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STRENGTHENING THE UNITED NATIONS

XX.

Functional Education and Science

To be a help in life and collectively to benefit man's future education has to be relevant to our projected goals. What must stop is the pyramiding of bodies and buildings: banish the obsession that schooling begins and ends inside a classroom at a fixed age, and demand that teachers prepare their students- whether in kindergarten or in laboratories of microbiology-for the obligations of the coming new world nations age.

There are portions of universities everywhere that need to be kept intact for social and natural science research and training. Otherwise every college and university would better be disbanded and set up in storefronts in thousands of towns around the world, conducting most instruction from internet sites and e-mail, dealing evenhandedly in education with the surrounding population, exchanging by capillary action the intellectual, cultural, and social nutrition and wastes of the universe.

To bring grave complaints against the existing educational order is to insist upon the importance of education. The New World United Nations, if it is to succeed, is education writ large on the face of the Earth. The cadres of the New World must come largely from those persons who have acquired the skills of knowledge while escaping the enervating effects of conventional schools.

Just as the New World depends upon teachers and scientists for its general revolutionary drive, it depends upon them as specialists. And in both cases, it bespeaks disciplined work, not dilettantes. The scientist, acting as specialist, carries a skill as powerful as a gun, a treasure of symbolic information about the world, and a general social confidence that extends his and her personality in social space where it can connect with the principles of the ongoing revolution.



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