Print

---

----- Original Message -----

Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 3:24 AM

Subject: Re: Saving the Planet

Hi Nick,
Good point made about the university system. However there is something even more important that needs to be addressed and that is the very essence of education itself. It has become very apparent in my lifetime that the way we are educated is not to encourage our abilities to rationally debate or assess situations or issues but instead to merely do a job. We are effectively educated to fit a work demand situation. So we are educated according to demand from the employers. In all we are not educated to question or challenge, merely to do what we are told without questioning it. This is so very wrong and I firmly believe we have lost the ability to differentiate between what constitutes a reasonable and worthwhile life. Especially when all around us the planet is being trashed for profit by the 1% who educate us into believing that we must have economic growth or we will all die. Yeah right. I'll remember that when there's nothing left to eat except a heap of paper money. Get my point? There is more to life than profit, profit, profit. Economic growth is a fallacy designed to enslave the majority of people for the benefit of the 1%.

Another aspect which is also of major concern is the way in which the education system is being hijacked by the self same corporations. They have effectively used it to brainwash the children from the very early age 5 years old) into believing that say for instance synthetic biology or GM is safe and the only way forward for the human race. Now I don't really give a damn if you or anyone else on the crisis forum thinks it is the way to go because I sure as hell do not and for very sound scientific reasons. But to brainwash the children even before they can properly read and write is sick. It is also very, very sinister. There is no other way to describe this behaviour. The children need to develop their own opinions (which falls neatly into my previous point about not being merely educated to fill the particular job niche of the day).

As a child grows up and develops knowledge it also develops a sense of self and a sense of understanding based entirely upon its immediate environment. I understand the environment to be wherever we happen to be at any given moment in time and space and it includes all the things, both animate and inanimate that we see, hear, feel, smell or touch or are touched by. These things shape our view of the world. The education system as you rightly point out is a part of that process but sadly they have gone down the road of corporate sponsorship at virtually every level so much so that the end product of educated people are merely educated tools to do the corporations bidding without question. The problem is they are attacking the education system before the children can even hold an opinion of their own and therefore they are having their individualities stolen by the corporations (and the government is colluding in this process) and a standardised identity imprinted into the mind of the children instead. One that suits the agenda of the corporation and not the future of the child.

Personally the entire issue of corporate greed is the driving mechanism for the planets continued destruction. In simplistic terms we are being educated to merely carry out orders with the carrot on the stick being whatever we are educated (through advertising and propaganda of the press and media) to accept as our just and rightful rewards without question. We are encouraged to join in with the act of environmental destruction by developing a craving for all these wonderful little trinkets as if our lives would not be complete without them hence economic growth and environmental destruction.

What worries me is are there enough of us left who have seen the Emperor in the flesh, and who can now turn the failed state of affairs around or are we going to find ourselves so severely outnumbered as to be merely cast as modern day witches fit only for hanging and burning (hypothetically speaking)? Its one thing to know what the problem is but its an entirely different ball game when it comes to changing the game plan when the major players are the very powerful and influential individuals who have everything to lose by changing. Think clean energy v fossil fuels and you get an idea. Solar PV is not being promoted because it would put the energy companies out of business and we don't want that now do we children? And no one is being educated to work that out for themselves. Its a sad old world we live in.

Hope that makes sense?
Regards
Kev C

'The first of all Earthly Blessings........Independence' Edward Gibbon

On 19/06/2012 13:43, Nicholas Maxwell wrote:

                                   George Monbiot published a very good, despairing article in The Guardian today, here in the UK, lamenting the all-but inevitable failure of the earth summit in Rio to do what needs to be done.  All we have is hope, he concludes, and it is hope that is the rope from which we all hang.

 

                                    Here is my response, dashed off as a letter to The Guardian, which they may, or may not publish.

 

In his despairing call for a change in the system to save the planet (It's make or break in Rio just like they told us in 1992), George Monbiot once again overlooks the one institution that, crucially, must be changed.  It is the university.  Our only hope of saving the planet and creating a wiser world is to do so democratically.  But that, in turn, requires that electorates, the people of the world, have a good understanding of what our global problems are, and what we need to do about them.  That in turn requires that our institutions of learning are rationally designed and devoted to helping humanity learn what our problems are, and what we need to do about them.  Dramatically and disastrously, they are not.  Universities at present betray both reason and humanity.  They seek to acquire knowledge, and do not give absolute priority to our problems of living, and what we need to do to solve them.  And the mere provision of knowledge and technological know-how can actually intensify our global problems.  They make modern industry and agriculture possible, which in turn have led to global warming, destruction of natural habitats and extinction of species, lethal modern warfare, population growth, and the other global problems we suffer from.

 

As a matter of urgency, we need to bring about a revolution in our schools and universities so that the basic task becomes to help us learn how we can change what needs to be changed in the system so that we begin to make progress to as wise, good a world as possible.

 

                     Best wishes,

 

                              Nick Maxwell

Emeritus Reader, University College London

Website: www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk
Publications online: http://philpapers.org/profile/17092