I was just reading a summary of the basic education vision in Finland for 2045, and I just feel it is too little too late.
The task of comprehensive schools is to increase competence and the willingness to use knowledge to advance the common good. Sound knowledge and basic skills are combined with ethical, social and flexible thinking skills, as well as the ability to guide one’s own learning.
Considering this is the vision for two decades down the track where they are finally starting to look at developing social skills for the common good and developing connection with parents, to build meaning, it should have really happened two decades ago. Instead of making the changes necessary to deal with the incursion of social media and the impact of the digital environment, they took a "wait and see" approach that leaned more into digital reliance, rather than handling what was the obvious outcome of an uncontrolled profit model that targets and influences behaviours, emotions, and creates a multitude of unrealistic expectations.
Of course, the argument is that it is the parents job to prepare children, and I agree. However, I also believe that "school" can bring a lot of value at the social level, where kids can get valuable experience and practice with human behaviour. It might not need to be a formal school of course, but with how much time we are spending alone in front of a screen and increasingly so, all opportunity to interact face to face should be embraced and leveraged.
Wellbeing should be the core focus of government activity, where innovation and industry are all geared toward delivering and improving wellbeing at all levels. Everything the government do, including incentives for business, should increase the demand on wellbeing delivery. We as consumers should be forcing wellbeing too.
But the thing is, that for many decades, we have been conditioned to believe that money equals wellbeing, that wealth is health at the societal level. And we have been happy to be brainwashed into this position, because it has meant that we as individuals can enjoy things that don't actually add to our own wellbeing as well. Rather than take responsibility for ourselves, we have pushed our health as a society to corporations who have zero interest in our health.
And unfortunately, while we can argue about government and corporations and individualism, the fact is that for any of us to truly be our best, we need others to improve also. We need to surround ourselves with quality. Quality food, quality information, and quality people. We need good people around us, ideally from before we are born, all the way through to our death. People who can support us, and people we are willing to support also.
Is the quality of the individual falling?
I believe so. Despite having the most information and tools at our disposal, we have overall degraded across so many of the aspects that bring us together. I know I have degraded personally, and it is far easier to keep the same trajectory than change course. And it is because of the ease of which we are able to avoid improving ourselves, especially in regard to our social selves, it sets up a huge challenge to overcome.
Complacency.
I think most of us have become complacent, which has increased the impact of the corporations even more, as we just go along with whatever marketing they push our way. Whatever makes our immediate experience more convenient has taken precedence, and this has affected every aspect of our lives, at every level, for everyone. Even as the numbers have showed the decline for years, rather than changing course, we instead doubled-down and kept right on going.
Changes in schooling won't do much, unless there are changes in every other aspect of our lives as well, where people start putting people at the top of the agenda, with the focus on improving wellbeing. We are not important in the grand scheme of the universe, but as a species, we are of utmost importance and need to start developing ourselves and our innovations to support the improvement of humanity. A tall order, that will likely amount to nothing, because it is much easier to do nothing, than what is needed to be done.
Just think about how hard it is to do the easy things you don't want to do, and then think how hard it will be for eight billion of us to do hard things we don't want to do.
Meaningless.
Taraz
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Our overall well-being ought to be a priority as humans especially for our children as they are vulnerable and easily targeted. It even affects adults too as many of us refuse to take care of our health and to make matters worse we take substances that make it deteriorate. It is a shame that we engage in activities that worsen our well-being as humans under the guise of enjoying ourselves. What many forget is that health is wealth because if our health fails us no matter the amount of money or wealth we have acquired, it can all go into taking care of our health.
Parents have more to do than the school since most of what the students are exposed to at an early stage of their life stems from home. The institutions too have a role to pay in safeguarding the interest of the youth and kids in the society.
And I don't think many are doing their job. Many parent out of convenience also, so all the kids get is the attention that convenience offers.
"Whole child" health is starting to become a thing here too, but sadly the politicians are still pushing for standardized testing and things like that so the funds and resources to address the other issues like social and emotional ones are quite lacking. Then you have half the population that is being told social emotional health is a joke or a myth and that doesn't help either.
Much better to spend it all on military and pumping derivative markets.
Right!? 😛
Of course they can. That is where I got almost all my social experience as a kid growing up. Bad or Good, kids learn to deal with all sorts of social challenges in school environments. Isn't that an implied part of the education?
The problem is here (and other places I hear) is that things like dealing with conflict is now pushed to the teachers instead. And they don't have the tools either. Let kids sort it out when young, so they can deal with it when adults.
It feels like we optimized for convenience and profit at the cost of connection, and now we’re trying to retrofit wellbeing into a system that was never designed for it. I agree schools matter, but they can’t fix what culture, tech, and incentives keep breaking every day. Complacency is the quiet enemy here it’s so easy to drift. Still, conversations like this are part of the pushback. If enough of us start choosing people over convenience, even in small ways, the trajectory can change.
The system is definitely not built for wellbeing - just profit maximisation. We are screwed.
Sounds like they're finally acknowledging the fire while the house is already ash, but as they always say, better late than never i guess.
Unless it is too late.
By turning the classroom into just another screen-based environment, we essentially handed the keys of childhood development over to the profit models you mentioned. We’ve outsourced our physical and mental health to corporations whose only metric for "wellness" is whether or not you’re still a paying customer.
And once bled dry, they take no more interest.
I think the culture of convenience has taken over our overall wellbeing. Schools can help, but true change needs a shift in what society values, putting human connection over profit.
The problem is that if there is no value on society, society has no values.
Here they say "school teach, parents educate" but how can parents educate when they work 8-18 and then back home eat and go sleep? School should modernize with current struggles of parents... As always something is done when is too late or the damage done already
I also think we are degradating, before people were more community driven, there was more collaboration etc... I think the west is doomed already, and we are seeing the twilight of it
How can parents educate if they aren't educated themselves, and spend their free time on screens too?
Yeah, I reckon. Most of us are screwed.
That's true, the other day I was at the children's doctor and there were 2 parents both on the screen totally ignoring the little kid, an other mum watching videos and ignoring the daughter... Fucking hell
Yeah, it is pathetic .... and the norm.
We have confused standard of living with quality of life; as long as we continue to measure success in terms of wealth instead of social well-being and human quality, we will remain trapped in complacency. 👋
We are trapped forever. Well, until we destroy ourselves completely.
What I noticed is that even at our daughter's private school that is an accredited International Bacalature school for middle schoolers my wife still has to be involved on a daily basis and we have two private tutors helping out as well...
So basically if you want it done right then do it yourself, no school will do it all for your kid...