Opus 2026-075: Immortal Quotes: Enquiring minds…

In contemplating all the doomsday scenarios that we are looking at I began wondering what it was that would help us to come out as individuals, families, communities the other side, moving forward and prosperous.  I am somewhat amused at the people who tell us to buy gold.  They don’t seem to have studied much in history.  As recently as FDR, we have had the government confiscating gold.  In order to make your goal worthless all it takes is the government to make it illegal.

The most recent advice I got was to invest in assets that would retain their value, don’t put all your money in cash.  Make sure you don’t put it all in the bank.  At all sounds very good.  Real estate is an asset that doesn’t go away, but it could be taken away.  All you have to do to wipe out someone’s real estate assets is to increase taxes to the point where they can’t be paid.  The same is true of almost anything.

That led me to think about what would help us to survive and the two things that came to mind were skills and flexibility.  In looking at skills, I could see that my children would be well placed to survive, but if I were younger and had to go out and get a job, I’m not sure that I have any skills that would find a place in a world coming out of chaos.  If I were younger, there might be a place for pastors, but even pastors often have to have a skill on the side.  My 29 years of teaching would be almost worthless.

I always get amused at people to think about teachers is being this elite group of highly trained professionals.  Not really.  Teachers main contribution is daycare.  They supervise people’s children while their parents are off, trying to earn enough money to keep up with their neighbors.  There is very little that is taught that most parents could not take care of.

The basics that are necessary for an education?  Go back to the three R’s.  Any adult who can read should be able to teach a child to read. If you can write a sentence, you should be able to teach your children to write a sentence and encourage them to put them together in a paragraph.  If you can balance your checkbook, you’re ahead of most Americans and you can teach your child the math that they need to survive in the future.  After that, it’s up to the child.

There might be some exceptions to this such as teaching microbiology or quantum physics, but that won’t be the issue for most of us.  In the world coming out of chaos there won’t be much demand for microbiologists or quantum physicists.  They well however, be a need for carpenters, bakers, welders, and hopefully we will be advanced enough to need electricians.

So that commercial phrase from the National Enquirer really should be one of our goals and focuses.  We need to create children with enquiring minds.  We need children with curiosity and the initiative to go out and look for answers.  What we need for the future are not more teachers, but more well stocked libraries

homo unius libri