How Important Are Our Values in Education?

Watching Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s campaign director talk about their campaign strategies earlier this summer made me realize that something really profound was taking place in our country.

As he detailed all of the innovations their campaign used to try and convince people to vote for their candidate I couldn’t help but wonder why it was so difficult to get people out to vote, an activity that is most certainly in their own best interest. And then I took that question one step further - why is so much time, energy and money spent attempting to convince people to do things that are in their best interest?

Whether it is a get out the vote campaign, public service ads telling people to stop smoking or to eat healthier, government mandated programs that force people to save money (which the majority wouldn’t do otherwise) or any other host of initiatives aimed at bettering people’s lives - Why is this costly practice of convincing necessary? Why don’t people know they should vote, know they should eat healthy or know they should be responsible with their money?

In a rare, and hopefully not precedent-setting, occurrence I actually would like to answer the question I raise. And I believe that the answer, sadly, is that these values, though perhaps once of import to our culture, and certainly valued in some sub-cultures or other parts of the world, are just not part of our process of socialization anymore.

For some strange reason, being raised in this country doesn’t guarantee you will understand the stock market, marketing and financial decisions, how to choose a healthy diet, how to exercise your political rights much less global economic and political dynamics.

Schools incessantly pound facts into young people while imparting very few, if any, practical skills or critical thinking concepts, not in a dissimilar fashion to Ray Bradbury predictions in Fahrenheit 451. True, many kids can do math at a level that would have surely categorized them as a witch in the not too distant past, but have they the same ability to question the world around them or an understanding of the complex and serious issues that they will have to grapple with throughout their lives?

If anything, school curricula have become even narrower because of the monumental over-standardization that has taken place over the past decade. The focus of our public education seems to have shifted from helping educate and socialize our youngest to just measuring the ‘quality’ of schools as to determine next year’s federal funding.

The idea of socialization, whereby the eldest help teach the youngest how best to survive and develop in a given environment is an incredible process. Humans spend more time on this process than any other animal by far. Our youngest today spend often 18 years or more under supervision, far greater than even our mammal relatives like dogs who spend only a few months or dolphins, perhaps the closest, who spend 3-6 years. This enormous focus humans have had on raising offspring is one of the primary reasons we have such robust culture - an incredible amount of information is passed from generation to generation, even before written or recorded materials existed. And now that we have such accesible and global mediums to record and share information, we should be able to further improve upon this practice.

For the first time in human history, we have unprecedented opportunity (resources and incentive) to enter into an entirely new level of thought, discourse and freedom. Critical thinking combined with vast and easy access to information is a powerful tool of democracy, science and thought that we have yet to tap into fully.

Perhaps we would not need so many complicated laws around financial markets if people simply were too well educated about finances to be tricked into poor decisions. Or if we had a better understanding of our bodies and diets we would no longer need the government to intervene for us. And if we could better engage with public policy issues, we wouldn’t need voter registration drives or overly-complicated (and ineffective) election rules.

Instead of attempting to solve all of these problems by creating cumbersome government interventions after the problem has arisen, we should, as a culture, take a more proactive approach and re-shape our education and enculturalization processes to better prepare people to make these decisions themselves.