The Story of Stuff

[IDMclean]

One can view the whole story in sequence here at the website: The Story of Stuff.

 

There is something wrong with a society that values economic prosperity above all other qualities or properties of the society such as education, innovation, creativity, or health.

 

YouTube - The Story of Stuff - Ch.1: Introduction http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqZMTY4V7Ts

 

The social emphasis on consumerism has robbed this country of many opportunities to flourish, to grow and develop beyond it's initial limitations.

 

By explicitly stating our values and developing procedures that foster those values by their very practice, we could build for ourselves a new renaissance though first we must overcome the commodification of education, a tragedy of which has afflicted our students with the greatest of scholarly illnesses: apathy.

 

YouTube - A Vision of Students Today http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

 

The way in which we use educational institutions has failed to keep up with the way in which we use and produce the medias that are most beneficial to the education of individuals and societies. It seems as though they, the educational institutions have failed to head the wisdom of great minds such as Einstein when he said "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." and Marshall Mcluhan when he said "Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."

 

Our schools today are the same institutions, with minor variation, that educated our great great grandparents at beginning of the industrial revolution; as such, we have been raised and educated for a system that simply no longer exists. The 19th Century classroom was designed for the factory work, farmer, businessman, and civil servant--hardly a fitting system for educating pioneering scientists, multimedia savvy scholars/researchers, innovative engineers; empathic, knowledgeable, moral, professional parents; and medical professionals.

 

Our's is system in crisis, and one that needs intensive care and rehabilitation. I believe we must examine the validity of assumptions that our founders made given the tools and conditions of their era and adjust our own models to more accurately reflect the present conditions in the face of what we discover by our examinations.

 

I look forward to what I hope will be a lively discussion.

-Ian