donewith dot info

Information is the commodity of the Information Age, and educational institutions are the new marketplaces. Colleges and universities don’t deal in oranges, washers or wheel barrows, but in something much less tangible: information. If someone is on the bottom end of the information curve (not the intelligence curve!), the refrain is get thyself an education! Like so many things, this is great on paper, but the implementation is less certain, and perhaps even insidious.

As I mentioned, educational institutions are essentially marketplaces nowadays, and things are not generally provided free of charge in a marketplace. The cost of education is astounding and prohibitive. What? You don’t have between $20,000 and $200,000 to spend? Then take out student loans that you’ll be paying back for years to come. Why not? Everyone else is up to their ears in debt, why shouldn’t you be, too?

At all events, education isn’t the solution to the world’s problems. Sure, education is useful and everyone needs a trade, but our modern educational systems are not about growing better people, but about cramming yet more information into the heads of people with the hope that enough of it will stick to allow that person to navigate the waters of the Information Age.

Here is an illustrative snippet from the book Hard Times by Charles Dickens:

Thomas Gradgrind, Sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, Sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind—no, Sir!

We need to be teaching people how to be more compassionate and more sensitive to their surroundings, not how to try to manipulate the world as if it were just data in a spreadsheet.

In his book Fatu Hiva, Thor Heyerdahl says the following:

“There is nothing for modern man to return to,” I admitted. I said it most reluctantly, for our wonderful time in the wilderness had given us a taste of what man had abandoned and what mankind was still trying to get even farther away from. [...] Progress today can be defined as man’s ability to complicate simplicity. Nothing in all the procedure that modern man, helped by all his modern middlemen, goes through before he earns money to buy a fish or a potato will ever be as simple as pulling it out of the water or soil. Without the farmer and the fisherman, modern society would collapse, with all its shops and pipes and wires. The farmers and the fishermen represent the nobility of modern society; they share their crumbs with the rest of us, who run about with papers and screwdrivers attempting to build a better world without a blueprint.

I can’t think of a better way to sum up donewith.info.