Truly, I think we’re in the Zombie Apocalypse. It’s a perfect metaphor for our current society of people reduced to mindless producer/consumer states. There’s a general sense of discontent along with ridiculous rates of anxiety, depression, and chronic disease conditions and yet people accept this fate with little resistance, moving unquestioningly through the prescribed path to becoming one of the living dead: go to school, get good grades so you can get into a good college so you can get a good job so you can attract a mate, get married and have children, buy a house, fantasize about vacations and retirement, spend evenings numbing out in front of a screen, live for the weekends, you know the recipe.
If you read my post, You’ve Been Schooled, you’ll find a list of ways that our school system prepares us for this bleak, depressing consumerist future. Children are reprogrammed to suppress their intuition and deny their own needs for play and self-discovery, never developing the strong sense of self needed to create satisfying and meaningful lives. They graduate from a system that directed nearly every minute of 10,000 hours (and this is without college) of their lives up to this point, disabling their own internal compass and ensuring compliance with our consumerist culture.
I believe humans come wired for contribution, each with unique strengths that support the whole. We’re driven to create and innovate, with bodies that reward us with feel-good chemicals when we’re engaged in those behaviors that call on our natural talents and when we lock arms with our fellow humans to maximize our resources. Ongoing movement throughout the day, generosity, and a sense of purpose are all natural parts of being human, so why aren’t most of us living a lifestyle that reflects this?
Because we’ve all been schooled. Broken like wild stallions. The human spirit is much stronger than it would appear these days, but how is one to resist the slow, steady reprogramming toward external drivers? Rewards and punishments, baby! Mandatory coercive schooling over a long period of time will break just about anyone. Soon a body wants to do nothing if there’s no external reward. We seek the “juice” through other means when our grades fail to provide dopamine hits; social media and video games become the drugs of choice for those who don’t conform well to the authoritarian paradigm of school.
Most five and six and twelve year olds want that damned gold star. They want to please their teachers and be seen as competent. In fact, according to self-determination theory, along with autonomy and relatedness, a sense of competence is imperative to our psychological well-being. What happens when you don’t get these needs met? Depression, anxiety, addiction. We end up creating an attachment void that gets filled with virtual or chemical substitutes for authentic connection.
This is nothing new. I’m just one more outraged voice among many who see the wreckage and fear the future of a world filled with sheeple. Why hasn’t there been a revolution?! To demand change requires courage to leave the mainstream, imagination and innovation to create new ways of doing things, risk-tolerance to try those new ways knowing we’ll fail many times before we get it right and others might mock us. Courage, imagination, innovation, resilience: all natural human traits that we’ve sacrificed to our “education.”
Restoring Justis 