“As a public school teacher, I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all: that we must wait for other people better trained than ourselves to make the meaning of our lives… We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they do not know any other way”.
Is the author of this quote trying to be ironic to let us know about a matter in our lives that could not be any more serious? To me, he is being ironic because he does not literally mean what is in the text, but regardless of the author’s mood, my interpretation leads me to believe that dependency is one of the most profoundly rooted problems in our society.
The public school teacher may have identified it in a classroom, with kids sitting on their conveniently positioned desks and paying attention to the bossy professor in front of them, waiting to be informed and lectured with everything they are supposed to be learning. However, the situation is replicated wide across our society and it leads to terrifying conclusions:
The human being, though created to be free to act or decide however he or she thinks better, has circumscribed its intellect and capabilities to the very narrow area in which others have already incurred. The number of people that could be considered free-thinkers or outside-of-the-box learners is too reduced. There are only a few people that have strayed from the established system, the current paradigms, and have crafted heterodox ways of explaining the world that, with the passing of time, have acquired prevalence.
The majority of the human population, however, has not yet developed the abilities of free thinking and decision-making. This is significantly due to the permanence of an educational system that gives the illusion to students that they’re learning, when they actually are not. The student enters a classroom and almost unconsciously expects to receive a lecture, conference or exposition from which he or she must take notes and then memorize everything for a standardized test. This would be the natural path to follow in order to approve a course and get a degree with the passing of years. This degree is often confused as a symbol, as a credential that will allow you to presume of your so-called academic preparation in the future, but the question is one and only: Why do we need a piece of paper to tell us what we are prepared to do or not?
The phenomenon of dependency is also manifested through the history of humanity. Ideas shape the world and define their current state. It is in the choice of common people to accept or reject a determined theory in order to let it become the orthodoxy, the current paradigm that everyone follows. The urge of choosing what new paradigm to adopt makes it important to develop our knowledge; and that has to part from the independency of thought when learning: the same lesson that our public school teacher is trying to point out to us and that could be summarized in the simple phrase: “Think for yourself”.
The only way of demonstrating the accuracy or falseness of a theory, of an idea, is to have developed logical thinking in order to discover the false arguments some ideas take their base on. For example, both socialism and libertarianism are correctly justified according to the people that theorized about both philosophies. It is important, then, to recognize whether they were crafted on premises that are true or premises that are false. Then we would come up with the incredible (but not really surprising) fact that socialism, despite having a bunch of fallacies as foundations, is usually accepted and tolerated by most people. Sometimes without knowing! Go figure why that is.
In the end, the irony used by the author was a mere communicative tool to transmit the message that the majority of the human population can be easily compared to a flock of sheep, because humanity is often led by a few leaders that act like the shepherd.
It is my mission to become one of those leaders that provokes enough questioning, in order that the quest for an answer will trigger a desire of fighting ignorance, a desire of trying to clarify our own ideas and to make decisions based on our own convictions: independency and freedom. What would be the way to make other people adopt the same objectives? Inspiring others to follow me? Refunding the academia? In any case, the lesson of dependency (to rely on other people better “prepared” than us to tell us what to do) cannot continue to be taught unless it is taken as an example of what NOT TO DO.
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