EPA insight
On NPR today I heard a piece about the Environmental Protection Agency and the future-looking new head of the department. He said that he sees a future where the EPA is less and less needed because humans will have learned how to use non toxic chemicals and chemicals mimicking natural compounds. He's even going so far as pushing for EPA's own scientists to come up with their own chemistry solutions to our cess pool of a system.
This got me relating this approach to education. What if teacher's were incentivised to take educational solutions into their own hands?
I take a further look at this approach. I think teachers, along with open source communities, co-op business through the lens of the internet, we can take educational solutions into our own hands. This approach gives me great hope. In the last 6 years, I have been routinely stupified by the beauracracy that runs our education system. To top it off, I am now seeing that the way we train teachers to work in our schools has it's own set of problems, disjointed from the education system itself.
I am going to become a credentialed teacher. That is, a publicly accepted member of the teaching community(I think I already am). I just think it is going to be in a whole new way than any solutions either bureaucracy-ladened system can dish up to save how we educate our youth.
The thing that makes me certain that the school system hasn't found a good solution is that it is too busy thinking it knows what kids need, but they aren't involving the student's own will in the solution. This is a major problem, and one that can only be solved by adopting a system that has a tighter and more real education-to-vocation hand off. Apprentice/master models of old times comes to mind. What ever it is, it must be rooted in the useful arts, the career technical education.
Our youth will be active all day with their mind, body, and hands, and a lot less likely to be bored out of their skulls sitting on their asses for 8 hours a day(like parents like children).
School must offer a path for any public school student to have a direct access to their financial stability when they are of responsible age. They will have options to pursue that which satisfys their questioning, and build skills that they can immediately use to help our community.
I have asked the question in several classes for my teaching credential, why does our education take so long, and achieve so little(can you remember a 10th of what you did in primary school??). Surely we can decide we are at a turning point for this wreckage. The answers are so close, and maybe so mundane to the sensability of a high tech society. But they are there and we have to let go of the notion that all youth have to go to college. It's an expensive and uneccessary step for a majority of the population. And I think that it's relevance is going to dwindle down to a very small percentage once we
readjust our priorities and design our youth's education to learn to build, and live in, a passive solar infrastructure.
Passive solar infrastructure is very low tech and harbors, in effect, the entire primary educational standard in it's physical geometry in relation to the earth sciences. and more.
