East group notes from Bill:
As a group we thought there were a lot of important questions that we as The Work Less Party should think about. Here are some of them:
- What do different people mean by 'work'?
- Why do we need to keep growing the economy?
- Who controls the economy?
- Does the economy have to depend on material resources?
- Why do we need property and ownership?
The East Group: Conrad, Bill, Amy, Jennifer, Evan, Paul.
We started with the customary introductions - we had some new people, Jennifer, Amy and Evan. As is always the case these little life stories became too interesting to curtail.
Conrad told us about the situation in South Africa under apartheid and how the black communtiies were subjugated to create a cheap labour force to work in the mines. But he asked "what has changed today?" The powers that be know that their main goal is population control. This is something Noam Chomsky talked about. Today, maybe in a much more subtle way than in those times of apartheid, the population is kept busy - working or consuming. That's the main objective of our government.
We began to discuss how our society is obsessed by power. We think it promotes competition, winners and losers, power over others, and inequality. We tried to think where all this type of behaviour came from? Was it companies competing with each other to make better and better products? Or was it Households trying to buy more and more status symbols to 'keep up with the Jones's'?
Then Amy started to talk about her thoughts on education. At the moment education is designed to produce workers. We learn about things which society wants us to. We are bred to think in a certain way and believe in the same things. We have technical colleges for the masses where they are taught hair-dressing, car mechanics, book-keeping etc.
Education should be holistic. Education should be a process of facilitation. The wisdom is inside of all of us, and education is a way for us to learn and share and develop our own thoughts, our own ways of thinking and our own goals in life. This is what happens with community education. We think this is something the Work Less Party should support, it is so important. So we decided that we should develop a policy on eduation.
Then we came to look at the paper Tom had given us and guess what! It was all about community education. It was really nice to see that we had demonstrated the very principles we were talking about. By having our dialogue together we had developed our own wisdom without the need for the teachings that were available.
Once again, a really rewarding get-together. Thanks for making it happen Tom. [Thanks, Bill, for taking the notes & writing them up.]
Posted by sandwichman at October 4, 2004 07:43 AM