In my thought experiment we start by lumping public libraries, the printing press, radio, television and the internet into one group then we call it Education. These are our media, this is wherefrom human beings get everything they know.

We then take popular concepts (or misconceptions) from each method and apply them to other methods in the group.

This allows us to get rid of all the weird cultural assumptions we make about these very similar forms of acquiring knowledge.

For example:

Lots of people believe there is a magical rule almost as if handed down by god that says television is suppose to be full of entertainment. It must absolutely contain nothing that would allow the viewer to sustain himself. When searching for work television may not contribute to your expertise. Television exist for the purpose of distributing advertisement messages, propaganda and to denounce politicians.

We then simply apply this “logic” to other means of information distribution. (here considered “Education”) We could quite easily build schools by that same line of reasoning and rate it by counting viewers and selling products.

Every step along the way people expected public libraries, the printing press, radio, television and the internet to have a much greater influence on education than it actually had. If the public library really revolutionized our knowledge the internet should be making everyone into a professor. Safe to say there is a lot more going on than we can anticipate. The repetition of the assumption suggests that the way things work are not obvious even after the dream doesn’t materialize.

If some of us like to visit a sooth sayer we might think it ridiculous we wont actively try to prevent them going there. Most people who go there understand the perspective from those who do not. Even if a huge percentage of the population would go there every day there is no reason to replace any kind of Education with sooth saying.

A library could interrupt your reading for “these commercial messages” the same way we do with radio. If this seems like a terrible idea (it certainly does) are we referring to interrupting Education for advertisement messages or is the library now a kind of holy ground? We don’t get furious because we are all used to radio in the current format. This same kind of conditioning would work in libraries. In one or two generations people simply wouldn’t know better. If you want to hear uninterrupted music you can play CD’s, if you want to read you can take the book home.

Play with the thought experiment, it should provide valuable insights however you transplant ideas from one branch of Education to another you should run into many great and terrible ideas and the medium should never be an excuse for or against it.

The reasons why we think advertisement should be tolerated are not exclusive to any Education medium.

Envision it!

Without advertisement we would all be standing there in the supermarket looking at another dumbfounded, not knowing what to purchase. On the edge of starvation we would all follow the old lady who still remembers what kind of products to buy. You would look at products on ebay not knowing what they are for – if it wasn’t for advertisement. All those giant databases with your every personal detail would be worthless without the means to constantly harass people with advertisement messages. The economy would collapse and we would find ourselves in a nuclear war within days – if not hours!

Or maybe thats not what would happen. Maybe that friendly stranger offering you to buy drugs is not being helpful and not a desirable component in Education. Maybe, neither the other friendly drug pusher on tv, the guy selling socks, the other nice people selling other consumer items etc etc There are not a lot of jobs that require you to be an experienced watcher of advertisement. Most would involve pushing marketing messages but there will always be catalogs to fill, products to present, etc etc But lets not forget that making the product is important too! We can’t have selling the product eating into the making of it. The way we are pushing people out of innovation and production into unemployment downscales civilization in more than one way while it also prevents them from buying things.

Rather than endorse it you should willfully fill your head with irrelevant nonsense the way you want to. When you do you should be actively engaged in it – with intend. If you want to “enrich” your memory with all the Pokemon, every wrestler, every sports team and crazy blog posts like the one here that should be up to you. Force-feeding my ideas into your head…. now that, we should agree, sounds truly terrifying. No doubt I could have you pretend to be a chicken and have you sing the national anthem backwards. Then I could sell you to the circus.

But I prefer to see all the humans on the same team, It works for me, I’m more romantic that way. You are not a product to be made and sold but if you were we should try to make you into something useful and valuable.

If we lack trained professionals in health care it should be acceptable to train people to be doctors by all means available to us. If that is what we need we cant have other things take priority over that without being widely illogical and suicidal.

Perhaps the simple solution would be to rate library books, radio shows, television programs and (possibly) even internet websites by intellectual power level then require different licenses to promote such materials. Every additional lvl 1 show on the Tee Vee could require an exponentially more expensive license. The cheapest variety (perhaps even subsidiced) would be to make nothing but overly intellectual programs that follow the curriculum live while it happens in universities. A program for the “tiny” audience of chemists and those dreaming of becoming one. Everyone else can feel appropriately dumb looking at it which will do miracles in self education.

Our television producers are sophisticated enough to create an audience for such program in that exact same way they’ve created untrained people to watch their programs for untrained people. We didn’t end up enjoying south park just like that, it required many years of highly stupefying mass media to appreciate jokes about the same. While intensely amusing it isn’t like it is so funny that we don’t need doctors anymore. We can be amused just as effectively by things that inspire us.

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Tags: education, industrial revolution, innovation, politics