submitted by jwithrow.
Too often we associate the word opportunity with the availability of jobs. We tell our young folks to go where the opportunity is so they march off to the nearest metropolitan city to join the rat race.
How come we never tell our young people that they have the ability to create the opportunity themselves?
We think that the answer to this question is largely because we have been shaped by centralized government education. We refer to it as government education because the Department of Education has gradually imposed itself upon our school systems over time. Whereas we once had school systems that were beholden to parents and local communities, we now have federally mandated curriculum, Department of Education approved textbooks, and compulsory education laws bullying parents into compliance.
Our government subsidized educational system is focused on itself, not those it purports to serve.
The primary educational system (K-12) is focused on molding kids into obedient students that can one day be productive cogs in the wheel. Creativity and critical thinking are subverted by the centralized curriculum and the centralized structure. Students are taught to be dependent on the ‘expert’.
The higher educational system focuses on selling degrees at an enormous price made possible by the abundance of government student loans. The system touts the ability of college graduates to obtain high paying corporate jobs after graduation as justification for the high costs.
The result is that we are conditioned to be obedient worker bees that do not question authority and we base success solely upon income level.
And the rat-race perpetuates.
Even if the college graduate is able to obtain a high paying corporate job, the cost of servicing student loan debt offsets some of this income. And speaking from experience we can say that most of these corporate jobs do not offer a very rewarding experience.
Most of these jobs represent nothing more than a cog in a giant bureaucratic wheel in which employees are required to perform the same menial tasks repetitively day in and day out. Their input is not welcomed and their output is not appreciated. These jobs require employees to sit in a small cubicle under a fluorescent light for at least forty hours every week. And it is not uncommon for commute times to be greater than an hour for many employees also.
The quality of pay is high with these corporate jobs but the quality of life tends to be fairly low.
This doesn’t sound much like opportunity to us.
It’s time to re-examine the way we think about what opportunity is. Technology is rapidly changing the marketplace and the jobs that traditional education prepares us for are diminishing.
But this is a good thing! The diminishing jobs are centralized and boring. The new opportunities are decentralized and exciting! One but has to recognize opportunity knocking.