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3 hours agoWe should all be considering just how successful his operation was, as well. It’s not like Epstein was a small figure head. Epstein effectively trafficked girls and networked them to high ranking public officials for decades. That ought be concerning for us all, knowing that our society was so vulnerable. Epstein built his pedophile pedestal in a way that reinforced the system’s security as it grew. It was so effective, in fact, that even in death his secrets remain mostly secret. That’s a failure on our part; we were vulnerable as a society and he capitalized on that vulnerability.
There was once a time when people educated themselves not because they wanted a particular job in the economy, but because they saw value in education and wanted to participate in the human tradition of advancing the specie’s ability to understand and use nature. You didn’t need school to be a blacksmith, for example, but perhaps just an apprenticeship (experience).
There’s a point to be made here, about how this degrades the value of education. It’s great for capitalism, making survival—or “living well”—contingent on qualifications derived from paid education. But what have we lost in this process? It feels, to me at least, like we’ve created a culture where education is a mere lineitem on a checklist. How might that change what education is, what it’s expected to be, and what sort of innovation comes from it?