The Gaps Dividing Us are Not the Problem
By: Mike Meyer
Tags: Culture, History, Change, Politics, Future

By Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ December 22, 2020

Not only is the culture of the US shattered, but the gaps between the pieces are growing. This shattering looks very much like the laws of physics rather than traditional social change.

We keep looking for solutions and ways to restore social cohesion, having identified economic and political problems, but that doesn’t work if the problems are structural. Perhaps the gaps separating us are not the result of social, political, economical issues but the cause of those problems.

Maybe the fracturing of postmodern social and political cultures is a solution to a bigger problem that we don’t fully understand. As a result, we are trying to solve a natural solution rather than a shorter-term problem. There is a logical problem in trying to ‘solve’ a solution thinking it is a problem.

Consider education as an example. Because of the pandemic, we have spent ten months restructuring education to work remotely and online. While the focus tends to be on the suddenly large physical gap between teachers and students working remotely, this has revealed far larger gaps in universal student access to online access and the ability to own the tools to work virtually.

There are also particular problems in meeting the needs of young elementary students without physical supervision and mentoring. Still, these are not problems with online education but problems with resource allocation and communal parenting. But this isn’t my focus here.

From middle school to adult education, beyond the asset distortions preventing access to online resources, the gaps that have appeared are the quality of online education and teachers and instructors’ ability to work with online pedagogy. We have spent centuries with the slow development of education for more than the aristocratic elite providing cheap classrooms and low paid teachers left to their methodologies in closed classrooms.

What else could you do? Dependent on the health of culture and its focus on a shared future, most classrooms will be adequate, some will be excellent, and some will be bad. Over the last six years of compulsory education, most students would have an appropriate mix of teachers and a range of satisfactory outcomes.

For America and many other cultures, this steadily improved through the first half of the twentieth century. As a result, the gaps seemingly reduced, and educational quality went up in many places. For the last forty years in the US, the gaps widened just as employment began to shrink for those without a vital technical education.

The pandemic explosion blew everything online, and the gaps in levels of competence were disastrous and glaring. Online education is not a closed classroom but very much an online social forum with students who understand how to use that to their advantage, including ignoring it.

Gaps in teachers’ abilities, not necessarily their fault by any means, are becoming more recognizable as technology changes, just as there is less room for such gaps. The students pay the price for education and the gap between what they need and what they get. This is the underlying problem of high school and community college education that has steadily reduced enrollment and retention.

The gaps are not the problem, but resource allocation issues ignored paradigmatic changes and redefining the purpose of formal education in the 21st century. Online education is the improvement that is needed and can be far superior to any past form of education, perhaps short of having Aristotle as your tutor. Still, it requires production with much tighter quality control.

In a broader sense, the most dangerous gaps are human gaps that can be directly linked to failures to evolve education for this century. We have levels of political insanity in many postmodern cultures that seem consistently tied to educational standards or distortions of reality manipulated for small group gain.

This is not a new problem by any means, but it is far more severe than it has ever been in the human past. We have widening gaps in the human ability to deal with complexity just as we are being overwhelmed by hyperobjects beyond our current ability to grasp, let alone solve. These gaps are reality and not subject to any known solution.

We need to stop trying to solve these gaps and focus on working around them as natural barriers. As a reality, we need to develop means of preventing disasters that do not rely on assuming all sentient beings are on the same page with the same abilities. These gaps will only expand in the future as we work with artificial sentience and, potentially, alien sentience.

Even if we don’t find other sentient aliens, the human population will grow in diversity, providing an ever-growing challenge to working together for the most critical common goals.

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