Education

Schooling The School System

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

-Nelson Mandela

If our species were to adopt the mindset that each of us is born, innately, of love and compassion, I believe we would have the common ground necessary to flourish across the board.  However, this is obviously not the case, and we suffer the consequences of a largely skeptical, narrow-sighted, and judgmental society.  Naturally, I wonder why — out of the purity of our natural beings — we have taken on such a conflicted, antithetical perception of reality.  And consistently, I reach the same conclusion:  We are educated–formally and socially–to buy into the illusions that our society functions around.  We are educated to perpetuate separateness;  we are educated to attach to desires and  be averse to discomfort.  These traits are antithetical to our nature, and therefore their prevalence among the public has to be related to the way we are educated.

In the current societal model, we are enforcing a hamster-wheel of delusion.  The same mental afflictions that our current system promotes — fear of change, self-centered-ness, and skepticism being a few — get recycled back into the next generation.  In other words, because we are not educated to be ‘wise’ people, we continue to suffer great personal ignorance, and naturally inflict the same on the next generation.  Our narrow-sightedness is illuminated by an education system that does not pay teachers like professionals.  Our self-centeredness is displayed by a system that measures worth based on test scores.  And our fear of change is pervasive in a system that does not evolve to fit the niches of an era.  Each of these areas, as well as many more, are overdue for amending.  In undergoing a revolution in consciousness, we can discover that stepping off this hamster wheel is the obvious next step.  The United States has the funds and resources to evolve the system, and lacks only the clarity to take the plunge.

Of course, our education system looks quite good to much of the world. I have spent time teaching English in India, Ecuador, and Tanzania and have dealt with similar issues in each experience. Class sizes are huge—often a hundred or more students to a teacher. Resources are poor—often out-dated or non-existent textbooks and few other materials. The teachers are often under-educated, and the schools are often underfunded. Students and teachers often miss class because of the necessary work to do in the fields. And for girls, they often don’t attend at all because of their inevitable future tied to the house. These are not extreme examples, they are the reality of billions of children in this world. These experiences have allowed me to really appreciate the United States’ education system.

However, they have also taught me the difference between ‘wisdom’ and ‘intelligence.’  People of the third world, often illiterate and uneducated, consistently demonstrate profound wisdom.  Intuition, connection to earth, pervasive gratitude and selflessness, and an exuding of “life.”  These are themes that transcend geography and culture — they are wisdom in its all-encompassing essence.  For this reason, I really appreciate their fortune to be free from the forced assimilation that western school represents.  Likewise, how fundamentally different ‘wisdom’ and ‘intelligence’ are.

I recommend that we re-define the word “smart.”  A new definition as a synthesis of intelligence and wisdom.  I propose that we commit to maximizing the quality and quantity of “smart” people in the world.  In the United States, we are privileged enough to produce generations of truly “smart” people and committing to this new paradigm is crucial to the umbrella of “awakening” that we are undergoing.

In this section, I will present an education reform that makes sense to me.  It will focus on the following questions:

What will it take to commit to a new education system?

How will the new system be shaped?

What will be the effects of this new system?

Adopting the mindset that education truly is the platform for the well-being of the species and planet — for the awakening we are ready to undergo — we will find that our whole system will naturally evolve by osmosis.  We have the ability to educate ourselves and the responsibility to provide high quality education for the next generation.  We can do this if we, the people, the subjects of a flawed education system, stand up for a new paradigm that we all deserve.   As Abraham Lincoln said:

“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”