Dear Montaigne:

The Cost of Ignorance

And the Profits of Learning
 

 The cost of ignorance defies knowing. Just imagine what it costs us in just the following areas:

 ·       Current wars and preparations for upcoming ones fed by ignorance and fueled by fear and prejudice;

·       Every day violence including: physical and mental abuse, accidents, and terrorism of many forms;

·       Pandemics that spread because of layers of incompetence, prejudice, piety and indifference;

·       Waste of human talent while massive environmental degradation savages the planet, and populations rise because women and girls are excluded from education;

·       Climate change denied by willfully ignorant leaders. These are leaders who justify not stopping climate change by treating the fossil fuel industry as a job source (not so) and the spread of AIDS as God’s angry response to bad behavior, not a sexually transmitted disease (as everyone now knows);

 How Our Metrics Fail Us

 We have no good metrics for what ignorance costs or solutions would be found. We have no proper systems for supporting the learning hungry to help them find what they need. Yet we throw away knowledge or hoard it, ration out bits of it to the privileged in archaic systems called education, which mostly the “haves” enjoy.

 Peter Drucker said that leaders pay attention to those factors that are measured. Metrics experts measure things that have economic value and leaders respond. The social sciences and economists create charts and graphs of human behavior to feed to policy makers. Yet the cost of ignorance is either not considered a worthy task or is simply too daunting to measure. Curiously, leaders don’t demand good measurements of ignorance.

 Metricians may argue it is too hard to evaluate the cost to global society to have children, especially girls, denied access to learning opportunities. And, at the top, leaders are too often evaluated on flimsy evidence like a speech well made, a smile flashed or a sound bite on twitter to loyal followers.

 Learning as the New Work

 Suppose we treat learning as the new source of work for everyone. If we start with the assumption that Will Rogers was right when he said, “We are all ignorant only about different subjects.” We all have a lot of learning to do.

 And, contemporary education will not get us where we need to be.

H.G. Wells said, “Humanity is in a footrace between education and catastrophe”. It is clear that education hasn’t outrun ignorance.

A Global Learning Exchange

 Imagine a world where everyone was learning throughout the life cycle? Leaders learning to avoid hubris and addictions to power and wealth? Families learning the arts of growing and preparing food? Women learning science and their partners learning to teach? Postal workers learning to be first responders and caretakers?

 It may be said that the world’s problems begin with ignorance. If so, then learning is the right antidote. Religious wars begin in ignorance and prejudice. Uneducated, superannuated and frightened men abuse women and their children and themselves. Ignorance allows pandemics to spread; the environment to be degraded; fear of the other to lead to violence.

 Let’s create proper measures for this global learning marketplace so that we can reward those who use and benefit from it.

John O'Neil - December 22, 2017