Loan forgiveness, possibly for only public institutions or full for public and partial for private, must be combined with free universal education going forward.
Loan forgiveness and universal public higher education should be contingent upon a volunteer commitment to organizations such as AmeriCoprs and Peace Corps. Yes, both organizations are ripe for reform. I think the creation of a Civilian Conservation Corps that supports a comprehensive Green New Deal can synergistic. Students would appreciate their education and attain guaranteed internship experience to launch their careers while benefitting society. More focus should be focused on trade school and community college, and the elimination of so-called "bullshit jobs".
The volunteer commitment should absolutely not be military service. Currently the military branches offer various programs to help education funding and student loan forgiveness. However, the military-industrial complex is a drain on society, and inevitably leads to international oppression, hegemonies, and senseless deaths and destruction. In fact, a universal higher education (for public school) and universal quality preschool should be paid for, at least in part, by drastically reducing the military budget. That's systems thinking: fewer casualties and destruction, more education and civic duty.
The military-industrial-media complex should then retool to sustainability: green economy, circular economy, doughnut economy, regenerative economics, degrowth, renewable energy, appropriate technology, natural building materials (cob, strawbale, adobe, super-abobe, rammed earth, compressed earth, earth bag, cordwood, etc), passive solar, homesteading, public transportation (TOD and new urbanism), intentional communities (cohousing and ecovillages), unions,, cooperatives and collectives, permaculture, biomimicry, systems thinking, and the like.
Education can also be revolutionized for the better. For example, the current model encourages obedience to authority, rote memorization of facts, and a reward and punishment system in submission to authority, peer pressure, and performance testing of store-and-dump facts. This creates a compliant but unhappy and hyper-individual future workforce whose thirst for learning has been deadened.
Instead, the focus of education should be on encouraging curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, real world skills, and emotional intelligence. Of course a generation educated in such a way would be difficult to manipulate and control, but they would not need to be. They will have the internal motivation to live life to the fullest in a way fair for all. Isn't that worlds better than our current model?
See democratic education, Sudbury Valley School, and Montessori for ideas of how public school could be radically revolutionized for the better. I do not recommend charter schools because they exasperate wealth inequality or homeschooling because of the risk of sheltered religious indoctrination.
I also recommend: A Place to Grow by Daniel Greenberg, Free at Last by Daniel Greenberg, The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori, Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks, Real Lives by Grace Llewellyn, Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn, How Children Fail and How Children Learn by John Holt, Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto, Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, Democracy and Education by John Dewey.
Schools should be teaching from thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Audre Lorde, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Howard Zinn, Cornell West, Chris Hedges, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Murray Bookchin, Fritjof Capra, Winona LaDuke, Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn, Paul Hawkin, and similar authors
See also my blog post Required Reading:
Meanwhile, society, through education and media, should continue to promote a radical paradigm shift in worldview toward deep ecology, ecosophy, eco-socialism, libertarian-socialism, green anarchy, democratic confederalism, solarpunk, and similar. In doing so, we can continually work towards a collective near-utopia.
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