Addressing Broken Society: Education and Social Responsibility in Tackling Social Issues

I am hearing as usual all the comments about the primary school children gyrating on each other and the reaction is the same as that which we give to crime, deviance and ill health with its attendant social costs. What are the police doing? What are the teachers doing? What are the prison officers doing? What are the doctors doing? What are the nurses doing? What is the “church” doing? Blame the government! Blame the social agencies! Get “back to God” and the list continues.

As is customary we jump on a blame and shame bandwagon. But at the end of it all, the fundamental issue here is a broken society. We fail our children and each other when we fail to educate and properly socialise our people and the young and new entrants to our societies known as children. Let me start with something that is dear to me and that is health.

People generally eat what we are told by other people, is food. Food is basically anything that can be eaten as long as it gets into our mouths, down the oesophagus and into our stomachs. It does not have to be nutritious but as long as we get it down, for many people, it is considered food. The consequence is that people’s health suffers because of the poor quality of what they eat. Education about what should be eaten to maintain health is often ignored at our peril. We, as a state then, have to bear the responsibility for people’s lack of education and the doctors are supposed to perform magic, to deal with people who failed to be educated on simple matters.

The same applies to crime, deviance and all the other social ills. Education is the key along with concerted action and advocacy. Guns don’t kill people by themselves. Some human has to point a gun and pull the trigger. So what is going through a person’s mind during this act? It has to do with education. Proper education will cause an individual to ignore the gun and find alternative dispute resolutions. The same with drugs and everything else. Whatever social needs are to be met, can be solved with education. The fact that an oligarchy controls the goings on of this world and imposes its evil will on the people, can also be dealt with by education. Educated people will fail to comply and the elite will be useless. Armies the world over, are made up of uneducated or improperly educated humans who fight wars for greedy people.

So, to make a long story short, education is the key. Education needs not be formal but people just need to know what they do not already know, in order to solve the many issues that confront us. The information is out there but because too many of us fail to research things, we do what the majority do and say, and too often this is not beneficial to us. Of course, the oligarchy does not want people to be educated but instead, to spend billions of dollars each year on useless things. For example, Black people who are educated about their true beauty and worth and history, will not spend exorbitant sums of money wearing other people’s hair and wearing false eyelashes, bleaching skins and wearing false nails on their fingers, or on expensive clothes and trinkets, An educated person will know that much of what we consume is totally unnecessary. So let us not expect others to do the job that we neglect to do. Education is key to solving our social issues. The more we get of it, the better for all of us.

Ian A. Marshall