Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast.

Today's reading has been edited and adapted from the essay, What's the Matter with Education?

by William George Jordan, published in 1923.

Some time in the years of the future, we shall look back on the education system of the

20th and early 21st century, with the same feeling of revulsion as we now regard the superstitions of the Middle Ages.

These are hard words, but they are calmly and deliberately chosen.

Such words would be insanely foolish and wantonly unjust, if not substantiated by proof.

They would be incendiary, useless, dangerously unsettling were no better way provided.

But there is a better way. There is a new model.

The failure of education is not limited to America.

It extends over the whole civilized world.

The most vital problem before humanity today is a true system of education,

for it is only as we train individuals and peoples to think, to use their minds and all their other powers to their highest efficiency, that

we shall find any adequate solutions to our other problems, be they mental, moral, social,

political, economic, or industrial. We are failing miserably to solve them today because we have not been able to bring

the trained minds of a trained people to bear upon them.

We have been relying on the trained minds of a few leaders to carry and control the masses.

This is a deeply personal question to every individual.

It determines the character of the world in which you live, and that of your children,

and all those dear to you. We are going through life on but a small

percentage of the mental powers that should be ours. Even our senses, through which all the

raw material of thought enters the mind, are actually weak, dull, drugged, and deadened. How can we think, remember,

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