Someone Else Will

"Well I wouldn't, but as with everything in life, there will always be somebody else who will"

This was a line of dialogue I wrote in a novel I am working on, it fitted very well with the mentality of the character who said it, but no sooner had I written had I realised how much truth there really is to their words.

When we are young we are told not to do many things, mainly because of the negative repercussions those actions would have on us.  We are told not to drink, not to do drugs, not go to certain places, or do certain things.  Underneath all of these assertions that are made however there is something we often forget, that those who tell us not to do these things, whoever they may be, don't do so simply because they would be bad for us, but because someone else has already done it, and they didn't like the outcome.

When we are younger it is easier for us to accept that the negative outcome would be so bad that it alone motivates us to follow the advice we are given.  As we grow however we become more critical, the more we learn about negative consequences of our actions the more we grade those consequences with our own scale of severity and what we deem to be the associated risk.  As we grow, these two things can diverge far enough from those that were first suggested to us, that we begin to re-evaluate that advice and decide for ourselves whether to follow it or not.

The interesting thing here is that everyone will live their own lives with their own experiences and interpret the world based on those experiences.  Two people can experience the same thing with the same starting conditions and come to separate conclusions and separate interpretations.  Our individual outlook on life influences the decisions we make in life much more than what we are actually told and the experiences that others share with us.  The end result is for those who try to instil some control and direction in the lives of people as they grow, ultimately the decisions they make will be their own, and whether or not they accept your guidance is ultimately up to them, not you.

That poses an interesting question about the nature of education.  Some see it as a means to reinforcing behaviours that are desirable from a societal standpoint, but if people will decide which behaviours to exhibit themselves, should education actually focus on reinforcement at all?  Would education be better equipped to shape society if it were centred instead around disclosure, giving students all the information they desire and all the evidence that is available, and encouraging the student to come to their own conclusions based on that information as opposed to forcing them to accept the answer to a given question is such, and if you don't accept that answer you are an idiot.

I'm talking here mainly of subjects whose content is subjective, i.e. questions which can be deemed to have answers that are not set in stone, as opposed to subjects whose content is objective such as mathematics where there is a right and wrong answer and one that does not satisfy the problem is not correct.

I find the evolution of education to be something of interest, namely because you can use it to determine what age someone is, and when they studied, based on their answers to certain questions.  For example asking someone how many planets in our solar system whether they answer 8 or 9 will tell you a lot about when they learned about space in school, as there were 9 but Pluto was relegated to the status of a Dwarf Planet reducing the answer to 8.  Other questions relating to biology, or technology, can give you an idea of when someone studied those as they too are subjects whose content evolves over time with increased understanding and new paradigms that emerge.  Something as simple as asking someone how many bytes are in a kilobyte and whether they answer 1,024 or 1,000 will tell you whether they learned about computing a long time ago or studied in recent years, as the answer was previously 1,024 as this is an exponent of 2 given binary is a base 2 number system, however again, the term kilobyte was redefined to mean 1,000 bytes and the term kibibyte was introduced in 1998 by the IEC to preserve the binary counting system.

All of this demonstrates how as time progresses and each generation grows, there will always be someone who will do thing differently, sometimes others will follow suit leading to paradigm shifts, and at others they will remain as outliers and anomalies that society as a whole rejects and encourages those who conform not to follow suit.