By ANDY ANDREWS
Los Alamos World Futures Institute
When I completed my series on education, “mi esposa” asked me to offer my solution for education and its improvement.
A tough question to ponder, I noted that in the United States there are roughly 55 million K-12 students in a population of 330 million people. In June 2019, the estimated world population, per the U.S. Census Bureau was 7,597,130,400 people, or rounding down it was about 7.5 billion.
If you divide 7.5 billion by 330 million and multiple by 55 million you get 1.25 billion, the number of potential K-12 students on Planet Earth.
Personally, I have trouble understanding the number 1.25 billion. Making the recognition more unfathomable, more incapable of being fully understood, multiply it by the cost per student per year in U.S. dollars (roughly $8,000.00) and you get $10 trillion.
The best value I could find for the 2020 U.S budget was $4.746 trillion or less than half of the money required for worldwide K-12 education. Obviously, this math manipulation could be strongly challenged because, one might argue, K-12 education is not for everyone.
Yet if you believe that everyone in adulthood should have an equal voice and vote in what we do, perhaps we do need worldwide education. It is “essential” to the survival and ruling of humanity. Or is it mankind?
Humanity refers to the human race or human being collectively. Implicit in the term is that human beings are benevolent. Mankind is a term or word that refers to human beings being considered collectively, but it does not require benevolence.
So mankind can have wars by humanity cannot. If you challenge this statement I would benevolently be on your side, but it is an important consideration if you are concerned about the existence of humanity and the involvement of everyone in the process of creating rules, law, and order.
Further, it requires some level of knowledge and reasoning to know and respect policies, rules and laws that must be followed. It requires respect for and obedience to the ruling of humanity. But who rules?
For those who know me, I like the bubble model. Every person is a bubble existing in some sort of fluid or environment. If two people join in a relationship, they form a larger bubble and have more of the environment in common. Keep building the bubble and different organizations or affiliations emerge for some purpose.
But if the internal bubbles do not share the same perspective of the bigger bubble, either the small bubble is evicted or the big bubble bursts. It is not unlike a molecule being hit by a burst of energy and breaking apart (divorce?).
The fluid in which bubbles exist also has a major influence on stability. Could a bubble at the equator exist the same way in the Arctic Circle and vis versa? Obviously not.
The bubbles have different environmental (fluid) demands for survival. If the equator bubble is dropped in the arctic, how does it know what shielding is needed to conserve energy? Likewise, the arctic bubble in the tropics needs to effectively reduce its energy content. But how do they know what to do?
In our world the 7.5 billion bubbles have been assimilated by choice or force into bigger bubbles with varying environmental fluids.
Among these higher bubbles we have central governments, ministries, cities, provinces, districts, countries, administrative regions, prefectures, ethnic autonomous regions, federal government, provisional government, municipal or local government, states, counties, cities, towns, secretaries, legislatures, executives, judges and on and on. Usually we think of nations, states, counties, parishes, cities and towns, at least in the United States.
Yet even in the United States bubble, the environmental fluid varies enormously. I grew up in San Diego, actually El Cajon and La Mesa, and never experienced snow except when I visited family in Wisconsin during the winter.
Plus the environment of San Diego was strongly influenced by the presence of the U.S. Navy.
In contrast, Manitowoc, Wisconsin was heavily influenced by ship building and dairy production, at least from my youthful perspective. And Route 66 was an ever changing environment mutating at 55 miles per hour.
Now expand the bubble perspective. Can residents of Manitowoc assess the needs of San Diego bubbles and establish, create, and/or legislate the rules, laws and other requirements for San Diegans?
Obviously they cannot and that is why we have states, counties, parishes, and cities. We “divvy up” the environmental bubble and let the mass of tiny bubbles bounce around (migrate) as they deem fit. But what does a bubble need to know to make wise choices, exercise judgment, and be responsible in the bigger bubble or bigger, bigger bubble?
It deals with learning and learning to learn as well as the philosophical fluid affecting 7.5 billion bubbles, or 330 million bubbles, or smaller and smaller until you get to one.
Til next time….
The Los Alamos World Futures Institute website is LAWorldFutures.org. Feedback, volunteers and donations (501.c.3) are welcome. Email us at andy.andrews@laworldfutres.org or bob.nolen@laworldfutures.org. Previously published columns can be found at https://ladailypost.com or https:////www.laworldfutures.org.