It is in our collective interest to give everyone the education they can make the best use of. Not just our family, but our neighbors, our state, our country.
There was a time when education was local. That was OK because most people lived their entire lives within 20 miles of their birthplace. Sure there were adventurers and explorers, but they were so rare that school children can recite the list. Marco Polo, Vasco Digamma, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Francis Drake.
In the 18th century, the world of nothing new under the sun changed. Instead of a one-way trip to America, North Atlantic packets sailed between America and England on a reliable schedule. Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin could almost commute to Europe. Still most people never went anywhere, but the revolution had started.
Crossing oceans went from months to weeks, steam reduced it to days. Steel rails had the same effect on land travel. Everyone became capable of traveling long distances. It no longer took the strength of pioneers nor the willingness to risk the unknown. Gradually in our perception, but suddenly compared to the past everyone became connected to everyone. In theory there are only six degrees of separation between everyone on Earth. If you know 100 people and each of them knows a hundred, that could be a trillion, one hundred to the sixth power.
Getting off topic. When lives were local, education was local, we taught our own children what we were taught and that seemed enough. As people traveled more and created larger communities, clans, tribes, cities. states and nations the total knowledge increased and the need to know did also. As individuals, it became worthwhile to learn more than our parents could teach us. There was new stuff every year, every week, now every hour. There is more to learn in this century than any one can know. The last person to know everything might have been DaVinci, but his flying machines failed.
What is more important than what we know, is what the others in our community know. We need the collective knowledge of our peers, our professionals, our skilled trades, teachers, researchers, even lawyers and politicians. It is not that the world has become more complicated, it’s the same planet Ecclesiastes inhabited when he said “There is nothing new under the sun.” In his day there seldom was anything new. What has changed is our knowledge of our planet actually our universe. The ability to manipulate that universe comes with the knowledge of how it all works. Now we can make things that are new, so new they were beyond our imagination last week.
The 1769 Encyclopedia Britannica alleged to contain the sum of human knowledge, three volumes, about 3,000 pages or 90,000 words. A city or university library may have a million books. The software to operate the nose wheel system of a Boeing 777 is four million lines of code. To be productive in the modern world requires education.
Because we no longer live in the 1,000 square miles we can walk to, we depend on people far outside that circle. We need them to have special skills beyond what can be taught at the neighborhood level. This means we all have a stake in the education of every child not just the ones we know, or the ones whose parents we know. Ideally, some superagency would see to it that every child got the education they can make the best use of. Unfortunately, the closest we can hope for is federal funding to make universal education possible. We should never have to make a choice as to who gets education except on the basis of who can use it, not money, connections, family, diversity or any political based theory. Education does not cost, it pays, handsomely. To ensure that there is adequate funding everywhere it must be underwritten by a national source.
On a different note. If you ever got a mosquito bite you were injected with an unknown substance; get over it. Millions have been vaccinated, few had bad side effects. Over a million unvaccinated died so far.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com