I have been blessed with a lot of interests and a nice spattering of talents. So when I think of the truly difficult situation of what is actually worth doing, I always return to what the Internet hasn’t really been used for yet and what it was rumored from its inception that it should ultimately provide: An utterly and entirely free education for all the world’s people.

That may sound like an idealistic stretch to the uninitiated but the fact of the matter is universities like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, The European Graduate School, and dozens of universities from around the world have been regularly uploading entire courses to YouTube for years. All entirely free of charge.

If that process was taken and applied to a social media platform like Facebook there would be no excuse for illiteracy to exist for anyone on the planet with Internet access. That’s why I started a pet project called [EDUCATING EARTH]. That’s the link to the Facebook Group. There’s also a more tightly curated archive I slapped together on Tumblr.

Now there’s usually a few arguments to this which are usually: 1) Learning online will never be learning in a physical classroom setting. I’ll grant that. But I’ll counter it with: You don’t need to learn everything there is to learn strictly in a classroom setting. That’s absurd. Not everything is surgery. Another argument is 2) cost and paying teachers. All I can think to respond to that is: How much in debt does the average student in the United States end up in after four years of college? What if that money was used to pay for a robust online educational platform? How many MORE people the world over could learn from that four-year tuition alone?

There is a whole world I wont go into here but there are plenty of articles and studies that I could cite about universities having money management problems, embellishment issues, and at the worst amounting to scams.

Here’s the major philosophical points I have for such a project. Illiteracy has been a historic tool used to oppress. As of today, nearly 500 million women on this planet are denied the right to learn how to read and write. Women make up two-thirds of total population of the world’s illiterate adults. It’s a global crime perpetuated against women, pure and simple.

Here’s another really, really simple one: If the world has so many problems on both local and a global scale, doesn’t it make sense to have more problem solvers available to collaborate and tackle them? If you have to fly in an engineer to fix your water filtration system, and you live close to poverty, that’s not a good situation to be in. Look at all these young kids devising ingenious ways to clean the ocean or detect cancer; don’t you want many, many orders of magnitude more of that going on in the world?

Here’s one last point: In terms of moral, social, and philosophical uprightness isn’t it striking to have the technology to provide a free education to all the world’s people (the internet and cheap computers) and not do it? Isn’t that elitist and wrong to have the ability to teach the world and still deny millions, possibly billions, of people that opportunity due to (1) location and (2) finances? Is that immoral? Unjust?

My guess is that we have yet to realize how much better off we would all be– that meaning the deep social good that it would be–to have all our neighbors as educated as they’d like to be without these obsolete roadblocks of location and finance. We don’t yet see that having educated neighbors is as valuable to the good of the community as having clean running water. Some of us might suspect it, but I think we’ve yet to fully embrace how obviously beneficial that would be to the whole planet to give everyone the opportunity to learn whatever they want, as much as they want, whenever they want.

In terms of a worthwhile project this has always seemed obviously worthwhile; a free education for all the world’s people. Some kind of cross between YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Wikipedia with an entirely educational bent. The whole thing would be bottom-up governed by the users. Research would be freely available to all. Problems and projects could quickly be outsourced and collaborated on by cross-pollinating groups. A powerful algorithm would translate as much material as possible. The whole vision of the very system of education would from being, as Brian Whitworth aptly described, “Knowledge gate-keeping” to “Knowledge gardening.”

Let’s not be niave; not having something like this already in place is why Donald Trump, climate-change deniers, and all the whole kingdom of low-hanging fruits in the world, that you are rightly embarrassed to share breathing room with, continue to exist. In a world after the establishment of free global education poverty, oppression, and painful stupidity on a global scale (things most people tend to agree is a problem) would naturally become harder and harder to come by.

In a way, a project such as this was always the destiny of philosophy, social justice, and all the good things we think of when we bring up the word “civilization”.

If anyone wants to rap further on this angle I’ve been at this game on-and-off since 2010. I can’t believe it hasn’t been seriously implemented by some billionaire or team of tech-heads with more resources and talent than myself. I don’t know why something like Educating Earth is not yet on the top-10 most of Alexa already. That’s got to change. There is no need for this pervasive disservice to humanity and the planet to endure. We are already beyond it. And yet tragically not yet.

Like Einstein pointed out, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”