Education and The Earth

When people talk about loving the planet, some of us immediately get a mental image of people hugging trees.  How reasonable is this?

Of course, most large trees have been around for years and years, even as individuals; in the east, a large maple, for example, probably has been alive for a minimum of fifteen years; possibly a quarter of a century; certainly they deserve respect, because they give us shelter, get carbon out of the atmosphere, and provide a spectacular show in the fall!  Nature lovers go crazy over rivers and woods; you can hardly complain about that.  Decades ago, Emerson and his friends went on and on about the beauty of unspoiled nature.

But loving the planet in the world we have now can't be all about a world without people.  I mean, face facts: there are a lot of people.  However, as you grow older, one begins to appreciate little things about people whom one doesn't even know.

Being a grumpy user of bookface--you know what I mean--I get posts from complete strangers: unknown people and pages and companies, and, of course bookface itself, (they do this so that its users spend more time on the site, so that ads can be shoved in their faces), and if you ever look at a funny cat video, well, you've gone and done it: you'll get at least one cat video a day.  But often there are clips and photos of people who say and do things that make you think that they're OK; that the planet is in fairly good hands.  (There are also clips and articles about people whose goals are good, whose hearts are essentially in the right place, but who try to express their anger in a variety of 'clever' ways, which are ultimately destructive.)

About thirty years ago,  in most colleges, students were taught things about the various parts of the US, and about foreign countries, which helped them to be able to relate to those countries, if they happened to be in the news, and to relate to foreign people, if they happened to meet them.  It is this population that, with great--inappropriate, I believe--idealism, set about to replace the word "foreign student" with the world "International student."  Think about that.  'Foreign' seems to me a perfectly serviceable word, with negative connotations only among the uneducated set.  (This is an example of so-called "PC" behavior, which has resulted in such amusing and pathetic neologisms as "policeperson, fireperson, serviceperson", and so on.  OK, I suppose that a woman who joins the local fire company probably resents being called a 'fireman,' but I'd like to have that confirmed; probably they don't.  The same goes with policeman.

We all know about the Taj Mahal, or the Great Wall of China, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or the Pyramids of Egypt.  We consider them our treasures, which is a good thing in some ways; if some foreign nation waltzes into China and sets about reducing their Great Wall to rubble, I absolutely believe that we should offer to head over there and help defend it.  It's our wall too.  However, if China itself decides to reduce its own wall to rubble, we're going to have to bite the bullet and let them do it (after sending over a strongly-worded expression of our disapproval).  All these wonderful things are ours only in a very limited sense.

Let's consider the problem with the Venezuelan elections.  (We're all beginning to see what a fragile thing national elections are; we can't just leave voting to the highly-motivated; we can't suck down any public expressions of sentiment about election candidates without checking them out carefully.)  When the administration thinks about Venezuela, are they making calculations about political advantage?  Do they know to what extent our covert operations have interfered with Venezuelan politics?  Are they aware how we have (like the Russian facebook agents have done to us, or even more crudely) interfered with Venezuelan political succession, and possibly contributed to the corruption of the supposedly socialist former prime minister (still hanging onto power)?  I do not know any definitive information about the situation, but the very possibility of taking advantage of Venezuelan oil reserves, with the resulting opportunity for a corrupt Venezuelan political leader to enjoy a lot of wealth from the US, can completely distort the balance of Venezuelan politics.  In the last analysis, Venezuelan citizens must take charge of their own destiny, and it is difficult to see how the US can poke their political balloon to the advantage of Venezuela as a nation.

It is the easiest thing in the world for unscrupulous foreign people to pretend to be Americans and spread false rumors about our Presidential candidates.  We have to make sure that those messages are originating on US soil with Americans, and that the statements they make are verified.  It is partly our own fault for being such suckers.  Is Bob Mueller going to investigate hundreds of Russians for spreading false rumors?  Sometimes I feel that, just because the FDA makes sure that there are no unhealthy oils in our processed foods, we too quickly believe that Twitter and Facebook are idiot-proof.  No, they're not, and we have the President to prove it.

Some time ago, I arrived at the belief that Education ultimately was designed to connect students with the World.

To be honest, I myself wasn't entirely convinced that this belief made sense, but I could not find any fault with it.  As we know, education at the college or university level has two aspects to it, and often these aspects overlap quite a lot: there is the expectation that the student will get an in-depth training in some field.  This is usually the major field of emphasis, or just The Major.  The second aspect is to convey a large number of pieces of information to the students, to make the World understandable to the student.  This is called General Education, and in the past, a lot of this was taught in high school, and even earlier.  Unfortunately, the youth of today are--many of them--highly resistant to education (I apologize for saying this), but the young people are unaware that this resistance is generally self-defeating; they will just have to learn this material later on somehow, and have the elementary material crowded in with other stuff, and as a result, they have to be taught the same material repeatedly.  That virtually ensures that the student will not take it seriously, because there is a subconscious expectation that it will be taught yet again!  This is similar to being taught long multiplication in third grade, and then being tested for it in fourth grade, and of course, they haven't learned it properly, so it is taught again in fourth grade; they're tested for it in fifth grade, diagnosed as deficient, taught the skill again . . .  By the time a kid gets to sixth grade, he or she will hate the very thought of long multiplication.  Actually, long multiplication isn't particularly difficult.

So, to summarize, a healthy view of the world at large is now not only a matter of creating a healthy, functioning citizen of oneself and one's offspring, it is a matter of being able to elect a suitable and competent political leader.  Many of the faults of the conservative elements in the government flow from not knowing their country well enough, not knowing their world well enough, not having gotten to know people well enough, except for the very few in their immediate circle.  When we accuse Donald Trump of being ignorant, he doesn't realize that we mean it literally.

As always, most young people will refuse to accept that they have such a moral burden on their backs when they go into College, already bending under the load of having four more years of school, which they see as attending gym class reluctantly, and resisting the onslaught of sex education, or whatever it is about school that they despised.  We can probably say goodbye to a functioning democracy if we leave such things entirely up to our kids.  Luckily for us, some kids actually are up to the challenge!

Arch