Article 26. of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1) Everyone has the right to education. …. (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.
Article 27. (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
The imperative to implement a new model of education for all ages that fosters health and wellbeing, spiritual and social values
One very important aspect of human society is the health and wellbeing of individuals. The current model of the health system is based on intervention “after the fact”. People live their lives the way they can, and if along the way they get problems, they go to the doctor. There, a series of expensive tests are made, and then the doctor prescribes “the treatment”, which often includes more than one chemical substance. The person takes it, gets or not better, and carries on with their life as before. As we know, each chemical substance has its side effects, short and long terms. That treatment, while potentially answering the immediate concern of the person, is creating more dysfunctions in the long term, requiring further studies, further tests, and further medication.
Based on this faulty model, we see now a new and worrying model of thinking proposing as a solution the A.I. The argument is that the A.I. would know better and in shorter time what you suffer from, can collect data in a blink of an eye from thousands of medical journals and present the best solution to the person.
In my view, this is the road to disaster. Not only it gives absolute control to those owning the A.I. over our lives, and potentially to A.I. itself, but it prevents the very thing this humanity needs: self-improvement, self-mastery and self-sufficiency without waiting or relying on external intervention, on external skill to fix its “glitches” or dysfunctions caused by its unawareness and state of ignorance.
I propose a far-reaching and longer-term solution: We develop a new model of education that would allow cross-generationally the individual to become progressively more self-aware, more self-reliant and more self-empowered. Instead of focusing on robots to make better decisions than us and for us, we learn more so we can make these better decisions ourselves.
This discourse proposed by the A.I. proponents has bypassed a fundamental stage in human evolution. Let’s give humans the opportunity to better themselves first, before we go on replacing them with machines! Only when we have done, as a society, all in our power and used all the resources to facilitate general human development, can we then envision the reliance on the machines.
So far, 40% of children are being denied the rights to basic education (source). The 3rd global cause of illness and disability amongst teenagers is depression, and the 3rd cause of death is suicide. The gap between the rich and the poor is larger than ever. The number one cause of all illness, sufferance and social turmoil has been and is the lack of adequate education, especially the emotional and spiritual development. The solution is more than evident: we need to focus our full attention on educating the masses instead of replacing the “faulty” human with the machine.
Now, more than ever, we need educators to lead the way for a more self-reliant, self-sufficient and more compassionate human. The focus of all nations’ political interest should be on a global alliance fostering the change in the tide from the predominantly economic interest, to the predominantly cultural and spiritual one. Only when we have a society driven by self-improvement as a means for an equalitarian thriving society, could we consider being an evolved society. Bypassing this crucial stage by the introduction of robots to fill in the “human cracks” is a societal genocide. By investing billions of dollars in the research on how to make the machine outsmart the humans instead of redirecting that investment on bettering the human instead, is an irresponsible, if not criminal endeavour.
And just like all scientific branches benefit from governmental grants to permit and support their researches, so do the human studies outside the present model of scientific research deserve.
A new holistic way of education of the individual of all ages and backgrounds is imperative and urgent if we want to address effectively the global issues, including global warming and the future of the human race. Technological advancements are fundamental to our evolution. They are the result of our evolution. But we cannot and should not allow ourselves to stagnate in our evolutionary process in favour of allowing A.I. to do the rest of the walk for us.
The old model
Because the present model of addressing the human mind and body’s disturbances have wrongly mislabelled ignorance as “mental illness”, most people would fall under the “mentally ill” label due to their lack of knowledge of how to manage their emotions.
Despite the uneasiness of the statement, the reality is that the present model of the medical science is based on treatment and not on healing or prevention. Treatment is not synonymous with healing – as we can see around the world the rising number of treatment dependent population.
The argument against the present model:
We have reached a point where we have to overcome our biases and admit the limitations of this model. Empirical evidence is based on observation and experience. And here is the main problem: they are both subjective factors based on the different levels of intellect, beliefs and hopes of the individuals observing and experiencing.
The colour red is not a scientific fact, it is a name given to a spectrum of light which we have adopted to describe it. The colour in itself is not a solid object or a fixed phenomenon, but the interpretation we give to a larger invisible spectrum of light. With the right knowledge and technology, we can see past the visible light, past the mass of the physical (X-ray, etc.). In the same way, the physical body it is also a name given to an interpretation of what we knew so far about what we could see from that level of understanding.
The dangers of the current paradigm have already caught up with us – from public health, economics, to social unrest and climate change. The reasons behind are many, but the principal reason is a social and scientific structure based on profit before personal and common welfare. The present model of science and the current definition itself is based on the research and development of tools and methods that have an economic interest. When it comes to medicine and treatment, the profit margins compared to the efficiency of the treatment are diametrically opposed. A science motivated by profit will always be at the service of the shareholders and not of the population at large. If profit is the incentive, by the mere use of the common sense analysis, the method or drug proposed has to be somewhat effective to justify its existence and costs, but overall ineffective to justify the research, trials and offers of more doses or other similar “solutions”.
The intermediate model
The alternative medicine came as a much-needed alternative solution to the medical chemical treatment model. Its natural approach – being through herbs, diet, energy, spiritual counselling, hypnosis, and all other forms of natural therapies – albeit more healing oriented, it is also focused on treatment and not on prevention or on the education of the individual into the science employed to treat them.
The new model – The next step
We are faced today with an evident requirement for the “next step”. If we evolved to the point of dissecting and analysing at the microbiological level our pain, and grew wiser by seeking counsel from nature when all else failed us, the next evolutionary step in human sciences it is not the study of illness but the education into harmony.
The next step is to take the knowledge from all the fields so far involved in human life: spirituality, allopathic and alternative medicine, and educate the human into the results of all these centuries of research, so that the rest of the population could catch-up with the scientist of yesterday, and the scientist of today could advance past its acquired knowledge.
I believe that the principal tenet of an evolved civilisation should be knowledge, and the measuring scale of any society when deciding how civilised it has become should be the general level of knowledge of its population.
If the current model of science wants to be taken seriously when it proposes its scientific results as safe based on the “majority” statistics, it should not fail to take into account the level of education, especially health education of the majority, globally. The odds are not promising, and the results speak for themselves around the globe, in all areas of human life.
And as CDC admits: “Disparities tend to develop as an unintended consequence when programs or policies are most effective for persons with higher levels of education (e.g., information campaigns), higher incomes (e.g., promoting healthier but more expensive foods); or health insurance. Relatively few programs have been developed to specifically reduce health disparities by focusing on populations in greatest need.
Finally, public health needs to ensure that all groups in the population benefit from progress in the whole population. The federal Healthy People 2020 process, as well as state and local counterparts, can play critical roles by focusing on improving health outcomes among all groups in society. Most importantly, these efforts must have the means to regularly assess progress and engage stakeholders who share accountability for improving the public’s health. The full potential of science will be achieved only when all available scientific knowledge is applied to practice and for all societal groups.” Source.
For more information about the benefits of this new model, please see this article.
Books
Copyright Graţiela M. Roşu, Mental Health & Preventive Medicine Specialist 2018
