Author Disclaimer: The following work is analogous to fan fiction in your favorite sci-fi world. I do not intend to infringe or misappropriate any real-world ideas or work. Any similarity to concepts or work is purely coincidental. This is Part One of a series I call “Bitcoin: What-If.” Marvel can’t own that, right?😉
What If … Education
Centralized education has failed the individual. That’s not to say that all students are failures. Rather the education structure employed by most of the civilized world 1) creates an environment that picks winners and losers much like the fiat monetary system, 2) has not kept pace with the rate of technology and information growth in subject matter and infrastructure, and 3) discourages free thought while driving its participants to capitulate to a specific viewpoint.
The compulsory education as known in most of the contemporary world ironically fails to remain contemporary. The infrastructure of the academic system has made little change since the “Committee of Ten” established it at the end of the 19th century.
With that structure came many other philosophies that have shaped the country’s and the world’s general outlook on education. The Committee of Ten of 1892, made up of high school and collegiate educators, determined that “…every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease.”
What does this sound like? Keynesian economics, which is a “macroeconomic economic theory of total spending in the economy” according to Investopedia, chooses to minimize the importance and uniqueness of the individual’s action. This perspective chooses to employ generalizations, prejudices, and heuristics over critical thought and tailored analysis that answers questions about human action and individual incentives.
Contrarily, Austrian economics “can be expressed in terms of microeconomic foundations,” as Steven Horwitz stated in his book “Microfoundations And Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective.” From a rational perspective, the macro/corporate entity is made up of the micro/individual, not the opposite. Therefore, if the capability is available, the individual must be the basis of economic study.
Education has missed out on true prosperity similar to the corporate-focused Keynesian economic world. This has resulted in individual students being left behind for the sake of “taking the easy road.” Even The Committee of Ten claimed that better academic success would follow the simplification of teacher training through the unification of content taught. To these academic central planners, it was more important to get a task completed than to get a task right!
Where does this track of thought lead us? To accept information propagated by authority because of the existence of the office rather than the rationale resonating from the office. In other words, “Do not question what you are told.” What is science? Prior to 1900, a sovereign creator was considered a legitimate origin theory. In the 20th century, the uncontested centralized perspective states that man evolved from fish. Instead of encouraging the understanding of both positions and enabling Socratic learning for students to choose (and maybe change their mind over time with more information), educators of the “free world” oppress one view and promote another. As long as there is a centralized mandate for education, it will always be a form of social programming.
While science may be an acceptable compromise to those that wish to erase the concept of God, the same forced narrative takes place with the dissemination of history to students. Did President Abraham Lincoln really care about the evils of slavery or did he want to preserve the union’s tax revenue golden goose in the south? Was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a courageous hero of freedom or did he bait the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor to sway the public and Congress to favor a lucrative total war in Europe? Is Black Lives Matter a destructive Marxist group preying on social strife in America or are they the new banner carriers for civil rights like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X before them?
History and science in a fiat world is written by the victors. The education of our youth is directly impacted by this coercive, centralized approach.
While the argument over “whose science” and “which history” could be debated endlessly, the subject matters of English, science, history and mathematics have been the core of primary and secondary education since the Committee of Ten report over 125 years ago. All the while, as finance and economics are immensely more important now than before, students are still learning about flowers in biology until ninth grade. We are in a world where five-year-olds navigate touchscreen operating systems, but software design is rarely available as an elective for highschoolers. One could place the blame on a slothful industry lacking initiative or funding to progress. But if this system is truly another pillar of the fiat ponzi scheme, then the limited, outdated, and redundant education is by design to inhibit broad scholastic progress. Therefore, to protect a skewed system where the powerful few understand and monopolize control over money, it would be counter-intuitive to educate the masses about how their natural rights are continually infringed.
Natural rights? Where in school do we discuss if we have natural property rights to our body and our labor? Is that up for a debate? Or is that part of the education that in order to justify government encroachment of property, people must never think they truly own anything, including themselves? We are left with an education system where the student, without intervention of a parent, church, or their own pursuits, will be subject to learn twisted history, skewed science, unapplied mathematics, and centralized literature. Additionally, students remain unaware of the natural laws of existence as a human and receive zero instruction on navigating the economic landscape of this world. Academics, as it is today, is antithetical to the concept of liberty. Its proponents must fervently defend the wasted time of students and money of taxpayers so as to protect the most efficient avenue for propagating control over the next generation: abject nascence. But all is not lost. As you may have heard before, Bitcoin fixes this.
It Is Sometime In The Early 2040s …
In this future there is hope. In this future, humanity prospers. Fiat money has capitulated to Bitcoin, the decentralized monetary network, and has consumed nearly all value of many countries’ fiat wealth. Through years of violently volatile trading with world governments being public buyers, bitcoin surged through bull and bear markets whose end was only marked by the 2033 Bitcoin International Treaty (B.I.T.) to dismantle central banks across the world for the sake of a new Bitcoin monetary standard, 100 years after Executive Order 6102 that forbade the individual ownership of gold by U.S. citizens for a period of time. Nearly all governments in North America, Europe, South America, South Asia, Middle East, Africa, would adopt bitcoin-backed regional digital tokens (dollar, euro, peso, rupee, dinar, franc). These currencies had levels of government oversight and insurance that was more palatable to a segment of the population.
Some countries in Oceania and Asia remain obstinate to a hard money supply, like China and Australia. They did not participate in B.I.T. and outlawed owning any alternate currency or token, especially bitcoin. Instead they chose the path of surveilled and coercive CBDCs as they continued to slowly steal the wealth from their constituents. CBDC implementation was made easier upon outlawing emmigration a few years before as citizens of some countries became essentially prisoners.
Because the Bitcoin world virtually ceased inflation, the exchange rate of 1BTC became 25 million North American dollars. As the age of central banks came to a close, governments also began divesting other areas of society on which they had previously dominated. The world quickly discovered the limitations of government reach when sound money is the root of all human action.
Forced Adaptation
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many to make drastic, unprepared changes in their educational life. Parents were not ready to police their children for at-home learning. Students lost fear of discipline for absent-mindedness and effortlessness. Teachers began to mail-in their effort behind video conferencing and irregular meetings. They were also forced to make due with curriculum and tools not designed for distance learning.
As society moved past the pandemic, something interesting, yet familiar happened: humanity found opportunity in apparent barriers. Schools began to leverage premade online courses as aids to in-person education. High-achieving students showed similar concept retention as with live teaching. The more automated lessons were implemented, the more teachers were able to act as supplemental tutors focused on lagging students. The problem with many traditionally “poor” students was found to be a lack of attention from teachers. This was an impossible issue to solve with overcrowding classrooms. The relationships teachers made with these students became a difference-maker for overall classroom success when implementing this simple technology supplement.
The teaching profession was going through a redefinition, not an extinction. Construction workers were not made non-existent because of cranes and bulldozers. Accountants did not disappear because of tax software. These individuals were rather empowered to achieve more with technology at their…
Read More:Bitcoin What-If The Education System
2022-03-30 20:00:00
