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There are a lot of different things you can try as a teacher, as a parent, as a member
of a community to get young people to try for a little while at least to unplug and
appreciate the world around them. If we don’t do that they will never really be able to
appreciate the virtues of reflection. They won't appreciate the virtue of reflection
because they won't have any down time. There’s a view of education, what I would
consider the vulgar view. This is the purpose of education is to create useful productive
factors, so the important thing is that you learn a lot of stuff that’ll be useful to
you in the workplace and by being useful in the workplace you’ll be productive and you’ll
make a nice income and you’ll also contribute to society in that fashion.
To me that is not the purpose of education. That is a byproduct of education. The purpose
of education is to make adults. The purpose of education is to take young people and give
them what they need to be an adult and there’s much more to adult life than simply being
good at taking a test or being good at a job. Those are great skills; one needs them.
But where on earth does one learn to be a decent, thoughtful, reflective, human being?
Reflection is a skill. Thinking things through is a skill. Putting arguments together, figuring
out what makes a good--an argument good or bad is a skill. If we don’t teach young
people those skills then they will fall into a trap like our generation only probably worse.
My generation, the generation that’s currently running things--I’m in my 50s--my generation
is a terrible example, just awful because we mainly just label people who disagree with
us and scream at each other and the value is in having the funniest joke or the cleverest
name to call someone on the other side. That seems to be what we value.
That is a despicable way to run democracy. There’s no excuse for it. But if we’re--if
we’re going to help younger people do better, not only do we have to do better, we have
to try to show them that the ability to run a real democratic politics which is a politics
about conversation, about real genuine argument carries with it the ability to be patient
and reflective. It’s hard with technology to squeeze that learning in. But it’s vital
to squeeze it in if we really want to educate people as opposed to just teaching them skills.