Access to educational resources: orientation and priorities

Logic sometimes leads to absurdities: how can humans come to compete with pigs for food? This 12-minute Brazilian film " The Island of Flowers", made in 1989, demonstrates this with humor.

This inhuman logic develops for what is material and complicated to reproduce, such as houses, food, or again, for what is rare and coveted, such as waterfront land or social privileges.

In education, we manage to deprive humans of educational data that can be reproduced almost at no cost in this Internet age. How is this achieved?  Asking the question eventually identifies the strategy to solve the problem.

Scarcity of education?  Education at scarcity.

Almost everywhere on earth the poorest populations, including in Europe or America, have access only to poor quality education, if any education worthy of the name.

When entire populations operate under excessive pressure, whether economic. social or political, school or the Internet are forgotten as means of social improvement.

The basic conditions for survival depend essentially on a distribution of income opportunities, opportunities that are increasingly imposed (in the sense of taxation) or limited by "possessors": pension funds, privileged heirs of a system and authorities who take their percentage in passing and distribute the fruits to their friends, investors, consulting companies, army, police, lawyers.   They finally leave only crumbs.

Before talking about internet accessibility or education projects, ignoring this first condition only leads to a system that continues to propagate and teach by example a logic of scarcity and undue privilege.

Teacher responsibilities and critical pedagogy

What is currently taught in the top schools is most often "how to make this system work"; and the seats are coveted.

What is generally studied and taught, whether about elementary particles (1) or the molecules of life (2), luxury product design or the administration of a commune or hospital (3), participates in and depends on the operating system in place, and does not contemplate reorientation.

We have a right to question the priorities of research and teaching. Teaching the balance of economic and social motivations, which are a force to be directed and not ignored, with human values, is an urgent priority if we want to see real access to knowledge and education realized.

There is a way to offer each subject that does not necessarily aim for the privilege of getting to the next round nor to sing the glories of a system that feeds us at the expense of others and of life itself on this earth.

Overlooking this responsibility of education will not make us any less responsible for the plight of our contemporaries who will nonetheless never come to our classrooms or even through the internet.

References

The Island of Flowers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZFFHRfpq6s

Leadership training drift curbed by MOOCs?
https://cursus.edu/11643/les-derives-de-la-formation-des-dirigeants-freinees-par-les-mooc

1. The Higgs boson will never have any application except the prestige of those who identify it.
   
   
2. Not the ones for malaria, but the ones for diabetes and other "paying" diseases.
   
   
3. *Investment is made in drugs, transplants, molecular, genetic technologies, etc, but crumbs for prevention, diet, exercise, personal care. Low-paying activities for a medical industry.