#3: 21st Century De-Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was a great and much needed growth in society when it occurred between 1650-1800 has it allowed for more free-form thinking and got us away from religious rule.  Before the Enlightenment most knowledge was universally accepted as truth if the church said it was true.  For example, if the Pope were to say the sun revolves around the earth, well that would have been accepted as true even though many scientists and mathematicians could prove otherwise.  We all know now that the earth revolves around the sun, but it wasn’t taken so lightly when it was first discussed.  If you disagreed with the Church you were considered an enemy of the Church and could therefore be punished or put to death.  Thankfully through the Enlightenment scientific reasoning and deductive logic made such an impact on the foundation on the rest of the world that it became vital to many countries, including our own as it shaped our Declaration of Independence.  Another idea that came from the Enlightenment was the need for education and not just for the wealthy but for all children of all societies.  At first there was discourse as people believed that many of the kids could not read and write and argued that we should not waste our time on them.   The free market of education won though and from the middle of the seventeenth to eighteenth century it began to take shape.  Before then though, there was no such educational system.  The system was to be paid for by taxes and since this was around the time of the industrial revolution socio-economic systems were vastly improved.  As the system as moved forward though, it has lagged behind and has been unable to keep up with the changes in technology.  Education has become boring while distractions outside of the classroom are more engaging to the minds of the people who see them.  This causes an epidemic of ADD in children today and they are given Ritalin, Adderall and other forms of ADHD medicine to help calm them down and keep them focused.  Sadly in my mind this has turned them into a zombie stuck a cage to be tortured with math and science all the while excluding the ability for them to be creative because the music and arts in most schools have or are being cancelled.  People do not realize or maybe seem to forget that music and arts help create better test scores, since that’s what our system seems to be solely focused on.  Hopefully one day we will wake up and see that our education system needs to be fixed again with this time, removing standardized testing.  Let creativity and free thinking flow from the minds of the children and watch what happens to society.