Mission - Complicating Factors

Our mission is to develop the joys of learning, teaching and social participation, every day.

The first part is easy and natural enough: Just try to stop us from learning and teaching. Here is the rest:

The need for social participation is so natural for humans that we have very unpleasant names for the few of us who seem to like it less. Here is my very personal opinion about socialization: Over the past few thousand years, more and more humans have been living in city conditions, with thousands or millions of other humans milling around. This is not natural for us. We are designed to live as members of a tribe, where we know everybody, we know the pecking order and we have a very good idea what to expect from anyone we may meet. We are not designed to live in a swarm, where most of the people around us are unknown: Potential threats and potential allies. Being a very adaptable species, we created behaviors that more-or-less work in the swarm environment. But these behaviors need to be learned, and they cannot be learned solely at home, since at home most of us live in a society in its ancient sense - we know everybody, etc. School is a very good place to acquire and practice social skills for the mass/city society. We meet hundreds or even thousands of kids at a similar age to us. We have the chance to interact and get feedback for how well we interact. We practice social skills that don't come completely naturally to us. It is a great disadvantage for a kid to graduate from school with a negative attitude towards social participation, and it is a great advantage to be particularly comfortable with it. Also, society has a deep interest in having as many of its members be active participants and contributors to society. It's a low-level indoctrination that most of us will agree works for our own benefit - except for those of us who are willing to leave civilization behind, and live an isolated life. This is an admirable choice, but very rare, so I will concentrate on those of us remaining inside the mass civilization.

Teaching social skills is not trivial. There are differences between people and between peoples in what they consider "correct" social behavior. Different religions have contradicting requirements. For example, is it unacceptable for women to go with a headscarf, or is it unacceptable for them to go without a headscarf? Or should we let each section of society decide for itself? Or should we let each woman and girl decide for herself? There is no hope for consensus, so this is outside the jurisdiction of the core mission statement, which should be almost universally accepted. Details can be dealt with by each school's own communal mission statement, which lives within the common, core mission statement.

The communal mission statement can determine what happens in the school(s) in a particular the community. People may then choose to send their children to a school whose communal mission matches their own preferences within the core mission. The particular social values are part of that mission. So are the particular subjects being learned and taught. A communal mission statement may call for every kid to come out of 12^th grade with an academic degree in math, and with a competitive approach to social participation. Another school's mission statement may call for kids to graduate with a high level of religious studies, and a charitable approach to social participation. Both schools can do a great job adhering to the core mission, without compromising their own particular mission.

Another complicating factor is the specifics of learning and teaching. Beyond the core mission of making learning and teaching enjoyable for all, there needs to be a decision of what to teach. The specific content of learning and teaching is likely to provide a lot of opportunity for disagreement. It may be delegated completely to the communal mission, but I think there should be a core curriculum to be included in all schools. Probably along the lines of the three Rs: reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. They are considered obsolete as the be all and end all of education, but they are still pretty good as a basis, and I am not aware of any section of society that thinks children should not learn these skills. These are so basic, that they can be considered as a compulsory aspect of social participation: In a developed country, it is truly difficult to participate when illiterate or unable to pay the correct amount at a store. A pure vision of the separation of core mission and communal mission will leave everything but the basics to the communal. Any additional subject matter that will be included in a core curriculum (even a foreign language) will put the system into a risk of a culture war.

Wrapping up the core mission statement is the demand that it will be the definite guideline every day. Not "sometime." Not "eventually." Not "be mediocre today and improve tomorrow", but "be great today." Not a general statement of intention, but what are we going to do today. Enough motivational speaking for now, but seriously, we humans are a lazy bunch, and we need to remind ourselves to act according to our stated intentions. Today.