March 28, 2024

BY JAMES WELLS

Education, intelligence, knowledge and experience – are these things lacking?

I have to say it because I’m not sure if anyone else will. We seem to be very narrow-minded people in the 21st century. People need to try and not be so black and white with their thinking, always leaving a little grey room for curiosity. Whether we get our information from our family, friends, school, social media or simply just hearing something on the street, many people refuse to broaden their knowledge and understanding of the world around them.

We constantly hear about people being uneducated, specifically those who appear to be racist, uninformed, bigoted and hateful.

Learning things and being informed is what people should strive for. If people were more well-informed and educated in regards to politics, social structure, religion and common, everyday occurrences, maybe people would be able to coexist.

The whole point of this is not so much to create or discuss a fix to the problem, but to simply address the issue in general. The first issue is our education system. It’s old, outdated and needs to be reformulated into something new and enlightening. Rather than enforcing basic concepts only in terms of math, science and English, there should be more social, religious and economic-styled classes at a younger age.

If this means that there needs to be one or two more years added to high school, then so be it, because the first issue to being educated and informed, is what we teach youth at a young and impressionable age.

The second big issue is social media. Young people are very impressionable and take to gospel stories on Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and even Google. The presidential election, the current presidency, the Muslim ban and many other issues have in some way been influenced and twisted by fake news. These don’t just have to be articles and news videos either, they can be memes, tweets and individuals posting lies to their friends and families. Social media is and will continue to be an issue unless it cleans up its act.

These sites must stop the spread of fake news and influential social media scandals. Perhaps if this were achieved, we would actually stop hearing about the war between the media and Trump from Sean Spicer every time he gets up to the podium.

The third and final issue I want to address is the ignorance of some people. The word ignorance sounds harsh, but the Oxford Canadian Dictionary definition is “lack of knowledge (about a thing).”

Taking this definition, friends’ and family members’ values may need to change. Those who ignore or refuse to open their minds to different ideas, should try to broaden their perspective. If more people did this, then maybe, just maybe, we could start to become more accepting and understanding of the decisions made by politicians, other countries and those around us.

We would understand the reasons why we accept love for what it is and not what it should be, why others speak another language or why they worship the same God but in different ways.

We may not always agree upon everything, but we could begin to understand why people believe what they believe, in order to possibly become more accepting of them.

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