Living Income Guaranteed and Teaching

This is a more difficult issue because thus far the education systems of the world have only been a drain in the economy and have not really produced anything substantial. One of the latest examples is the South African education system that in the last 10/15 years has eaten up 20% of the budget, but at the university level, there’s only a 15% pass rate with billions being lost in inefficiency.

Education and specifically teaching is also a type of ‘easy job’ because there are no real guidelines or minimum standards, while this is one of the points that build the foundation of a society that can exist without a criteria to measure effectiveness, to apply it and to expect effectiveness.

The current likelihood of drawing people into the education field is purely for having an ‘easier job,’ one where there is no real accountability and that is quite a problem. Therefore in Basic Income Guaranteed we suggest that the teaching profession should be in the category that is normally referred to as one’s vocation. This means that teaching should be in the hierarchy of needs at the level where a person has achieved everything they wanted to be and become in this life, thus they are accomplished and ‘feel the calling’ to educate the children of the future. And they decide to do so not because of money, they do it because of the satisfaction it gives and because they have prepared themselves effectively to be the best that they can be.

We suggest that the teachers should be the best individuals of our society, the living examples that can share with the younger generations how to walk through the path of life with sufficient skills, sufficient understanding of how the world works while standing as an example of what it means to be a self responsible and integral person in society. Therefore money should not be what drives the teaching vocation, because Basic Income Guaranteed would be – in our proposed format –sufficient to make a decent living, which means a teacher should only ever receive the Basic Income Guaranteed and not anything more.This would require one to look at teaching from a different perspective and to investigate the reasons why our education system at this stage seems to be a complete failure.

What must also be emphasized is the importance of the family in the basic education of a child, realizing that in essence: education begins at home. The tools and the mechanisms with which to do this should be available in every home, and every parent should be educated and supported to understand how to facilitate this so that by the time the child reaches school, they follow an integral technological education curriculum that facilitates the correct functioning and learning of the mind, and the structure of the character within the relationships that produce a society that is best for everyone. This is how we can bring about the intellectual development of the human to be able to facilitate and contribute to society through finding more effective ways for the coexistence and harmony that is necessary between humans & humans, and humans & animals and humans & nature.

Another proposal is that if a method can be found to be effective in managing and ensuring that the teachers do produce the children that we can be proud of in our society, such as teachers being subject to performance evaluations and meeting the criteria for effectiveness, then one can revisit this point and possibly pay the teachers at least the minimum wage. However, based on our current evidence, the situation has not improved at all, it has only gone backwards and there is clearly no solution proposed for immediate implementation, and to simply try and ‘motivate the teacher with money’ while the very future of our society is dependent on their effectiveness means such incentive would be in fact counterproductive.

Teaching will be stepping stone to create a society that is genuinely driven to support others to become the best self-sufficient interdependent beings in society, rather than being merely competition driven individuals to make the most profit only – we will finally establish living values that will be the essential structure in which the functionality of our coexistence in self responsibility will be based upon.

 

Equal Life Foundation Research Team