Occupy Your Mind

Over the past couple of weeks the Occupy Wall Street demonstration has been prevalent in the media and has spread to several major cities the world over. These protesters are taking a stand against corporate greed and economic inequality. They are demonstrating against the capitalist system that appears to be leading to an increasingly larger gap between the wealthy and the poor.

The ultimate goal of these protesters are to have better lives for themselves and their loved ones. What is ironic is that the demand which is arguably most crucial to a better life is not getting much attention compared to the other demands regarding things that will ultimately be out of the hands of the individuals. You guessed it, education. According to Occupy Wall Street's voting results page, "free education Kindegarten through college" is ranked twelfth, and it is the only education related demand amongst the top 27 currently ranked for inclusion in the official demands.

While it is still not a number to be proud of by any means, the unemployment rate through 2010 for the college educated (those with at least a bachelors degree), at 4.7%, is less than half of the rate for those who do not have degrees, 10.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is the most basic evidence there is that a college education substantially increases employability. So why isn't education a more focal issue of the protests and their demands, if it displays such a clear and strong correlation with the economic success that these demonstrators claim to be fighting for? Why aren't they more granular with their demands for educational improvements? "Free education," aside from being very broad and bearing dramatic implications for the economy, not all of which would be positive, does nothing to address the quality of education provided, which will ultimately determine the ability of future leaders to productively administrate societal and economic institutions.

These protests either implicitly or explicitly make the economic divide an "us versus them" issue between the rich and the not rich. I'd bet that the rich do not view the economic inequality in America as a matter of them versus the poor. They are more concerned with keeping themselves rich than they are with keeping those who are not rich from becoming so. Their goals are not to stay rich... and keep others poor. It takes a stretch of the imagination to picture someone who is immensely wealthy harboring ill will against any number of poor people rising into the ranks of the rich, especially if it is not at their expense.

Perhaps the educational system is to blame for the majority, if not all, of the problems being addressed now. It is well known that the majority of these wealthy and powerful decision makers matriculate through a very concentrated group of educational institutions, considered to be the elite program providers. These universities and many of the programs that aspire to send students to them are very close-knit, and share many similar paradigms. What if, using a bottom-up approach, we could filter a more diverse set of leaders up through the system and eventually have the decisions that created this economic and cultural divide being made by people with different backgrounds and value systems? Maybe that's looking a little far ahead, but, in the immediate future, the quality of education and the number of people acquiring a quality education is a simple and seemingly overlooked issue relevant to this problem of economic inequality. Instead of occupying Wall Street or our nearest metropolitan areas, maybe we should focus more on the youth and ourselves occupying our minds, and occupying our universities... to learn. Then that way we can occupy business centers... with occupations.

It's a start.