Equality in Education

I violated my own rule last night, I did.  I pitched a bitch at the world and didn't include a possible solution to the problem I was complaining about.  But, according to the calendar it's still the same day, so I can still slide it under the wire and redeem my resolve.

Preamble:

The essence of my complaint is the observable fact a great many will take on an air of personal superiority towards their fellows based on a negative, a denial.  We don't smoke, we don't drink, we don't do drugs, we don't allow pubic hair, we don't vote (the other party), we don't watch professional wrestling... you get the picture.  Not to say that removing any or all of those things from a life is a bad thing, no, none of those are of necessity a bad thing.  But what is a bad thing is the cumulative impact of pride based in the event-negative on the emotional environment.

I'd like you to stop for just a moment and consider, if you will, what you in and of yourself would use for a definition for a term I just used: the emotional environment.  Take a moment, please, and get a working handle on that term, it is a key concept in a great deal of my thoughts concerning the how and why society has evolved to be as it is.

It is easily seen that since pride is a rigid thing maintaining pride based in event-negative reasoning all but demands a reduction in empathy and understanding.  It is the overall loss and degradation of empathy created by such socially sanctioned pride which is the core problem to be addressed, a problem whose ultimate consequences far exceed the damage potentials of even the most extreme damage potentials of any one of the events (smoking, drugs, etc et al) which are used to sponsor such rigid pride.

Application:

The event bringing these thoughts to focus was a post on my friend CJ's blog WWST concerning smoking in art, and of course this instantly produced a long run of testimonial commentary, most of which carried evidence of either an event-negative pride or some degree of social contrition.  Of course what was not mentioned, never is, are the underlying reasons people bring such afflictions into their lives in the first place. 

Since it is my considered opinion the greater majority of self inflicted injuries (of all sorts, smoking simply one of the older and more prominent) are an individual's way of marking themselves as one who has accepted (even and especially accepted subconsciously) a subservient role in their society the key to alleviating such maladies is to remove as many of the dividing lines as possible, not in the society as such but rather in the barriers to understanding found within the individuals of that society.  To this end I would propose using the education establishment, specifically, to use the dividing line between the science and technology disciplines and the various humanities to emulate the dividing line stretched across society between those who habitually provide and those who habitually consume.

When one sets about achieving a degree in the sciences, the technologies, it is required you spend some preset minimum of time studying elements of the humanities.  This is sound wisdom, but it is a wisdom applied unequally.  Where the engineers (to set them symbolic) are exposed to the most diverse range of the humanities that can be effectively communicated in short form those studying the humanities are not required to sample the demands placed on the engineers any more than the average social consumer is compelled to understand the life of the average social provider.  At most they are exposed to some abstract science in short form, little more than an extension of high school memorize and regurgitate level thought.  If they are to actually understand the effort demanded of the engineers (and those who will populate the engineers' world) across a lifetime of maintaining the physical world they need a bit more than just that.

If everyone in the universities were required to actually apply elements from some area on the far side of that dividing line as a mandatory project I believe the net result would be a most beneficial gain in empathetic understanding, and the chain of circumstances and causality initiated by that empathetic understanding educated in would go a long, long way to alleviating the hidden but terribly potent biases which pollute the emotional environment with negative-event prides and bigotries, the same pollution which leave a great many thinking of their life as an ignoble servitude to be defaced if not deliberately shortened to escape the discomfort.