ON EDUCATION

The ArteFact Channel

May 2058

“Good evening, my friends. Welcome to the ArteFact Channel. I am your faithful correspondent, Artie Sharp, bringing you news of what is happening in our One World.

“You may have overlooked this fact as you struggle to be a good citizen in a country that’s short on power, protein, and promises, but we are now barely two years away from the thirtieth anniversary of Agenda 2060—and among the deliberations to be made by the International Review Panel is the appropriateness and success, or otherwise, of Article Nine, relating to education.

“A quick refresher on what that Article says: ‘Provide equal education for all, with the aim of achieving cohesion and harmony of thought and eliminating antagonism and disagreement by promoting social justice as the cornerstone of all curriculums.’

“Now, who can argue with that?

“… Precisely. And what an inspiring goal it is.

“And speaking of inspiring goals, I’d like to take this opportunity to comment on the recent speech by the president of the World Government herself, delivered on March tenth of this year, when she announced that the early-twentieth-century philosopher and essayist Bertrand Russell would be elevated to the approved reading list for the Inclusive Societies curriculum.

“Her description of Russell as ‘the most prescient of progressive liberals’ is extremely insightful and causes no dissent from this quarter, but rather encourages me to borrow from that august figure’s work to mount my argument for a revised approach to a certain element of education.

 “Now, the fact that only some of Russell’s selected works have been approved at this stage is not surprising, for there is no doubt that he was a little free in his thinking.

“I am uncertain, because I have not seen the final list of approved texts, whether the following passage from his ‘Mysticism and Logic’ essay of 1918 has been redacted from the proposed curriculum. But I offer it here, albeit hesitantly, from an uncensored copy in my possession:

“Life, in this philosophy, is a continuous stream, in which all divisions are artificial and unreal. Separate things, beginnings and endings, are mere convenient fictions: there is only smooth unbroken transition. The beliefs of today may count as true today, if they carry us along the stream; but tomorrow they will be false, and must be replaced by new beliefs to meet the new situation. All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought. Somehow, without explicit statement, the assurance is slipped in that the future, though we cannot foresee it, will be better than the past or present…

“In quoting that passage, I am not suggesting that the beliefs of today will be false tomorrow—that is mere speculation—but the past and present are the subjects of the Intergovernmental Review, and it is my hope that, in setting goals for the future, we will have the courage to be honest about the goals we set in order to get ourselves to where we want to be in 2060, just two years away.  

“Has our ability to forecast the future always been reliable? Or dare I suggest that it has been badly wanting since April 1970, when the founders of Earth Day predicted that civilization would collapse within fifteen to thirty years, that the world would be eleven degrees colder by the year 2000, and that by 1985, air pollution would have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earth by half? How fortunate we are that the great biologist Professor Paul Ehrlich got it wrong when he stated in the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive that between 1980 and 1989, four billion people, including sixty-five million Americans, would perish in ‘The Great Die-Off’.

“Hindsight is indeed an excellent viewing platform for observing events clearly … but it seems to me that we have been determined not to climb up to it of late.

“Agenda 21 was the product of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Ten years later, the Agenda for Culture was added. In 2012, 182 nations affirmed The Future We Want, and in 2015, the Agenda for 2030 was declared. Within four years, Greta Thunberg and millions of children worldwide were predicting their lives would end within twelve years as a result of extreme global warming. Thanks to their efforts, they did not. However, as the International Convention on the Environment and Development reported in April 2030, based on its monitoring of the performance of member nations, there remained much to be done. Hence, Agenda 2060 was set.

“I address these words to the International Review Panel: My purpose here is not to undermine the objectives of our World Government, but to argue for a remodeling of one particular policy that I hold close to my heart. I do hope that the deplatforming of mathematics within our education system will not prejudice your response to my proposal. In the words of Plato, ‘You cannot step twice into the same river.’ I am not attempting to revisit arguments from the past. I am pleading for a revival in our educational approach on behalf of—and in the absence of—Bertrand Russell, who wrote:

‘Education as a political weapon could not exist if we respected the rights of children. If we respected the rights of children, we should educate them so as to give them the knowledge and the mental habits required for forming independent opinions; but education as a political institution endeavors to form habits and to circumscribe knowledge in such a way as to make one set of opinions inevitable.’

