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Discussion and links on education and necessary preconditions for education
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education_prerequisites.md

Education is one of the fundamental pillars of a technologically advanced, forward thinking societies. Unfortunately, the focus on test scores has taken curriculum and teaching further away from the basic tethers to reality and the reasons for learning more abstract thought. If we are to address the problems laid out in a paper as old as I am, that our failing education system is a threat to national security, we will have to start focusing on education which starts from actual physical principles and moves toward everything considered abstract in a more concrete way. This means investing in educating teachers and ensuring they understand the principles they are teaching and how they are firmly rooted in the practical.

One of the necessary prerequisites for education is stability in one's household. If a student is so caught up in worrying if they will have food, when they'll be able to study in between doing all the household chores, watching their siblings and/or kids, or if they'll be able to make enough money for their needs. We need to have a more holistic approach to dealing with stressors on students which disrupt the learning environment. It's difficult to learn if you have a rhino chasing after you, so we need to figure out how to keep the rhinos from chasing after our students. While fixing everything at the most fundamental level may be impractical to do in one fell swoop, we can at least work to ensure all children have nearly equal support structures. This means taking a cold hard look at the struggles of those who have the least among us, comparing it with those who have the most and those in the median. Then and only then can we enact measures to put those who lack at ease so they can actually make their studies and education effective. In that vein, there is a lot of research into how the socio-economic status of young children impacts their brain structure permanently. This means we need to focus on all factors related to socio-economic status and work to equalize the variability between the current cohorts.

We need to bring education back to the basics and center everything what it means to live as an actualized human being, not just a cog in a corporate machine. This may include adopting indigenous methods of teaching mathematics. Some of this will necessitate more funding for supplies for math, engineering, and general science education. Some of this may necessitate interdisciplinary work between math, music, art, writing and science. It will even require going back to teaching about growing plants and maintaining school and community gardens where multiple generations of people can come together and learn from each other.

We must also understand how businesses profit from what is invested into children. Children are the nations future workforce and leaders and they deserve to be taken care of. This means we need to have a social net and we do need to take care of parents of students -- because it is good for business to have a healthy workforce. Since education is equally a service provided to families as it is to businesses, the economics impact of this need to be studied and proper taxation of corporations which benefit from the education needs to be put in place.

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