What does being educated mean in 2026? 

Historically, educated meant 'knowing how'. How to appropriate and prepare food, build shelter, rear young, and defend against threats, including knowing about the world you inhabited: resources, life cycles of plants and animals, weather patterns. This 'know how' enabled human life for centuries.

As the written word culturally progressed during the Renaissance, learning how to read and write became necessary to manage life, as did the aspects of mathematics, essential to teach the modern formats of human existence. A formal education reflected social strata, the bourgeoise laying the foundation for modern schooling. Advancements in industrialization fueled the need for new skills and specialization. Learning trades or crafts from our forebears declining; uncharted territories in industry moving forward to warrant broader edification. 

Educating a new labor force required infastructure: classrooms, educators, and administrators. To justify these expenses for free institutions of learning, subject matter and time in the classroom expanded to include some of the basic 'how to' once taught at home. Familial and tribal nurturing had been exchanged for professional human cultivation, industrializing a child's education to what society defined more than a century prior.

Using this construct today exchanges a lot of capital for a trivial amount of learning. Updating or replacing buildings, modernizing infrastructures, and increasing staff and salaries secure precedence, narrowing curriculum and expanding the number of schooled children reaching adulthood uneducated.

Food for Thought

In 2025, pretty much everything an individual will ever need or want to learn can be searched on one devise.  Stream documentaries, lectures, or watch YouTube. Can't read, use audio or video. Can't write, use a mic and AI. Use a calculator for math, an app for art and language, and choose from numerous rhetorics in history and theories in science. The old idea of an institutional education has become an obsolete platform for learning and stifles child development to societal choices.

Before your vote for the next legislation or levy, or vax up and send your child off to first grade, ponder the inclusions in the academic long game-violence and bullying, peer pressure, biased educators-your child may confront, shaping their attitudes and beliefs, establishing their fears, while limiting their 'know how' for adulthood.

Humans are innovators. Ask yourself, how can one lay claim to today's technology and renounce the minds of future generations? 

                                - Cinder, Educator 

Check out past seasons in ARCHIVES for more Food for Thought