Schools Teach Children To Be Mindless Consumers

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought thatperhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position.Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-born American economist (1908-2006)

Alas, Mr. Galbraith's statement bore more truth than even he may have realized.

First of all, a Canadian study a few years ago for McLeans magazine showed that only six percent of Canadian adults read more than three books per year. Considering that many people read books related to their work--indeed, must read them, such as medical doctors and other professionals, to stay up with advances in their respective fields--the number of people who read for pleasure, including those who read nonfiction simply to learn more, must be tragically small.

Although I have not seen similar studies relating to citizens of the USA or other western countries, I have no reason to believe that their reading rates would differ from those of Canadians.

Oh, we read, most of us. We read junk mail delivered to our homes, prodigious quantities of emails that serve us no good, internal memoes that usually mean nothing to us in our workplace and news in newspapers, magazines or on the internet. Those news sources that we choose ourselves tend to be biased, as all news sources are. The news sources we choose tend to all be biased in the same directions, preventing us from getting confused by a wide variety of opinions.

Thus we come to believe that our news sources present a fair and reasonable assessment of the news of the day. If our chosen news sources don't cover a story, it can't be important. Or we simply chose to believe that all other events are of lesser importance such that they don't deserve to breach our personal intellectual radars.

Thereby we funnel ourselves into comfortable grooves where we believe that most other people in the world think like ourselves. It may not be true, but we believe it's true, through practice and habit. Thus we come to take comfortably pretentious positions, as Galbraith noted.

When something that someone says or writes violates the sanctity of our cozy corner of thought, we think that person or organization must be on the fringe, likely dangerous because it might cause others to come around to its position. As we have persuaded ourselves that those who do not think like us are not "normal" or "average" or right, some of us feel it necessary to expunge the sources of such anti-social thought from public consciousness. We bitch and criticize and condemn.

We believe it is only right, indeed our duty, to prevent seditious thoughts from invading the minds of innocent people ("Save the children!") to the possible extent that others begin to think differently from us, in progressively larger numbers.

Eventually, the "we" referenced above get old, become disregarded by the younger generation in power, die off and join history as "those who thought differently in those bygone days." Some of them were strong supporters of slavery, believing that some people (always the social group to which they belonged) were naturally superior to others and had the right to treat them like pets or hunting prey.

The original aboriginal tribe of Newfoundland, Canada, for example, whose skin colour most likely resembled the "red skins" that Europeans began to call all natives of North America, were literally hunted into extinction, for sport. The unsociable Beotuk Indians had a habit of covering their exposed skin with red ochre, making them sufficiently different that Europeans thought they should be eliminated as a threat to social purity.

After that we had men who thought women so intellectually stupid that they should not have the right to vote, to equal pay for equal work, to be treated without abuse or to receive compensation if they were chucked out of their homes by their men (owners) who got tired of them.

Even today we have men in some western societies who believe that war is the only way to subjugate inferior peoples. Our leaders--who may be among these people--may tell lies to persuade enough voters to support going to war with ultra-sophisticated weapons and smart bombs against people who can only defend themselves with knives, rifles and stupid car bombs. Somehow there are still people who will believe that making war is the only and best route to peace.

You can see how pretentious the positions of such people must be, that they will believe the lies of the leaders who secured their positions in the first place by lying to those same people to get elected.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a brilliant man who believed his calling was to teach in a university and to write for university students and graduates, had no answers to the dilemma he posed in our quote. Yet there is a solution. And it's a simple one. And extraordinarily cheap.

Teach the children what we want them to know and to be able to think their way through pretentious and lying positions posed by others who want little more than to twist their minds into believing that their lives only have value if they do what their leaders tell them.

Our school systems are set up on a model that prepares young people to be the workers and consumers of the future. That is their whole purpose. And they do it well. But they don't have to teach creative and eager children to be dull automatons who simply do what their corporate employers want them to do and buy what they are told to buy in advertising.

The primary responsibility of parents is to teach their children what they need to know to be competent and confident adults. Many parents today don't do that. They leave that job to schools, even if they naively want to limit and control what the schools teach to the corporate model.

