For muslims, we know that we should not use such foul language but somehow the wider community has normalised it (even a political leader of superpower country uses it publicly). Are we okay with it? Take this further in the age of AI and there are already talks of sexbots, erotica agents acting to your whims (listen to this to know on their existence - mentioned in the podcast about Grok's naughty agent - and how we are making our brains to evolve). On the larger scale, are we ok with the current g*n*cide in the Middle East available for everyone to watch (note that embarrassingly I even have the fear of spelling some words in full, why?). Even on the abstract level, are we ok with the idea of truth being malleable according to each own's world views?

Some treat education as a monolith and expect a single stroke of solution (policy or whatever) to make education right. In reality, we all understand the multidimensional aspects of education and yet we are entertaining comments that are unidimensional. At this stage, I have always maintained that teaching and learning are creative processes but what happens now, we tend to make them as an algorithmic process, often introducing bureaucratic processes along the way, adding workload to the teaching and learning agents, positively or negatively. Are we ok with monolithical instructions with the risk of stifling creativity and not to mention lessening the passion of agents in the teaching and learning processes? I tend to see many plans and strategies were made within an engineering framework (see remark later about Snowden's complex system approach). But there are many aspects to education for any single person or body to handle; there are too many aspects being entangled - our colonial past, our cultural values, our social engineering experiments, external technological incursions, all giving rise to our present state of society. That is why I'm more interested in diffusion processes as used by Snowden (see this for example) and consider dispositional states and adjacent possibilities within the Sensemaking and Cynefin frameworks. This is more action-oriented and perhaps fall outside the formal classroom system to be considered as a possible solution. I remember mentioning about Snowden's approach and a junior colleague said that it would not work here. Maybe so, but how can we proceed then? We think we know what we want (do we really) but yet we do not know how to get there.

I'm a retiree now and my actionable sphere is limited. As such, the actional sphere (burden) falls upon the younger generations in order to better our educational system. I'll shut up now. Will resume taking gabapentin (see here) perhaps to dull my senses, growing old as I'm supposed to.

Learning with my three-legged cat, the companion of an old person.