‘’It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.’’  [quoted in The New York Times, March 13 1949, p. 34].

— Albert Einstein

 

I was a substitute teacher at the secondary level for L.A. Unified Schools in the San Fernando Valley from 1987 to 1992. And I can’t even begin to tell you how sick & tired I got of hearing students — especially middle school students — complain, “This is boring,” or “I’m bored.”

 

Then one day, I subbed in a class that had this quote on the board, “The cure for boredom is curiosity and there is no cure for curiosity.” It was like I had discovered gold & I was elated. Now I had an answer for those complaints of boredom. If students would listen or were even interested, I’d point out, how can you be bored when there are millions of new sights, sounds, tastes, etc.? So, if you’re bored, it’s your fault and you are merely copping out or being intellectually lazy.

 

Today from the vantage point of an old fart of 70, I am more sympathetic to those students’ complaints. What they were really saying & feeling but didn’t know how to articulate it was, the rote method of teaching employed in the overwhelming majority of public schools was what was boring them to death. Einstein’s quote above puts it far more succinctly. Yet, to a large extent, we have raised the last couple of generations to expect to be entertained 24 hours a day & they believe it’s their birthright to a large extent.

 

What worries me is that the individual student & citizen is drowning in this sea of entertainment. And I have come to the conclusion that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future was far more correct than George Orwell’s was. Dismiss me as a fear monger or an alarmist if you will but, hear me out.

In American society today, our blind trust in technology, especially in the “Social Media” gurus of Silicon Valley, we have de facto entrusted our minds & our emotional well-being to the greedy entrepreneurs who have become mega-millionaires at our destructive expense.

 

There is a myriad of personal costs as well as our national well-being from this blind trust & worship of all things high-tech, but the most pernicious cost is the erosion of our ability to think critically or analytically for ourselves. For example, behind all this supposed “social media,” & high-tech gadgets like “Smart phones,” the artificial connection via “platforms,” has to an alarming extent, replaced the actual, physical connections with friends.

If that fact alone doesn’t worry or scare you, perhaps you too have become so addicted that you can’t see it? Behind all this faux “social media,” & its tools of enslavement is advertising. And in Silicon Valley, advertising success is what their fortunes depend on & what it boils down to is “eyeballs” i.e., the length of time people watch/use their platforms. So, in a nutshell, what these tech titans don’t want you to know/understand is that the corporate conglomerates are in effect, controlling & manipulating all those who are addicted to their supposed benign tools & platforms.

In the fairly recent documentary, “The Great Hack,” Britney Kaiser who claims to have been unaware & now pretends to be a whistleblower after Cambridge Analytica was busted, said one thing that surprised me & made me sit up & take notice. She said that “information has replaced oil as the world’s most valuable commodity.” This is not wild, conspiratorial speculation because the fact is that the high-tech, social media firms have been collecting every scrap of our personal information, many of them willingly cooperating with the government, & it’s being stored in a massive, data storage facility in Utah.

I’m going to move on or return to the main thesis of this essay now because I don’t wish to go too far afield of my subject. My central point is that many, if not most of these modern marvels are making us mentally flabby or are enfeebling us. And I don’t believe that so many millions of us would’ve fallen for such an obvious phony like Trump were we not so dumbed-down — see John Taylor Gatto, one of America’s greatest teachers — by the Wizards of Oz in the Silicon Valley, “our” mainstream media, & our deliberately undermined public education system. (See several of my other essays on my blog if you’re interested in these subjects)

 

As this essay was taking shape in my mind, it occurred to me, how as individuals & collectively as a society, are we to progress if we continue to allow this sapping of our mental capabilities? My intellectual as well as spiritual guru, Noam Chomsky, made a very cogent point in regard to the dilemma of higher education from the standpoint of the corporate overlords. One the one hand, they want a society of obedient & subservient employees & that’s why they have undermined public education but when it comes to graduate school, they depend on students who are free thinkers, nonconformists, people who dare to question authority i.e., the traditional ways of thinking.

 

Why? Because those are the people who make the breakthroughs in technology, medicine, etc., the ones who dare to think “outside the box.” The students who obey & follow all the rules rarely, if ever, come up with original ideas or perspectives. It’s the rebels, the nonconformists, the dreamers, the idealists, etc. that true progress depends on.

Sadly & unfortunately, many, if not most of those free thinkers are destroyed by this society that praises conformity & playing by the rules, and punishes & ridicules those who can’t or who refuse to. What’s important for all of us to remember is that technology is a double-edged sword i.e., it can be beneficial to mankind, or it can become a dangerous weapon that harms humanity in a myriad of ways.

Again, this is why it’s so critically important that far more of us, ideally, all of us intellectually capable, acquire the skills of critical & analytical thinking. I have been urging family, friends, & strangers alike for almost four decades now, to develop these skills but my words have mostly fallen on deaf ears.

 

I don’t claim to be some sort of grand master or something, but I have spent tens of thousands of hours seeking answers & looking for patterns & causes behind the crisis’s humanity faces. And Chomsky has focused his laser-like attention on the two, greatest threats to human survival, climate destruction & the threat of a nuclear war, and his perseverance has in turn inspired me to persevere no matter how often I am mocked & dismissed.

 

So, when people disingenuously try to dismiss or ignore me as if I were simply another one of those proverbial, street-corner preachers ranting & raving about the coming Apocalypse, I know that my aim is true & pure, and I continue to pay the price socially.

 

My beloved wife, Jeri, who passed away over nine years ago, was one of the hardest working & most dedicated teachers I have ever known. And while she was usually swallowed-up in the asinine bureaucracy of being a special education teacher, she respected my Don Quixote crusade to inform & ideally inspire people to stand-up, speak out, & fight the powers that be. And I miss her down to the marrow of my bones & hope that I may someday be worthy of her love. In that spirit, I shall leave you with a gem from Doris Lessing who happened to be the favorite author of my first English literature professor, Roy Garrot, in the top four of the most inspiring teachers in my life!

 

Here’s an excerpt from “The Golden Notebook” that every teacher and parent should read:

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to ensure or guarantee that all teachers will be fired-up with a passion for learning & teaching but if we were honest with ourselves as a society that claims to value equality, democracy, freedom, & truth, we would earnestly strive to create such an educational system. For now, we must individually pursue this dream.

 

As for me, my conscience is clear & even though I never took a single course in the teacher education curriculum, I have had ESL students cry when I had to move on. Those were the highest compliments I’ve ever receiving in my career. My training was all on the job so-to-speak & I believe those students loved me because they knew that I loved them & truly cared about their welfare and wished them healthy & happy futures.

— Persevere!