Human society has several institutions: There are schools to educate people. There are hospitals to heal the ill. There are courts and prisons to punish and reform criminals. All of these institutions serve fundamental needs that will always exist in humanity; we can never completely eliminate illness or crime, and people will always need to learn. On the surface, then, it seems like a good thing that we have these elements of society to fill those needs. Unfortunately, the reality today is that none of these institutions are actually fulfilling their role. They exist because people insist on having them, and the government provides them because people want them (and satisfying the general public is the only way to get re-elected), but in most if not all parts of the world, people are not getting their basic human needs met by the systems created by their governments. "Education" is a greatly misused word. Properly, it means to give knowledge to someone, and to teach them how to think so they can gain not only gain more knowledge, but also understand how to use it. Unfortunately, public schools serve different roles for parents than they do for governments, and neither party typically values education as a primary role. Parents see schools as free day-care; they have children but need to go to work, and school is a convenient and government-funded way to get child-care without having to pay for it (although they do through taxes anyway). Government, on the other hand, sees schools as a way to indoctrinate. In essentially every public school in the world, every country instills its own sociopolitical values into people from an early age through its public schools. In this way, children are taught to serve the government as good citizens. The level of propagandism varies from one place to another, but it is present everywhere. Actual teaching of information that will help people lead meaningful, well-balanced lives tends to be notably absent. Medicine has always been something of a disaster, and it hasn't improved much even in modern times. It's expensive, and even in countries which offer public health care (a trait which tends to be very much championed by the citizens of those countries), "health care" amounts to little more than a hospital bed, a nurse who provides meals and perhaps some medication, and a doctor who runs some tests and usually makes what amounts to an educated guess as to what the problem is. Although our scientific knowledge of the human body has advanced considerably within the last 100 years, we still know so little about it that we lack the ability to comprehensively diagnose many disorders. Treatment usually consists of the doctor randomly trying various medications until the problem goes away, while pretending to know what's going on because doctors are taught never to reveal that they don't know what is wrong. The resultant lack of concern for the patient or actual efficacy in treating medical problems is nothing short of abominable. As for the prejudice in most legal systems and failure of so-called "correctional institutes" to actually correct anything... It hardly even seems worth addressing such concerns in a short essay like this, when they have already been handled much more effectively countless times before by others. Suffice it to say that "law enforcement" often achieves anything but. These problems will always exist. Like many other problems which people label as "political", these are not problems of laws; they are problems of people, and the only way to change them is to change the attitudes of people. While you can change some people, you can't change all of them. You can make the problems better, but they'll never go away. My point with all of this is that too many people mistakenly rely on these institutions to solve problems. If someone is ill, the typical first reaction is "Why don't you go to a doctor?" If someone is in danger, the typical first reaction is to call the police. If someone has a mental disorder, the typical first reaction is to suggest going to a psychiatrist. While all of these may be appropriate and effective responses, don't automatically assume that they are the best choice. If someone comes to you for help instead of going to the designated "authority" on their problem, listen to what they have to say before you try to brush them off to the authorities; it may well be that the system will fail to serve their needs. There will always be a need for personal human solutions, because there will never be a "one system fits all" society.