1) If we want an economically-abundant society we have to invest in our people.
2) It is good to earn what one needs rather than to depend upon subsidies from others. This is known as “independence.”
3) Dependence should be temporary, not permanent.
4) Even better than independence is interdependence, a sense of family, of mutual support groups, of bringing grandparents and even he community in on helping to parent.
5) The teacher’s job, on every grade level, is to show the relevance to the child’s life of what was just learned, to tie the acquired new knowledge in with experience.
6)
If one is a social change agent, or wants to be, the best way to break into the education system is on the state and municipal level, on the local level: it is to help city Superintendents and school Principals to widen their perspective, since they have more autonomy than the bureaucrats in the federal Department of Education. Think globally and act locally. This is the best way to intervene in the system. Today, for the most part, schools just train people for a traditional job; they don’t teach creative thinking, and a focus on priorities: on solving the pressing problems of today – we know what they are: personal corruption, the worship of the god of money, gun-violence, lack of mental-health counseling, the lack of meaningful jobs, etc.7) How can we help the principals and teachers? Teach them a new ethic: to adapt to a new paradigm of rapid change, to acknowledge that we live in a global economy, with automation replacing non-innovative workers, that the student should know that the career he has at 20 is not the career he will have at 40.
8. Governments can get so big that they impose bad laws and bad regulations that are not effective. Smaller government can often be more efficacious government.
9) So work on the local level to solve pressing problems. We as a country need to get a handle on education. We need to teach a coherent, 21st-century ethics, one that directs us to build a world where emergency situations are less likely to arise because we have arranged things that way. We need to build trust and foster empathy. -
10) Robert S. Hartman taught me: Things don’t have freedom of choice; nor do theories or systems.
Many, if not most, historical ethical theories however “agree that moral problems arise because of man’s freedom of choice, and that a person in an emergency situation – such as for example, a foxhole, a burning airplane, any situation of violence -- is not free and hence incapable of moral action. Such situations are amoral. They are always situations where a person is caught in a dilemma between two evils. Being thus deprived of free choice he is deprived of his very humanity. Few ethical theories draw the conclusion, as they should, that it is a person’s duty to avoid getting caught in such situations.” Let's build a world that minimizes such situations !!
....Your thoughts on these points?
To learn more about the latest breakthrough in ethical theory, see these threads:viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9461
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