Players Invade Cyberpunk

Chapter 1317: Chapter 427: School, Childhood, Education (3)

Lin Miao led them inside, carefully explaining everything here.

"Before I came, the children of Night City typically joined gangs at eight, started using drugs at ten, committed PC at twelve, killed at fourteen, and went to prison by sixteen. What do you think is the reason?"

"Because their living environment is just like that."

Lai Xuan, who has mixed in gangs from the bottom, knows this all too well.

"So you want to create an isolated teaching environment, separating them from external society?"

"Yes."

Lin Miao took a deep breath and began conveying a concept to them.

"Honestly, these children’s parents are not really able to take on parental responsibilities, and the most crucial issue is that the internet, new media, and other information dissemination media have made it very difficult for modern society to provide children with a normal childhood."

Childhood

A concept created by sociology, in most people’s minds, childhood should be a carefree, happy time.

In an agrarian society, a farmer’s child has to be part of the workforce from the age of five.

In Victorian England, a three-year-old had to crawl through chimneys, work in factories.

Clearly, such juvenile times, including now in Night City, can’t be called childhood; they can only be termed as underage or youth, and surviving to adulthood is challenging.

Even with adulthood, what is adulthood?

Is crossing eighteen years old considered adulthood?

If that’s considered adulthood, why are there still so many man-children in their twenties and thirties in society?

Can those man-children really be called adults?

Think carefully, and you will find that childhood seems to be a period free from work and life worries, and without excessive adult interference.

During this period, the only thing children have to do is to learn.

Learn knowledge, learn to control desires, learn how to integrate into society, establish personality, build a complete system of logical thinking; only after completing these studies can you be considered "adult."

This learning process is conducted mainly in two places: home and school.

Schools represent the civilization’s ideals for the future, representing what kind of people society expects children to become.

The appearance of schools means that humans have initially mastered the ability to classify information, knowing what knowledge should be taught to children at what stage, be it life, science, or even sex, and in this place, children are completely separated from adult social spaces.

Before the advent of electronic information media, the school environment was relatively closed, and students could focus on the teachings of teachers without much social information interference.

Sex, violence, death, money, desire, social relationships; these pieces of information would all be blocked outside by the high walls of the school.

Even adults would deliberately avoid discussing these topics in front of children.

In this process, school and home would reveal social knowledge to children in stages, until the end of sexual enlightenment.

Since then, we have had a cheerful childhood.

But this childhood is now destroyed.

First, we must understand a concept.

The amount of information in human society increases geometrically with technological development, and this exponential increase leads to information chaos, as a large amount of fragmented information floods human society.

Schools emerged as closed technological spaces to combat information chaos, selecting suitable and effective information to cultivate the next generation.

Knowledge is the refinement and distillation of mass information.

The development of dissemination media from oral → paper → electronic media → digital media.

In paper media, when you see that line of text, your brain starts to imagine, to think, to train its ability to understand abstract concepts.

The further it progresses, the more precise the information, the faster the dissemination. By the time of digital media, it’s almost enough to take a glance to understand what the image content is, and past social information management is ineffective, as the internet is omnipresent, reducing the threshold for acquiring information to the lowest.

The high walls of the school collapsed, and children were fully exposed to the impact of chaotic information from society.

At six, they curse; at eight, they see pornographic images online; at ten, they start encountering drugs, violence, death, money, sex...

Information that should belong to adult society is being poured aggressively into the young minds, disrupting their gradually forming way of thinking.

They know about death before they understand what life is.

They know about violence before they understand communication, comprehension.

They know about desire before they understand restraint, endurance.

They know about sex before two-gender education.

Acquiring information from images and videos is far faster than from text, directly skipping the process of thinking; in these media, sensation outweighs thought.

Words and language are key to building logical thinking; why are literacy and reading ability at such a low level for people at the bottom of the cyber world, and the reading disabilities so prevalent, that they can’t even understand a piece of literary work?

It’s precisely because massive amounts of digital media have shattered their minds from a young age, destroyed their imagination, and a large amount of meaningless fragmented entertainment videos have crushed human thinking ability.

Yet science and knowledge can only be documented predominantly through words; they require thinking, require abstract thought.

And those whose thinking and imagination have been crushed no longer have the patience to identify and imagine those abstract literary works.

The barriers of identity are given by information.

When everyone knows everything about a lawyer, then lawyers cease to exist.

When everyone knows everything about a doctor, then doctors cease to exist.

Then when children know everything about adults, childhood also ceases to exist.

As they encounter the adult world, they’re cast out of the concept of children.

Children are no longer children.

Through the internet, children can know everything you know, and they can know everything you don’t know.

Thus, there appears in this world a group of mature minors and a group of immature adults.

But transmission media is not wrong; it’s merely a technology.

"Children are not our past, they are our future."

"The reason I established this academy is to re-categorize and grade social information, to re-establish an information high wall for the academy, combat the information chaos caused by the internet, plan what information different age stages can accept, and open access by grade, to bring childhood back to the children."

"Anyone who can graduate from here will certainly be a true adult."

This is also one of the functions of the Heart of the Horizon.

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