The situation today is not hopeless, as many believe. Change is possible, but only if people talk about it and find ways to teach new parents what they need to know about raising their children effectively and in a healthy manner.

When enough parents teach their own children properly, without leaving it to schools to do the job many parents abdicate, the school systems will eventually change.

Right now too many parents are too concerned about ensuring that the schools their children attend teach to the corporate model. We can talk about his situation until enough people understand how their minds have been manipulated and how the minds of their children are being molded in ways that are unhealthy for them and for the country.

Just talk about it.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves and who need a guide to show what to teach their kids and when.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Buy Your Way To Happiness? Not Likely

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.
- Denis Waitley, American inspirational speaker and author (b. 1924)

What the hell does that mean?

If that was your reaction to the quote, you might be a bit light on the happiness scale, and may not know it.

Think about things that can be owned, earned, worn or consumed. They all require spending money. Thanks to the rich and powerful West and its persistent propaganda telling us that we can't be happy unless we spend money, an unbelievably large number of people in the world equate happiness and spending.

That requires people to have money to be happy, going along that way of thinking. Everyone who is poor must be unhappy, as a corollary. Or at least lack the ability to be truly happy.

People with lots of money spend, spend, spend. And they are happy. Or they believe they are. They must be, they conclude, because they are living the lifestyle that says they must be happy. They believe they are happy because they have been taught to believe that.

Yet look at the divorce rate among these people. Look at the percentage of their kids who take drugs and alcohol and simply can't manage in school. Look at the number who grow up with a video game as a surrogate mother instead of a real one. By the time they are in their teens, they don't want their natural mother anyway, many of them, because their mothers don't know what to do with them. And they have no idea what to do with their mothers.

So they all spend as much as they can to be happier.

But they don't get happier. What they do get is embroiled in addictions and obsessions, causes to which they devote much of their lives--such as their religion of choice or a political party--in a vain effort to teach the rest of the world how to be happy.

Some cults in other parts of the world understand. They have no source of the money needed to spend the way the addicts do in the West. So, jealous of the West and their own inability to get money to spend on the luxuries they believe they need to be happy, they become suicide bombers or terrorists of other stripes. Some kill their own people out of spite.

Most people in poorer countries don't behave that way, of course. But they have gotten the message. They believe that only fate has prevented them from being happy by not giving them the ability to earn money they can spend to make them happy. "Poor me, fate has dealt me such a cruel blow."

However, others in poorer countries do not succumb to the consumerism propaganda. They believe that happiness is what you make for yourself. And what you make for others around you in the process. They become musicians and dancers, for example, and find happiness in their music. They cherish the "spiritual experience of living every minute" with their music. Others get involved with other forms of artistic endeavour.

They lose themselves in whatever they do. Musicians become one with their music. Painters one with their paintings. Actors one with their particular craft, and so on.

Are the arts, then, the secret to happiness? No, it's the giving of themselves to something beneficial or to someone else that is enjoyed and appreciated by others that brings the happiness.

I can't say whether they live each moment with "love, grace and gratitude." Those are Denis Waitley's words. What words would I use? I stumble over them myself now that I have found happiness I could never have understood until recently.

While I was growing up, I was taught repeatedly, at home, at school, at church, playing sports and doing just about every activity involving others my own age that I must come first in my life. I must be in charge. I must be in control. I must succeed at everything. "Pay yourself first" and buy what you can with it. Borrow to buy what you can't afford so that you can show it off to others so they can see your success. Only when I outgrew that infantile, selfish and consumerish way of thinking and began to share my life freely with others did I find happiness.

With happiness, the more you give to others, the more you get back in return. Business doesn't work that way, which is why business wants us to be selfish. And consumers. Business lives for money. A life built around a business model is pretty shallow.

Business, however, cannot be happy. It's emotionless, even sociopathic if you believe some studies. Shaping our lives on a business model not only doesn't bring much happiness in return, it tends to lose for us many of the opportunities for happiness that we could have enjoyed.

Make someone happy today. You'll be glad you did. Really.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children how to be more than consumers, who want them to live lives full of happiness.
Learn more at http://billallin.com