(note: I'm still working through most of this, so I kind of ramble on a bit, especially towards the end)
I've been thinking a lot the last few days about what I want out of life, where I want to see myself eventually and how both of those relate to my fundamental philosophy on life. Generally, all I want out of life is to change the world in a positive manner so that when I leave a place it is in a better state than when I entered it (granted, that calls into question what it means to be 'better' but I don't really want to deal with that right now). The underlying assumption here is that the world, or at least parts of it, can be made better and I admit that is a fairly large assumption. As to where I want to see myself: I want to be working with a large organization that promotes education in various locales, whether that organization is a government or not, a for-profit or not, in whatever area. The details don't matter so much to me.
But I've realized in all this thought (there was a lot more but I haven't sorted through it all yet, what I wrote above is just what I've gotten somewhat organized in my brain so far) that I actually have my own philosophy on life that has been slowly forming throughout my life and is now actually gaining shape because I have learned how to express it in the last few years. The way I see it one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, about living or about being human is the preservation and dissemination of knowledge or information.
Throughout virtually the entire history of the human race the driving force in our ability to survive has been the effectiveness of our ability to teach the next generation the most pertinent information discovered by every generation before it. With the invention of writing, we were able to preserve information for years, centuries even, instead of just the minutes it took to speak the same words. The extended life span increased the ability to take that information to places much further away than oral transmission could ever hope to reach.
The basic definition of literacy is the ability to read and write but I personally think that it has come to mean significantly more: the ability to glean information from a source. Granted my definition is pretty vague but recently there is talk of computer literacy, music literacy, wine literacy, numerical or math literacy, etc. so it seems to stand up and apply to all of those as well. Most of the more specific kinds of literacy involved learning information and the easiest way to do that still involves the most basic literacy: reading and writing.
The way I see it, the best way to help a person is to help them help themself, convoluted I know. But from everything I've learned in college, it is impossible to learn about, understand, internalize and create a solution for a problem that has never been a part of one's own daily life because it is practically impossible to really see the way everything interacts and effects everything else; the only way to have a true understanding of it is to have lived in it. Every situation is relative, no matter how many similarities you can find between two situations, their differences will necessitate varied solutions. Anyway, the whole point to that is that for a person to help themself, they must first be literate. Literacy is necessary for education, education creates informed minds, informed minds lead to informed decisions and informed decisions enact positive change. When said positive change is enacted by local people, generally, it is more likely to succeed in the long run because the people have an invested and personal interest in the area.
Beyond that, if a person is literate they are able to inform themself through their own sources instead of relying on one person or institution. Getting information from more than one source allows a person to avoid a biased, and in some cases corrupt, knowledge base.
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