Education and climate change.

# 4094

The most legitimate task to which all others should be coordinated is managing the world, treating it as if we are in an amazing landscape, with reasonable and even loveable humans, and all the other species that deserve dignity.¹ Our education not only doesn’t align with the task of managing the world but helps the educated destroy it.

Education should help people in the task of managing the world but also develop these;vd. Our current education system is aimed at efficiency in making a profit from exploiting people and land. Technology is the leading edge of such practices, owned by profit seekers. When I was graduating from HS in the 50s I was a "beneficiary” of the removal of the need for a foreign language to graduate. As I was finishing a PhD in Berkeley in the 60'Sthe language requirement was being withdrawn from requirements. I did Russian in the last year of that requirement and had much fun with it. More importantly, it set me up for learning Spanish when I lived in Mexico and also played with French, Italian, German, and even a little Greek and Latin. Now I am taking on reading and writing Chinese. The pressure to eliminate language requirements came from the tech and business community. Now we have STEM just as the internationalization of tech gives an edge to engineers who are capable in more than one language. Efficiency in profit means enhancing the education of a few while narrowing the education of the many. We need our employees to be good at math, not language". Such an attitude defeats the promise of education as full human development. Increasingly, new employees are weak in basic language.

Now comes AI. I used to joke that for every job in the world, there was a Stanford undergraduate who was writing code to automate that job. No more. We need to realize that AI deals with the abstract world, not the world of smell touch and aesthetics. AI can support natural systems management but the pressure to co-opt it for finance is people need to know that climate exists, seasons exist, pathogens exist, and humans have desires. Now we have eight billion people and the planet. Putting them together is the task.

Now climate. The task implies everything, from design to manufacture to maintenance to integration into the system. It means understanding humans and the rest of biology. We need people educated in systems thinking, architecture, gardens instead of mega agriculture, and understanding of materials and their manipulation. Again my own experience: as an undergrad at Caltech I needed to earn some money so I got a job in the machine shop of the physics department. I was taught lathe and milling machine use and all the other obvious tools and machines such as making cutting bits for the lathes with a grinding wheel. The smell of burning oil from the lathe, and the tactile feeling of holding the bit against the spinning piece if metal enriched my life. with hand and eye coordinating skills. I was acutely aware of the fact that fellow students had no hand-eye coordination experience and their education was reduced to equations and numbers without reference to manipulating or measuring instruments, except for sports and a few who played music,

An engineering approach to climate change would search for any hints at what might be issues of potential concern, The capitalist approach is to exclude most of those issues,

1. YouTube video show animals in so many interesting ways. Mostly caring and playing. That humans are so attracted to these videos show us the forgotten aspects of our own nature.