Paying Back Education
The concept is simple enough. Education is currently a sunk cost pushed off onto We the Taxpayers. We cannot really call it an investment, because currently, we get no Return on Investment. We cannot really call it a ‘right’ either, because not all of us get an equal share of it. Taxpayers must pay this cost because We the People allegedly own the government, and our government is allegedly a Democracy, that owes each citizen an ‘equal opportunity,’ through education, to seek a life of liberty and happiness.
If this yarn about We the People owning government has any truth to it, then We the People might want to rethink how the government could provide equivalent education, how education could provide equivalent opportunity, and how this whole endeavor might ‘pay for itself,’ in order to be sustainable financially.
If we frame ‘rights’ as ‘reciprocal obligations’ conferred upon each citizen, what are we getting from children in return for this ‘education’? How is this arrangement ‘reciprocal’, if the children don’t have any ‘skin in the game’?
If we go back to thinking of educational training as a form of apprenticeship, it would make more sense: We would train our children to eventually ‘take over the job’ by actually ‘doing the job.’ In this way, children ‘payback’ the money spent to educate them through providing valuable goods and services along the way, and if we guarantee them a job is waiting at the end of this ‘apprenticeship’, all parties involved should consider this to be ‘a fair trade.’
Doing The Dirty Work
Education must train these young apprentices to take over the world we made for them. It is a world filled with
- Food and Water shortages
- Disease epidemics and pandemics
- Mass destruction of ocean life / ecosystems / extinction of other species
- Resource wars and other conflicts
- Extreme weather events, fires, massive coastal and inland floods
- Mass migrations of refugees
- Economic collapse
- Violence and social unrest
- Worsening inequality, increasing poverty
We must equip children with the tools and skills necessary to do the job of undoing what we have done.
We need scientists, ambassadors, social science engineers, essential needs technicians, counselors, tutors, caregivers, empaths, advocates, and more.
As a consequence of this apprenticeship, Children will learn to help each other (through babysitting, tutoring, etc.), the community (through caregiving, agriculture), the nation (through FEMA, homeless, and immigration housing), the planet (through ambassadorships, recycling businesses) and themselves (through earned associate degrees that secure waiting jobs or further education).
