Scenarios of our children living in a Postmodern World

Scenarios of our children living in a Postmodern World

Dr Abe V Rotor 

Living with Nature - School on Blog
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid (People's School-on-Air) with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM Band, 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday [www.pbs.gov.ph]

 Education is the most important tool of our children in a postmodern world

Key players to our children's future: Institutions and the Family

 The youth: full of energy and dreams, UST

1. Our children live in a Renaissance in the new age: post-capitalism order, environmental revolution, devolution of corporations, green technologies, cyberspace communication, and space exploration. Our children comprise a new breed of more dedicated leaders. They hold the key to change. They play the role of the little prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's novel The Little Prince, who saved the pilot whose plane crashed in the Sahara desert.

2. Our children will continue looking for the missing links of science, history, religion, astronomy etc., among them the source of life itself and its link with the physical world. 

This includes linking of disciplines, narrowing down the gaps of specializations, making of a new concept of Man and culture. 

3. Our children are at the front line and center of people’s revolution spreading worldwide. Arab Spring - Part 1 and 2 - is sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, so with the escalating unrest questioning the present world order. The young are angry at the inability of government and capitalism to narrow down economic inequity. Occupy Wall Stree! is the battle cry in the US. Greece, Italy, Spain, once world powers in their own time are undergoing a similar revolution.

4. Our children will live simpler lives, going back to basics, preferring natural over artificial goods and services.  In the long run they are less wasteful than we are today. They learn to face a hidden desire to escape when things get rough, an instinct for survival either by detour or turning back.  

5. Our children face the consequences of  loss of privacy and secrecy from personal to institutional transparency. “You can no longer hide. There is no place you can remain with comfortable anonymity.” But they adjust and find comfort and peace in their own way. 

6. Our children’s involvement in social media makes them actors and not mere spectators. They are involved, concerned with issues, local and world wide.  Development Communication rises above conventional entertainment and reactionary media.  They favor transparency to attain social justice an d more freedom. They learn from Wikileak which unveiled classified information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  Bank secrecy laws and safeguards are changing.  Citizens claim their right to access to hidden financial transactions.

7. Our children inherit our aging infrastructure.  Aging Infrastructure pulls down the economy, increases risk to disaster, creates ghost cities and makes life miserable.

We have created artificial ecosystems in deserted towns, inside the 38th Parallel between the two Koreas, land mines areas, deserted high rise buildings, and now in radiation-affected areas of Chernobyl and Fukoshima. 

8. Our children are being deprived of natural beauty and bounty with the unabated  shrinking wildlife, conversion of farms and pastures into settlements, and destruction of natural habitats and ecosystems.  “Canned Nature” (delata) have become pseudo Nature Centers. Gubat sa Siyudad, Fantasyland, Ocean Park, Disneyland

9. Our children, and succeeding generations become more and more vulnerable to various infirmities – genetic,  physiological, psychological, pathologic. Computer Syndrome is now pandemic, and its toll is increasing worldwide, with South Korea, China, US, Japan, India leading the list. 

10. Our children’s learning process through codification defeats logical thinking and creativity, thus affecting their reasoning power, judgment and decision, originality of thought and ideas.  More and more children are computer-dependent. They find simple equations and definitions difficult without electronic gadget.

11. Our children face the age of singularity  whereby human and artificial intelligence are integrated.  Robotics robs human of his rights and freedom – new realm of curtailment and suppression. (2045 – The Year Man Becomes Immortal – Time Magazine).  This is falsehood!

12. Our children find a world of archives - memories, reproductions, replicas – of a real world lost before their own time. We are making fossils,  biographies, dirges and laments, with little sense of guilt.

13. Our children are overburdened by education.  They need freedom to learn in their own sweet time and enjoy the bliss and adventure of childhood and adolescence. E-learning is taking over much of the role of schools and universities.  Open Universities, Distance Learning will dwarf classroom instruction. This is a revival of the academy of Plato’s dream. 

14. Our children become more and more transient in domicile where work may  require, and for personal reasons, and when given the choice and opportunity in a global perspective, intermarriages notwithstanding. “Citizen of the world” is a person without a specific country.  He is therefore, rootless, baseless, transient. Humans since creation are rooted politically, culturally – and biologically most of ll.

15. Our children become new heroes – heroes for the environment, martyrs for Mother Earth. Heaven is in a regained Paradise on earth. A universal faith, irrespective of denomination, is shaping up fast.

16. Our children will clean the land, water and air we the generation before littered.  They will heal the earth we defaced, damage. With generation gap closed, the task will be shared by all. They learn to become good housekeepers of  Mother Earth. Our children know the meaning of biodiversity and its four attributes -  richness in kind,   population, interrelationship, and balance. Biodiversity  per se does not guarantee sustainability unless integrated with functioning systems of nature. 

17. Our children face acculturation and inter-racial marriages.  Melange of races is on the rise – Eurasian, Afro-American, Afro-Asian,  etc. – a homogenization process that reduces - if not pollutes - natural gene pools, as a consequence. Culturally and scientifically, this is dangerous.  Homogenization leads to extinction of races and ultimately the species. 

                                    Living close to Nature

18.   Our children will realize that optimism will remain the mainstay of human evolution, rising above difficulties and trials. Hope is ingrained in the human brain that makes vision rosier than reality. Anxiety and depression will continue to haunt, in fact accompany progress, but these all the more push optimism up and ahead.

19. Our children live in an era with race discrimination a thing of the past. Many favor living alone as a new norm. More and more join the nones - spirituality outside organized religions, 

20. Our children face the coming of the Horsemen of Apocalypse  – consequence of human folly and frailty (nuclear, pollution, poverty).  Finally, postmodernism may do more harm than good for our children in a runaway technology and culture. More than we grownups, they are more resilient to adapt to the test. This is true. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”  And this is the philosophy that we wish our children to uphold. ~