In our society we are all striving after money. We all want to get rich because we believe that if we have lots of money all our problems will be solved and we will be happy. But do we really believe that money will make us happy? Or have we just gotten caught up in a system that tries to make everyone fit into the same mold?
I believe that deep down inside each of us we know that money will not make us happy, but we still need money to support our families, to buy food, clothing and shelter for our loved ones. With the rising price of raw materials I can see why people want to have more money, but greed blinds us. Greed takes away a trait of being human, our ability to work in communion with each other. Greed makes everyone around us a competitor instead of a teammate.
Money can never really fulfill us. If you look at the richest men in the world, like Bill Gates we see that they spent their whole lives striving after money, but now that they are older and death is getting closer they see their folly. They put the quest for wealth ahead of their family and friends so eventually they lose all their relationships. Bill Gates is getting involved in more and more charity work and giving away his money because he has discovered what many of us already know, money does not satisfy. What really matters is our relationships with those around us, family, friends, our spouse, etc. these provide us with fulfillment and joy.
Work and money are necessary parts of our lives, but I find that more and more often people do not enjoy their work and are very unhappy. How do we change that? In order to change this I believe that we need to change the whole system of education. Our education system tries to force all of us from a very young age to conform to a certain set of rules and guidelines which governments and experts think are the best ways for children to act. Children are put in school from 8:30 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon starting from the age of five or six. They are told when the can sit, stand, move around, or talk. They must ask permission for everything they do, including going to the washroom and eating. Every child is taught in exactly the same way regardless of whether the child learns best that way. Every child is taught the same things regardless of whether they want to learn those things or are interested in those things.
By the time we graduate from high school we have been told what to do for so long that we don’t object when the school tries to pick a career for us or a guidance counselor tells us which career we would excel at. We don’t know how to make good decisions on our own because we’ve been told what to do and when we can do it for so long.
The school system as we know it has served it’s purpose. If we look back in history to when our current school system was being developed we can see that the reason the school system was set up this way was because the majority of the population lived in rural areas and the parents only had knowledge of how to farm and reading and writing were not essential to everyday life. Schools were set up where one teacher who knew the basics of reading, writing and math would teach all the children the same way. As time went on more and more subjects were added and schools became bigger and bigger with more centralized authority and less say for the parents.
The problem with this school system is that it kills children’s creativity and interest in learning. Students do not have any say in what they learn until grade ten or eleven and by that time any of there original joy in learning has been long gone. We, as educators, need to help children to reach their full potential by encouraging them to pursue their interests. If a child is interested in baking we should make ourselves available to teach them how to bake. If a child is interested in farming we should encourage him/her to pursue that interest. Learning is a lifelong experience, but when we are children we have a great love and interest in learning, which needs to be nurtured and allowed to grow.
Through the school system we tell children that they need to make lots of money and to do that they need to get good marks and compete against all of their peers. School itself is a competition to see who can get the highest grade. But grades are not an accurate reflection of what someone has learned. Students can manipulate the system by memorizing things for exams and forgetting everything right after. In every class each student learns different things, but in the grading system not all topics are equal so a student must memorize the topics the teacher or the school board think are important instead of focusing on those topics the student is interested in. And this is reflected in tests because a student may know a lot about a topic, but if that topic is not on the test than the student is viewed as not knowing anything and given a poor mark which sets him/her back from their peers and they are labelled a bad student. What we should be doing instead is encouraging children to pursue their interests, what ever that may be. The goal of our lives should not be to make the most money, it should be to find the greatest joy we can. In order to do this we need to find a job that we like doing. We need to tell children that in order to find a career they should list the things they are interested in and find someone to pay you for doing those things, or else create your own job by making your interests of value to others. We should strive to help each other to live happy lives by encouraging everyone to pursue their interests and to make it possible for everyone to earn a living for their family doing something they love to do.
We kill creativity in our world by seeking to gain wealth. As humans we have the capacity to dream, to think outside the box. We can invent new things, we can create new technologies which move humanity forward. Throughout history men and women have been free to be creative and invent new things. Thomas Edison was allowed to be creative and he gave us the light bulb, Henry Ford gave us the assembly line and the combustion engine, Benjamin Franklin gave us electricity, and there are many many more. A common theme with all of the great inventors was that they were allowed to be creative and to make a product or service that revolutionized the world.
In our current times we kill creativity because we see new products or services as a threat to our personal wealth. For example, the oil companies have a monopoly on the automotive industry because the vast majority of modern cars use gas or diesel to propel themselves, so the oil companies are threatened by new ideas for engines for cars which do not use oil or gas. When an inventor comes up with a new idea he is threatened and pressured by these large companies until he sells his idea to them and they destroy it because that idea could ruin their monopoly and cut into their profits. We see this all around us, and especially in the field of energy.
In order to fix a lot of the problems we need to be free to dream. We need to allow the development of new technologies which will enable all of us to live meaningful and joy-filled lives. When I walk down the streets I see a lot of people just surviving. They are not happy, they do not have purpose or direction. They are not really living. They are going through the motions every day. We need to have purpose and direction in order to be happy and one way to give someone purpose is to give them the freedom to dream, to be creative, to be themselves.
Each of us is unique and we all have different talents and skills, but our school system is trying to force all of us to learn the same way. This does not work. We need to make learning a more personal activity and more suited to the unique interests of each child. We have a lot more to offer our children then the school system we have now. We could set up a school system where there is a lot more freedom and a lot less structure where we provide each child with the opportunity to learn what they want to learn, when they want to learn it. We could broaden the types of subjects we offer to include things like the trades, farming, cooking, parenting, civil service, politics, economics, philosophy, logic, rhetoric etc. Each child is interested in something different so if we have teachers with a wide variety of interests we offer students more choices and could let students choose which classes they wanted to attend. Classes would be smaller but this would allow a child to have a more personalized and fulfilling school experience and would create better citizens and workers after they are done school.
Our society as a whole would benefit from a new system of learning because each person would be free to do something they like doing and still support their family. We would have a happier population which would be more productive and healthier. This would cut down on the costs of a large number of government programs and enable the government to have a balanced budget with money available to spend on things like the military, infrastructure, healthcare, welfare, etc. Everyone would have a fulfilling life because they would be doing what they love doing and not seeking after money. This would allow for the development of better relationships with our friends and family which would give even more joy to everyone.
Everything in our lives is connected. If we spend our whole life at a job we hate than we will carry that unhappiness from work into our relationships and home life. This will result in an unhappy home and a lot more resentment and a negative outlook on your whole life. We need to encourage creativity and dreaming so that people can use their unique talents and skills to their fullest potential. We need to foster the natural interest children have for learning by making school a more personalized experience where each child can learn more about the things that interest them. Only when we allow people the freedom to dream can they reach their full potential and live meaningful and joy-filled lives.
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