2+2 must never equal 5

Most provinces and territories in Canada have favourite dented cans that the politicians and residents alike love to kick around from time to time, good water cooler chat, good optics from the govt gang perspective. This alphabet rearrangement will focus on one of these cans, namely education which in turn I hope will be part of a bigger collection examining the pillars of our society and reality.

Right off the bat, any discussion worth a tip should be prefaced by the following: education and an education system are two entirely different things. Education is a concept whereas an education system is simply the delivery method of the concept. Things of course completely fall apart from this point forward but I don't want to skip too far ahead and out of order. Note: the tip jar is over there in case you were wondering.

So what be this education then? Dictionary.com has it this way:

Dictionary.com said

noun
1. the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.
2. the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession.
3. a degree, level, or kind of schooling:
a university education.
4. the result produced by instruction, training, or study:
to show one's education.
5. the science or art of teaching; pedagogics.

A few complimenting concepts included above but one theme running throughout: knowledge. For our purposes then, let's distil it down to "education is the acquisition of knowledge". I feel that to be accurate while at the same time staying true to the 5 items above. Righto, neat, so what? Now that we have established what we're talking about, absolutely, "so what?" is a fair response so let's find out 'so what'.

Mental rail ride time, this run going back in our collective timelines to our respective births. Never say never, always outliers, but for the rest of us:

Who remembers what the nurse was wearing?
Was anyone counting to five by lunch on their actual birthday?
How many books got read that first day?
Who enjoyed a birthday sunset bike ride peddling under their own power; bonus for no training wheels…

Agreed, lame attempt at humour and here are the answers to those very deep questions: none, no, zero, none, and keep your bonus. Pretty much every other question along these lines will have the same negative answer. Supported strongly by observation alone, humans do not possess what in any stretch of the definition could be called 'innate knowledge'. Could we say too that the remote tribes of Brazil for example would be pumping out their version of an automobile if innate knowledge did exist? In fact it really appears that, in the early going at least, the only thing an infant human knows innately how to do is expend energy in the form of vocal vibrations AKA open their 'lil yaps and that could very well be instinctive at first.

OK, our locomotive is now rolling in reverse back to the present…'cept, other than getting taller, looking older, and letting out some belt notches, nothing has changed with us youngin's from our birth selves…what would that be like? It can be summed up pretty easily as there would be no present to return to; we would have never proceeded much beyond very early childhood, most likely measured in days if not hours. Further, there really would be no human species at all, the first batch would have been the last. 7 billion+ humans is strong enough observable evidence to conclude that this is/was not the case, so what then has changed from smally to biggy human? IMHO, the most important, nay, critical, change has been the acquisition of knowledge. Without that process, humanity would be the big nada, persona non grata, el existus nyet.

TL;DR: no language = no knowledge beyond feral
Knowledge is more than just knowing how to do stuff. Think of language, a concept that could be considered a pillar or root of knowledge, what is its function? For many of us the answer would be communication. While that's true, it goes deeper, more nuanced, for in order to acquire knowledge, one must be able to think and in order to do that, one must be able to articulate, quantify, categorize and curse at the information, facts, et al that make up knowledge and in order to do that, one must have a way to express 'n recall and in order to do that, one must have, you guessed it, a language, of any description, coordinated grunts included. Wee, that rabbit hole has some depth. I suppose we could say that thinking is communication in a unique form: it remains solely within the body of the individual, communicating with one's self as it were. [Note: there are verifiable attempts by other humans to use technology in an effort to remove the 'solely within the body' bit; every one of these attempts must be shunned at every turn, always and forever until fail-safe safeguards can be enacted, safeguards which may ultimately be unobtainable.]

Something else that is demonstrated through observation is a human's ability to acquire knowledge. Virtually every detail of this process is unique to the individual and aside from those folks who have physical hindrances, physical/biological alteration to brain structure and function for example, there doesn't appear to very many humans who cannot acquire at least enough overall knowledge to be able to function within a wider group and without too much hardship on either side. Personalities and personality disorders, while potentially shaped and influenced by knowledge, is/are a separate topic for another beer…I mean day.

To our goal: "so what?"

So yeah, I don't think we need to dig any further in order to fully understand the importance of knowledge for it literally is the difference between being here on Terran 3 at Miller time or being the subject of Kansas' classic 70's tune. The next challenge is to appreciate it to the same extent.

Given that humans have no innate knowledge to speak of, given that human's very existence is dependent on knowledge, it is then absolutely illogical, irrational, fargin icehole level stoopid not to place the highest personal and societal importance on education. It can't stop there either, no way, no how. For the exact same reasons and with the exact same name calling when not adhered to, knowledge must be as accurate, factual, up to date, the whole shebang, as possible, full stop, no exceptions, period, do not pass go. If we pursued this premise with the same zeal as is being used in the attempt to force populations into wearing masks for example, well, paradoxically enough, we would have enough knowledge to know when the mask is being pulled over our eyes so the situation wouldn't exist in the first place.

In the next article of this series, I'll take a peak at education delivery as a concept and make the case that ANY 'system' of delivery is liberty limiting, knowledge restricting and ultimately doomed to fail from the perspective of the public at large. For the collection of personality disorders currently allowed to occupy positions of power and authority though, education systems are a must for long term job security dontcha know…interestingly, the opposite of 'good/quality' knowledge is a foundation for that group so by insisting on good/quality knowledge in pursuit of education we are also taking away one of the items these assclowns need to exist, twofer, woohoo!

May the bestest of weekends find you . . .
Be well, TR