Education & Culture

School

In our current society, children hate school almost as much as adults hate work. Can you blame them? The current one-size-fits-all education systems aim to shape children for a world that existed years ago by rewarding the ability to memorize facts. It's absurd.

Why don't we teach children what really is important in life? Why don't we encourage following dreams and passions? In this country, we will.

Children will be able to shape their own life. We’ll teach them how to think, not what to think; how to make their own decisions instead of deciding everything for them. They’ll even get to decide whether they want to keep the name that they’ve been given (they have to live with it the rest of their lives, after all). We will not force children into our boxes.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

—Albert Einstein

Primary education will focus on teaching fundamentals: love, empathy, emotions, science, rational thinking, self-education, perspective, relativity, mindfulness, helpfulness, altruism—of course in addition to basic skills including literacy and numeracy.

A large and alternating variety of subjects will be part of the curriculum for a short period of time, in which the basics of each subject are taught. From a young age, children will be able to choose which subjects they want to drop and which subjects and areas they want to expand upon. Permanent compulsory subjects will be kept to a minimum, and gender roles will be abolished. Anyone can follow any amount of subjects, homework will be optional and class progression will be based on learning progress and maturity instead of age.

Adult Education & Parenting

In addition to primary, secondary, and higher education, adult (lifelong, continuing) education will play an important part in life. While not compulsory, I think it's important that you should never want to stop learning and be curious about the latest developments in your areas of interest. It's also a good way to keep meeting new people, and to keep discovering new interests.

Parenting and education go hand in hand, so it's important that parents do it right. In my opinion, soon-to-be parents must pass a parenting exam before they're allowed to raise a child. Anyone can have children, but there's no reason to assume that anyone can parent—it's a huge responsibility. Like with other subjects, secondary education will teach the basics of parenting and this will continue during adult education.

Taboos

In our culture there will be no such thing as taboos. Most people find it hard — ranging from unpleasant to impossible — to talk about a lot of topics; most related to sex (sexual orientation, pornography, masturbation, incest, paraphilias, polygamy) and death (abortion, suicide).

As soon as a taboo comes up in a discussion, people lose all rationality and emotion takes over. I find this extremely dangerous. Taboos and constraints potentially lead to frustration and undesirable behaviour. Every topic should be open to discussion.

Every time a child asks you a question, you are given the opportunity to shape a better world. You may in turn even learn from the child and its unclouded judgement.

Religion

Another thing that I find extremely dangerous is religious indoctrination. There is value in teaching children about religion and the role it has played in history and literature, but teaching a religion as absolute truth is unethical and should be considered child abuse. I could write a whole separate piece explaining why religion is deplorable, but countless writers better than me have done so already.

Religions will not have any form of special treatment, privilege or protection in this country. A personal belief can not be taught as truth without evidence. Fortunately, our new culture and education systems will be incompatible with most religions anyway.

Maturity vs. Age

In our new society, we should stop discriminating and making assumptions based on age. Maturity comes with experience, not age. While the body grows older linearly, the mind may experience periods of exponential growth or periods of complete standstill. I know lots of teens that are just as or even more mature than people in their twenties.

If a 14-year-old wants to join or form a company (association) and wants to work, follow higher level education, or participate in politics, they will be free to do so. If they feel mature enough to experiment with drugs (including alcohol) or sex, they can.

Again, taboos and constraints will only lead to frustration and undesirable behaviour. Teens get way too little credit and are very capable of making intelligent decisions, especially with this new country's high standards in education and parenting.

Sexuality

Something else we should approach differently is sexuality. Eliminating taboos will surely help a lot in this regard. The natural goal of sex used to be reproduction, but nowadays it's primarily pleasure. People often tend to forget that—it's fun, don't make such a fuss about it! The same goes for nudity. In Western society, nudity is immediately linked to lust and sex.

Sex is experimentation too. This is where sexual orientation plays an important role. Most people think of sexual orientation as something permanent and binary; the majority is straight and some people are gay. Even I used to think this, because this is just what society makes us assume. But an important wisdom is true here as well: nothing is black and white.

Sexual orientation is in fact more like a spectrum. The Kinsey scale is an attempt to describe this spectrum, even though it's a pretty complex topic. You might be completely straight, completely gay or somewhere in between; bisexual with or without a clear preference. You could also be romantically or emotionally attracted to women, while sexually attracted to men, or any other combination you can come up with.

Sexual experimentation and curiosity are natural parts of self-discovery and should be considered completely normal—encouraged even. As you can see, bisexuality covers most of the ratings on the Kinsey scale, which is why I suggest we might want to view bisexuality as the “default” (or: assumed) sexual orientation in our culture (as opposed to heterosexuality).

While it has yet to be proven whether humans are naturally bisexual, it is the most inclusive term and acceptance-promoting solution. If the assumed starting point of self-discovery of sexual orientation is set in the middle, fear of considering and sharing sexual orientation will be a thing of the past.

I strongly feel that we may only teach theories we have scientific evidence for as truth, so I'm not a 100% sure about this yet. However, evidence gathered from hundreds of other animal species forms a scientific basis, and it may also finally provide us with a definitive answer on human sexual orientation.

Culture

While I come from The Netherlands, I have an affection for certain other countries and cultures. Personally I'm very interested in Eastern culture—specifically the Japanese culture (and etiquette). I have a strong love-hate relationship with the American culture, and I am part of the European culture. I want do draw inspiration from all of these cultures and form a hybrid Western-Eastern culture, obviously with some ideas of my own.

The result will be culture of creativity, luxury, technology and entertainment. A culture of respect and acceptance, where gender, race and sexual orientation are as (ir)relevant as eye color. A culture where you can always feel safe, where your front door doesn't need locks and where you know that everyone you meet is doing their best to contribute in meaningful ways.

Back to a culture with a sense of community. We keep living closer together, but drifting further apart. Cities have become mass machines. The campus life can inspire the daily life in a lot of ways. I think interconnected, smaller-scale communities are much more preferable than huge, impersonal cities.