A while back Shaggz commented on an IEET discussion thread that religion should be evaluated in the same way as any other technology to decide how useful it is in the modern context. His point was that we have moved from pen and ink to typewriters to computers and at some point to direct input to computer by thought. Anyone in the transhumanism community can talk about the exponential curve of technological progress in our present time. Our children look at things that we never dreamed of existing as not only commonplace, but often obsolete.

Social progress has not kept pace with technological progress. We may be adaptable primates with all kinds of cool gear, but we are essentially still adaptable primates. Institutions such as government, business, religion and education remain very much as they have been. It is as if we were still trying to run our modern supercomputers on DOS. I suppose it would be possible, but it certainly isn’t the best way of using the new technology.

A social technology in the context that I am speaking of here is a process that we use to interface with the world and each other and/or the method of teaching that interface to the next generation.
I will take education as an example. Sir Ken Robinson talks about how our education system is outmoded. It is primarily set up as a system for creating the next generation of workers. To break down education into its component parts we find that literacy and social training are the norm early in the process. It is vital to open the doors of literacy to young people as early as possible. Social training is important as well.

Indeed Robert Fulghum wrote a book entitled “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”. He lists the lessons that Kindergarten attempts to teach. This is a part of that list:

Share everything.



Play fair.

Don't hit people. 



Put things back where you found them. 



Clean up your own mess. 



Don't take things that aren't yours.



Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

As students progress into other subjects they start to learn other messages than what they learned in Kindergarten. They learn to conform, to only ask safe questions, that the world isn’t fair, that it is always someone else’s fault, that there is only one right way – the way they’ve been taught, and probably the most important lesson – don’t get caught. Our education system is predicated on teaching the young what to think and making sure that they will be ready for the ‘real world’ when they graduate.

Most of the assumptions about education are based on the primary assumption that the teacher has the answers and the students need to learn those answers. This is sent up marvelously in the Simpson's episode in which Lisa steals all the answers books from the teachers. The reality is that answers are easy. They are all over the internet. Anyone can have an answer to almost any question in a matter of minutes as long as they have a computer and internet access. The problem is that not all answers are created equal; some are better than others, some are wrong. What we need to be teaching is how to evaluate the answers they find, not what answers are acceptable.

Education is much more complex than I’ve presented here, but the basic fact that we are educating children for a world that no longer exists is still true. So what do we do about it?

Education reform has been kicked around for decades. We know the system is mostly failing, but we don’t know how to fix it. I suspect a large part of our struggle is that we don’t really know what we want from education. Rather than tweaking standardized tests or comparing our children to those in Korea or Sweden, maybe we need to start by talking about what the end product of education should be. This is where we need to separate information from learning.



It is no longer necessary to pass on information. It is already available. What we do need to pass on is the ability to think creatively and critically about the information that is available. If technology continues to progress at its present rate we will need minds that are able to think in ways that we find hard to imagine right now. Teachers could spend much less time teaching information and much more teaching thinking skills.

The basic rubrics of education are still functional; bring children and adults together to teach literacy and social skills. The shift will be that the end goal will not be a class that knows the correct answer, but children who can come up with new answers and evaluate their usefulness. People are experimenting with different ways of accomplishing this goal.

A similar analysis of government, business and religion are also possible. In each case we are functioning in a way that actually holds us back. Old systems fail to provide the necessary framework to function in the modern world. The profit over every model of modern corporate capitalism is destroying resources. The assumption that democracy is about voting and not accountability is creating politic structures that fear making any change. The concept of religion as being the arbiter of “TRUTH” is creating division and misunderstanding among people who would otherwise be cooperating.

There is no easy way to re-write our program. I don’t think it is impossible. The beginning is for individuals to take to heart the list of learning from Fulghum’s book above. That immediately puts social accountability above other motivations.

I would add a couple that need to be there before people are ready to change the world:

Ask questions.

Think for yourself.