Reflections on the Power of Knowledge and Ethics to Enrich the Lives of All Humanity on this One Earthly Sojourn (Fourth Report from the Committee for the Review of History, Issued on 14 March 2217)

In this fourth report, issued one day after our last conveyance on 13 March 2217, we relate to citizens in the Universal Confederacy our continuing fascination with the crude level of education, thought, and citizenship that prevailed in the United States Sub-Region of North America (what was in 2017 known as the United States of America) during the early 21^st century.   As in our previous communications, we base this report on our intense review of the historical record.

 

We offer as in our other reports descriptions and evidence of the stark reality, so that our academically sophisticated populace, accustomed as that citizenry is to examining evidence objectively and with careful attention to factual detail, may consider the facts along with a few comments contrasting the state of our own public consciousness in the year 2217 with the low level of citizen awareness prevailing two hundred years ago.

 

Therefore, be aware that in addition to our previously recorded information, these conditions, unimaginable to us as they are in the year 2217, actually prevailed in the year 2017.

 

In this fourth report, we particularly emphasize the precise conditions that pertained to the system of K-12 education---  to which we have alluded at numerous junctures of the previous three reports---  that adversely affected so many aspects of life in the year 2017 in what was still called the United States of America.

 

Know, then, that these conditions in K-12 education actually existed;  our particular case for salient representation of a general condition is the locally centralized school district of the Minneapolis Public Schools, abiding in the namesake city in the Midwestern region of what was in 2017 the national entity of the United States of America (our United States Sub-Region of North America  within the Universal Confederacy):

 

>>>>>    In 2017, teachers were still trained in departments, schools, and colleges of education on the campuses of universities---  institutions representing what was known as “higher” education.  Teachers were trained by professors of education, who were in a constant scramble to make a place for themselves at the university, where in the absence of a rigorous academic discipline, these intellectually insubstantial occupants of professorships were widely regarded as inhabiting the lowest rung in the status hierarchy on campus.

 

>>>>>    Presiding as they did over courses that would have been better taught by psychology, philosophy, and history professors, education professors tried to make a place for themselves by emphasizing pedagogy, even though most were former K-12 teachers who had been the most mediocre practitioners in schools grouped for grades kindergarten through five, six through eight, and nine through twelve.

 

>>>>>    Having so little knowledge themselves, these education professors felt emboldened to challenge the provision of knowledge as the point of a young person’s educational experience.  These professors of education made the claim that factual knowledge could always be accessed at a moment’s notice in an age when technology (though clearly crude by our own standards) was undergoing rapid advance and seemed to offer answers to many human dilemmas;  we now know that technology in the absence of knowledge and wisdom in fact does much harm, but we can grasp the strained logic that made the claims of these education professors appealing, however facile.

 

>>>>>    University administrators, and indeed all university community members, were deeply complicit in the conveyance of this degraded depiction of the purposes of K-12 education:  The university community signed off on the design of not only insubstantial bachelor’s degrees but also easily obtained master’s and doctoral degrees in education;  teacher aspirants and teachers seeking higher placement on the step and lane system flocked to these degree mill programs, in time inducing the demise of terminal master’s degrees in legitimate disciplines (e.g., mathematics, chemistry, history, English literature, and the fine arts);  the programs of departments, schools, and colleges of education became cash cows for universities---  which explains the complicity of administrators and the university community.   

 

>>>>>    K-12 teachers then went forth on the basis of limited knowledge and a corrupt idea of educational excellence and purpose to instruct students who were denied their inheritance to the great accumulation of knowledge in the human experience.  Ignorance of the United States Constitution, world religions, national and global geography, national and international economics, high-quality classical and contemporary literature, the fine arts, and the great historical epochs of humanity atrophied in human mental consciousness.  Generations of young people and adults were robbed of the great purposes of education that we now comprehend are cultural enrichment, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction.

 

>>>>>    Only with the Trump Tribulation of 2017-2025 and the partially overlapping Great Debate of 2020-2070 did our ancestors grasp the importance of knowledge-intensive education and come to grips with all that had been lost in societal disregard for verifiable data and factual information.  Humanity thence went forth on an exciting pursuit of the best purposes of science, religion, and philosophy.  

 

>>>>>    In 2125, representatives of the World Council of Religions convened and produced articles for the seminal document, Universal Ethics, from which we have long traced our current stance on matters of spirituality and morality---  shifting from particularistic claims, toward a universal system of ethics consonant with the teachings of the progenitors of the world’s great religions.

 

>>>>>    With this happy confluence of knowledge and ethics at the core of the K-12 educational experience, departments, colleges, and schools of education disappeared.  Teachers trained in legitimate academic disciplines and became scholars of equal status with university professors;  they earned teaching certification after review of their performance after serving a full-year of internship.   

 

>>>>>    According to the heightened ethical consciousness that succeeded the convention of the 2125 World Council of Religions and agreement on the precepts of Universal Ethics, society as a whole gave energetic support to the efforts of activists to transform urban education;  the extension of services and resource referral to economically and functionally challenged families, along with an academic program of foundational skill and knowledge intensity resulted in an educational system of equity across lines of class, ethnicity, and gender.

>>>>>    This revolutionized system of K-12 education, then, prepared all adults for lives of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction.  Generational poverty ended.  The United States of America became the democracy theretofore only described in propaganda and popular attestation.

 

We trust that our academically sophisticated citizens now understand the sources of corruption and degradation of life that prevailed among the ill-educated populace of 2017.  In issuing this fourth report, we on the Committee for the Review of History anticipate pausing for a time to allow readers to reflect on the revelations pertinent to our ancestors living in the year 2017. 

 

As we hold our forbearers in our hearts, feeling empathy for their condition in 2017, and expressing gratitude for all that they accomplished during the Great Debate and at the World Council of Religions in the course of the decades thereafter, we respectfully present their experience as both a cautionary tale of the dangers of ignorance---   and as an inspirational account of the power of knowledge and ethics to enrich the lives of all people on this one earthly sojourn.