Understanding Education

All parents worry about their children.
They worry that they will be safe now and in the future.
They worry what kind of job they may get.
They worry how well they learn in school, to secure their future.
What parents little grasp is that school is not there for their child.

Teachers are of all kinds, some loving, some worrying about their students, some unhappy in their
life, some stressed by the working conditions they have. Teachers are human, but they are employed
within a system that controls how effective they may be. This system was not created for all children to learn equally. It was created for two purposes.

The first purpose is to instill within children a sense of discipline, so they will conform to the legal
laws and moral codes of their society when they become working citizens, and so maintain a
working harmony by which the society can only function.

Underneath this lies the second purpose of school. This purpose defines the whole operation of the
school, although few today think of it or see how it works. This purpose has itself two purposes.
Firstly, it is to create two quality of citizens. Ones who will manage the others, with these others to
be complaint to this management. We may think in terms of managers and managed. Secondly, to
vary the competence of students to match the predicted work needs of the society.

After all, since different jobs require workers to vary in their competence, society does not want of
school that it produces students who are either very clever or the opposite. Society wants clever
students to do clever jobs and less clever students to handle simpler jobs, and yet as citizens for all
to be relatively happy being neither too complacent or troublesome.

To satisfy this requirement of society, certain conditions are placed on teachers in their operation
ensuring their students little fully understand the learning that is required of them. Through
strategies in society and within education, school is able to produce a variation of ability, we might
say confusion in the minds of students, about what information is, how it should be handled and
how it should be projected. It is by the later that assessment is made, which is much related to the
language ability of the student. This in itself has social connotations.

The way that school has always achieved this wide variation in ability is to not teach children in
school how to think or how to reason, but to judge them by the skills in these they have acquired
through outside influences.

Traditionally, this was the family background. By this means children from better educated parents
were better prepared to play the game of school and generally more able to obtain higher marks. By
this, and through the better wealth of their parents, they move to the university. In the university,
these future citizens are taught how to reason and how to think, so they may better handle the
greater responsibility society will give to them.

Those students who, for whatever reason, do not obtain a university place and move from school to
college or direct to work do not gain this education in their higher reason. By this means, as it is
designed, these future citizens are generally more compliant and less fractious to the management
of their lives in society and in employment.

Such are the purposes of school and how it is arranged to work. Children are simply processed as
they always have been and so how civilization enables its existence. However, there is now a new
design being imposed upon civilization that we have no control over. This design is emerging
through the development of artificial intelligence. It is a design that sees humans of being less
required in the operation of the society, for too many jobs will be taken over by machines.

We used to hear of 50% of jobs being lost, but as developments in AI continue, predictions now see
far more jobs being lost. Some speculate as much as 90%.

While this will create many headaches for society, in how to keep people mentally occupied and
satisfied with their life so they will maintain a sense of cooperation and harmony, we are caused to
realise that the purpose of school will be forced to change. No longer will children be taught in
subjects related to later work functions, because there will be too little work. Subjects must change
to developing a mind knowing how to create harmony and responsibility to the society first and the
self second.

For the past 40 years, Roy Andersen has been writing and lecturing about all of the above. This has
been his life purpose.