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The speed with which the world is changing means we cannot possibly hope to teach our young folks how to deal with it all. The speed of climate change, the advent of Artificial Intelligence, the massive increase in information about the universe, leaves us with a feeling of inadequacy in conveying the necessary information to our children and grandchildren so they can deal with it appropriately. How do we teach the best way of employing Artificial Intelligence when even those at the forefront of creating it don’t know what it is capable of doing?

We can’t answer questions about cosmology, the science of the origin and development of the universe, when new information is pouring in faster than we can grasp.

We’re setting new records for heat daily now and more places are beginning to reach levels where human existence is becoming untenable. We have some answers about that but haven’t cracked the code on how to get people to do what’s necessary to slow it down, much less reverse it.

One of the terms most bandied about over the past few years is “cognitive dissonance” which is the mental discomfort resulting from holding conflicting beliefs, values or attitudes about life. Anyone really paying attention to political pundits and so-called experts on how we all ought to think, hear conflicting information endlessly broadcast. If we compare the positions taken by politicians with what they have avowed previously we quickly realize most of them are not exactly honest with any consistency.

We have, if we have courage enough to admit it, a flawed culture in which we regularly contradict what we claim we believe.

Seems to me, we do not need to crawl back in bed and pull the covers over our heads but instead admit we don’t have tomorrow’s answers today. Simply teaching rote lessons to our children ill equips them for new challenges. Demanding teachers just teach according to what we were taught is a futile exercise which will leave children as bewildered as we are.

What we need is not new generations able to recite old truth. What we need are not students particularly good at consuming present knowledge. We need new generations who have the freedom to be creative, to have the ability to invent the new answers to new problems. That’s easy to say, much more difficult to embrace. We don’t like change. We reject creativity. We want to cling to what we learned when we were young. We don’t want to be made uncomfortable by having different points of view openly discussed. We’d rather all continue in our complacency rather than even acknowledge that some of what we were taught was the prejudice of the age, not the reality.

A quote I particularly like has been attributed to George Bernard Shaw, “Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.”

Daring to question the assumptions passed down to us is essential to creativity, essential for all our tomorrows.