An Invisible Chain of our Time

by Iam Willgreen

required. We are not teaching what we collect into the books written on paper, or on web pages: we are teaching our daily behaviors, which are visible in homes and streets. That is what we are teaching to our children. And we teach it mixed with ideas, static and dosed them over a few years in school. Teaching mathematics or hygiene is not a problem; the problem is how to teach it and what use to make of it. I fear that in a few years during which the essential human body (that of a child) is completely predisposed to learn and build relationships and patterns that endure over time, these are precisely directed towards competitiveness, individualism, the collection of goods, but not in the direction that ought allow our children's personality. We transport our own vices to our children, we transfer them our own obsessions and lies, our tricks, creating something like copies of ourselves.

  It seems that we cannot do anything but convince all our neighbors, our acquaintances, our coworkers, how wonderful is our life, and this is stupid. Life is not easy, sometimes boring, brings difficulties and obligations, that we should get used to calling responsibilities more often, we do not like too much, but once taken allow us to adapt or try. And this is seen by these observers eyes, they hear and listen it and memorize, and learn the subtleties of our lies, and just repeating faithfully, trusting education we provide. Then, how can we be surprised? All eventually learned behaviors are used and are visible with time: you cannot fail to recognize that everything we see, which makes a generation that takes the alternative, was not indicated in the genetic code; at least a 50% has been taught.

  Such teaching fills all attitudes in life: which is very hard to admit to people is that it is not required to teach by word nothing, instead is required to demonstrate in fact, with our own actions, and now that is unlikely, difficult, fuzzy, blurry, distant. We do not want to do the same that someone should teach our children.

  This is a key problem now: are our own contradiction, our lack of credibility, and our inconsistency. This lack of credibility as individuals affects all areas of our lives, is widespread: it is visible in our relationships, on the work, our professional attitude in all that we take for granted in public; or in what we stand or reject, in our attitudes to issues that are common (goods that belong to everyone, and anyone), and the worse: is reflected in our laws, and all those agreements that we agree with all its contradictions.

  I remember clearly some of the considerations that were established to evaluate the mode of education offered by A. S. Neill, in his school Summerhill. This fear caused by a proposed education without lies or hiding places, seems to have preferred the current education: today, instead of a sex clean and devoid of nonsense, sex as a business is a powerful and comprehensive source of revenue in our Western society (I am sorry, actually it is a worldwide business, never was my aim offend nobody, this one is a global issue). Still is not enough obviously our contradiction?

  So thus move the values and attitudes of parents to children: if we neglect trees and animals, they do not feel it; if we do not care how much you get dirty, how much we spend, what and where we throw away, they will do it with confidence; if they hear how to act wisely to get hold of the other and live like kings, will never find pleasure in anything but could be the same. Congratulations: we can keep quiet coming together, doing conferences at all levels, and by writing all sorts of wonderful choices and intentions, while making otherwise below.

  What will your children inherit? Your children will not inherit anything, and it is not a problem, because they will not remember anything they never knew. It is easy. Do you understand why nobody is concerned really about it? Someone at the top of knowledge might say: please, talk about education scientifically! I suggest you try to do yourself this question: could you admit your partner to talk to your children's education scientifically? Do not feel you what is to educate? There is no sense in that? Can be packaged the education within 8 kg of colored paper? Can be packaged the entire world you must know in a perfect and standardized list of books?

  Be careful, you may find once you reach the age of 50, you may have missed the opportunity to do something as natural and beautiful as educate your children and feel them. Children are fruits of one season: once mature, cannot re-grow. Too many women in the intimacy acknowledge it, and thereby too often times the distance to the man who was her supposed partner.

  As an adult, you can make a very enlightening exercise: remember those beliefs and images saved from your childhood as you believed in, including those that you now know were hoaxes, and think: what you would have preferred to know? It is easier to treat children in the face; it is not?

  The universities, the research: still leaders of future?

  Universities are a heavenly place, which offer something actually valuable: relationships. And what could be the catalyzing reaction to open mind of students, the relationship with professors, the contact with real tools, with real list of success and wrongs done, in many cases is becoming in a long period for build individually the business and commercial future of each student, each future successful manager.

  These former universities or colleges from the XVIII and XIX centuries, on its onset were strongly influenced by its state origin, the surrounding world and politics, and religion. The XX century universities have less to be with all this: slowly have been banished the women exclusion, the religious nature, but not the culture around which remains into the foundation, as are beliefs, thinking, and male dominance.

  Beginning the 1946 after the WWII, the United States absorbed a crowd of professors, technicians, doctors, physicists, all of them fleeing from the devastated Europe, falling in the warm places of more than 3,000 Universities. All those centers of knowledge, closely related with companies, with a concept of “campus” like a home where living and study and do everything without need of going out, started a successful road triggered with the inherited treasure of the German patents. The rest of the World reached different results: the same Philip Coombs (President assessor with J. F. Kennedy, and director of the IEEP of FAO) warned the poor results of expenses applied in education worldwide. The teaching systems that have currently success are all those focused to profitable lines of work (whatever the field) always linked to some business. The rest of works, the rest of education has disappeared. Even the more highly trained; when their fields of knowledge are "out of range,” have no place out of this.

  With all respect for the effort involved in research (which requires your time and give your life, which sometimes takes all the pleasure), I give you my opinion, especially if you are a scholar holder, fellow or doctoral student: when you are allowed and granted to start research, make use of millionaire laboratories, implement large-time projects, initiate trials, be supported with funds and legal support, wage, staff... you are making a kind of jobs that seems to be the only possible, those you think are worth and are valuable, and improve the common life; but nowhere is nobody which want support this if not be by following a profitable purpose. Benefits are healthy, necessary, vital for the business blood: but must or should be linked to reasonable goals and real world: currently some of them do not looks to be so. And large-scale benefits have nothing to do with welfare.

  Welfare? You could not talk anything about this in a corporate meeting: there are always people who belong at the same time to venture companies, to investor companies, to financial institutions, and all those companies have lost their pretended social goal many years ago. Another vision around this could be the script of a story from a Walt Disney film.

  Trying connecting the strings.

  It is not difficult elucidate that the main groups of beings that have been disfavored simultaneously: the tamers, the domesticated, and those that will not be tamed because they are not valuable for us. It is as easy as knowing who is the owner, the landlord. An owner who really does not know what has underfoot.

  “A credulous mind … finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards tho
se that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such.”

  Samuel Butler

  14. Be informed.

  I lie to you, and you need me.

  One century has been enough to develop a raft of skills widely applied in the market. From the initial calligraphy over trucks, through magazines and leaflets, panels, spots on the radio, arriving now to godless TV and the internet: the quickly way to be informed. It is shocking that a company has already grown to seek profits from plagiarism (Plagiarism Checker), or defending the authenticity of the information (HONcode), or provide it already prepared (GreenFacts). I guess you must already have some idea about the powerful tool that is the advertising in its various lines for herding people. When are been visited more than three countries in a year, is visible how any trending is a mechanical behavior digested by everybody.

  You can choose how to design and advertising in today's market, the list is like no other ... endless: the image is design, is design the good behavior, are designed the rumors, are designed symbols that identify the successful folks, are designed revolutions; information is designed to influence you, and is collected