“Is there a child alive today who does not believe in the imperative of environmental sustainability, the protection of our fragile earth, support for vulnerable and oppressed minorities, the elimination of privilege, and the need for equality of outcome for all peoples? Surely not. These things have become so self-evident that any child would embrace these missives freely, of their own volition, and without need for compulsion.

“Hopefully then, you will accept that what I am advocating is not a cunningly devised backdoor attempt at subversion, but rather an openhearted plea for you to agree with Bertrand Russell on the matter of education when he writes:

‘The prevention of free enquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than to let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of mind. Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.’

“At the risk of ignoring Plato’s advice regarding stepping into the same river twice, I ask you to consider Russell’s view that ‘Logic is the youth of mathematics, and mathematics is the manhood of logic.’ Yes, I am asking you to restore mathematics to the education curriculum, and I hope to convince you of the very good reason why this would be in the best interests of not only our children, but our World Government.

“Having your eyes so firmly fixed on the future, you may have overlooked, or even forgotten, the events I am about to describe.

“In October 2017, the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change predicted that sea levels would rise twenty to thirty centimeters by 2050, and fifty centimeters to one meter by 2100. According to the science reporter of the now-defunct New York Times, the US National Ocean and Atmosphere Administration estimated a ‘plausible worst-case scenario’ of a 2.5-meter sea level rise along the Eastern Seaboard causing massive inundation. Not content with that, The Times reported that the August 2018 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicted sea level rises of sixty meters this century.

“The cause of these apocalyptic predictions? The unprecedented melting of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, occasioned by an increase in global temperatures by two to four degrees, thanks to mankind’s CO₂ emissions.

“Now, it is not my place to undermine the convictions of the many tens of thousands of academics, government employees, and science reporters employed in protecting the world from indifference to—and inaction on—climate change. Nevertheless, I was bemused by the suggestion that oceans would rise by sixty meters as a result of melting sea ice. It simply did not seem logical—and it was not until I was asked to explain the situation to a young man who was extremely disturbed by this information that I realized that the absence of mathematics in today’s teaching is leading to the absence of logic in people’s reasoning.

“See, here’s the thing. By far, the greatest area of ice on earth is in the sea. But because the density of ice is only nine-tenths the density of water, ninety percent of the ice is below sea level, and only ten percent is above. However, because water expands by nine percent when it turns into ice, that means that the volume occupied by the underwater ice will actually shrink when it melts and turns back to water again—causing the overall sea level to FALL.

“Now, that still leaves ten percent of all ice above water, so what happens when that melts? Well, just reverse the process: when ice turns back into water, its volume shrinks by nine percent. So, in combination, when all the ice melts, only ninety-nine percent of the volume presently held by the ice below sea level will return to the ocean as water.

“Well, I have to say that the young man I was explaining this to was completely bemused by the logic of my explanation and by the terminology I was using. But I was determined to allay his fears (which were very reasonable given the circumstances), so I took it upon myself to teach him some basic mathematics. For example: if x is the volume of ice below the surface, then x minus 10x divided by 100 equals y, which is the volume of water below the surface once the ice melts, and so…

“But all of this is too simple to bore you with it. It is not worth working through the equation. Just knowing the facts about how water expands when it freezes, it is an easy matter to apply logic to the question of the ice melt’s effects on sea levels. Mathematics is the tool we use to validate logic, nothing more. So, we see that the sea level actually falls as a result of the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice melt. We didn’t have to wait half a century or more to prove that the predictions of sea level rise were wrong.

“My young man, once he understood all this, was greatly relieved—but also very, very annoyed. ‘What do they take us for,’ he shouted, ‘fools? Why aren’t we taught this?’

“Perhaps you will ask yourself the same question, for as Bertrand Russell has said, ‘The essence of the State is that it is the repository of the collective force of its citizens.’ Treat us as fools at your peril.

“Of course, now 2050 has come and gone, and there was no such sea level rise—nor has there been a two to four percent rise in global temperatures… But that’s another story.

“Thank you for accepting my submission, as I believe having this information available is in the best interests of the World Government.”