Conserving Communities

Through out my reading of "Conserving Communities" by Wendell Berry, I found myself constantly coming back to an observation of a central questioning of the moral focus of our economy.  One of his thoughts that especially struck me was his thoughts on the education system.  Berry points out that our education system is focused on teaching children how to get and have a job that can make them the most money rather than to actually educate them.  He emphasizes that rather than actually teaching children about the world, we treat education as "job training."  As a student I felt that this was a very interesting thing to point out.  Our lack of focus on local economy as a whole centers around this moral dilemma of humanity measuring success based on how much money someone makes or how high ranking their position is in their job.  As Berry puts it we think that the "summit of human achievement is a high paying job." As a society we have failed to construct our everyday routine around actual moral values and instead have focused our values on goals that are amoral.  Resulting in an economy and society that are more interested in winning and defeating each other socially and economically than benefitting everyone in a just way.  As Berry explains through his central message in the essay, if we were to focus our economy more locally the repercussions would be more positive than imaginable.  The ideals of the current global economy that centralize around “mega businesses” has led to massive, unfixable issues.