Education should teach us limits and detours

"To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Though I have never met anyone who was pleased with their personal limits, I have met many who simply accepted them. Many more who had no idea what their limits were.

People gladly and enthusiastically fight for freedom when a charismatic leader urges them in that direction. Yet most people don't even sense that they are losing their freedoms (gaining tighter limits) if the change happens slowly enough and sufficient rationale is given to satisfy the noisy ones.

The only way we can know if we are losing our freedoms is for these to be taught to us as children. We should also be taught what freedoms others have, or lack thereof, so we have some means of comparison.

When it comes to our own personal limitations, most people don't know what theirs are. They assume they don't have any and proceed as if the road to glory is paved with gold, only littered slightly by others who have the annoying habit of getting in our way.

We must give opportunities to children to learn what their limitations are so they will have the chance to overcome them. A person whose legs don't work knows what lies ahead in terms of getting around without the use of legs.

A person who has trouble reading because of a characteristic within their own brain should have the same advantage. Otherwise we label such a person as "slow," thus condemning that person forever to treating a road block as a prison, without pointing to a detour around it.

We each have limitations within our own brain. Our education systems, our religions and our family orientations are not designed to identify these limitations. This explains why we seem to have so many stupid people among us.

Stupid people have accepted their limitations, and generally ignore them.

Education systems could easily be changed to accommodate this new objective of identifying personal limitations are helping to work around them.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to eliminate stupid people by teaching them about detours before they imprison themselves.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl