The Reflective Educator

Education ∪ Math ∪ Technology

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The greatest thing you’ll ever learn

"The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved in return." ~ eben ahbez

I want to challenge the notion that the best things we learn in schools are the academic and job preparation skills, but instead the "soft" skills, all of those skills we supposedly learned in kindergarten.

There are areas where our society is in turmoil because these lessons have not been learned by everyone. Love each other is a very important concept, and one where we, as a society, need a lot of work. From Tea Partiers who believe that we should not fund education for everyone, to Internet trolls who post cruel and disgusting things on a 13 year old’s work, we see a lot of evidence of a lack of love in the world. We see it in how we distribute our "wealth" amongst our citizens, and how we prioritize funding for different programs, both in the Western world, and for aid programs abroad. If we lived in a world where "love thy neighbour" was actually followed by everyone, would we even need aid programs for the "under-developed" world?

While I am grateful for all of the scientific knowledge that we have, it seems that our ability to solve scientific (requiring academic skills) is vastly superior to our ability to solve even the simplest of social problems. Perhaps it is time for our society to focus on solving the social problems for a while? Maybe one of the roles of school should be to develop "good" citizens?