Why not make the primate learning as a new push towards wiping out poverty in learning?
Where am I coming from to say this? Of course, the push has come from my D-quadrant learning leading up to the stage where I can comfortably say: please take another look at how you can teach your sons and daughters what you know to help them focus on learning wherever they are. I know that there will be a disconnect from what has been taught at school as neither my kids nor I need to know the calculus as part of primate learning, but calculus is as part of school learning. But do we really benefit by this primate learning?
Let’s take an example to elaborate on this. Say, I am an electrician by profession. I repair appliances. I may think, why not transfer the knowledge to my kids so that they can continue to do what I do for living without even going to college? My kids then can get into certification program without even going to school? This is bit like – out of the box thinking, right? No, it is part of D-quadrant learning.
The current setting is that even if my kids become experts at it, they cannot do it as they have to be licensed. To get the license, the pre-requisite is that they should have studied up to a certain level at school. Moreover, to become a licensed technician for a manufacturer, you need to be certified by them too. The list of ‘to do’ things keeps growing to stop you from benefiting from the primate learning and, quickly. My question is: why should we stop these benefits derived from primate learning?
I really feel that some of the requirements that are laid out on our younger generation to do some irrelevant studies need to be fine tuned to derive the benefits from the primate learning, instead. Why not give credits for the things learnt inside the family circle? Doesn’t it make the family members to come together and make families to grow stronger? Doesn’t it make the bonding better? We all know that strong families make strong societies. If so, shouldn’t we at least consider the primate learning as part of the overall learning package?
My heart goes out to those mis-directed kids who drop out from schools and colleges because of the value that they miss out from primate learning. I do agree that if parents are not capable, then let it be so that kids need to attend schools and learn to discover few things on their own. I do agree that if I am a son or a daughter of a dentist or a surgeon, I don’t need to become one like them. However, we are missing out on the valuable learning that could come from primate learning irrespective of the profession that our parents are in.
The choices that we make in learning and in broader aspect of choosing a certain kind of life to lead are somewhat convoluted because of the hype that goes along with it to choose that lifestyle and the intense exposure that we are subjected to in doing so. Sometimes, what you can earn by choosing a certain kind of profession becomes a pre-cursor to studying subjects that you don’t even dream of doing otherwise. We all know that money talks. However, we also know this: most of the transactions in earlier days did not involve money; certain items were exchanged for some other items. However, when the usage of currency became a norm to ascertain a fair value for an exchange, it later became convoluted to the extent that the real value of the goods and services got slowly eroded to become either fake goods or fake services that we experience nowadays.
Let me give you an example of a microwave. The number of parts that make up that product usually does not come from one manufacturer. Several companies are involved to make all those parts needed and finally someone else puts them together as a microwave for us to use and it goes through the entire supply chain to reach us. Let me say, I finally get one for $100.
After some use, one of the parts is broken and the microwave becomes totally useless. It needs to be looked at now. The service call costs you anywhere from $50 to $80 and of course parts and labor comes after that. You do the math and you find that over a period of time the microwave that you bought for $100 is now available for $80 and you don’t know how much parts and labor will cost. So what do you do with that uncertainty? You decide it is not worth repairing it and junk it for spring cleaning and buy a new one.
This has caused more than one undesirable effects – let me call them UDEs.
The first UDE, is that all that metal, electronics, and energy consumed to produce the microwave has now become junk. The second UDE, is that the person who could have earned a living could not as the cost of repairing the unit does not stack up with the new price. The third UDE, is that the recycling was not necessary but needs to be done to take care of the hazardous waste that got generated because of junking. Fourth UDE, the primate learning died as the knowledge is no more required.
Is it possible to fix these UDEs? Yes we can. What if the service person had offered a free quote to examine the unit to find out what went wrong with it. He could find the same old problem or something new that could be shared with the society he or she belongs to. Of course, from my point of view, if I decided to go with the repair work, the charges on the parts and labor minus the service call might be still reasonable. This simple change in approach, could have taken care of the rest of the UDEs that I mentioned earlier.
For a problem to become complex, a simple approach overlooked is the reason creating rollover effects creating several UDEs. Stop that rollover effects in the early stages – we not only make the problems simple, but can create simple solutions too.
As a by-product, just think about the boost the economy would get by doing so!