CHAP.30

(9/19/98)

CHAPTER XXX

EDUCATION IN A WISE COMMUNITY

Good teaching and good education are key issues in a Wise Community. Congruency is essential to good teaching and good education. And congruency is the weakness of current society's world view. The binding religion of Western civilization (Christianity) shows us one image of the world (miracles, souls, God, prayer, angels, heaven, hell, etc.) and science shows us another -- cause and effect, physical not spiritual, mind not soul, atoms not God. This lack of congruency in society throws our community into disarray and undermines its very nature. Things will not get better until we reach a new congruency. And it is the goal of a Science of Religion to provide that congruency. Good teaching effects a person's every action and what they make of everything they encounter. It helps determine who we are, and what we become. Teaching, experience, understanding are what make it possible to find and accept a congruent world view. Only with superb teaching will we be able to develop a Wise Community made up of Wise Persons.

However, at the same time a Wisdom Group should be concerned to improve in all ways possible the public school system. Our public educational system requires many changes if the goals of this book are to be achieved. Our present schools are designed to prepare a person for a brief bondage here on earth before going to a greater existence after death. If the presupposition that supernatural concepts are meaningless is accepted, we must then decide upon another aim for education. The vision of a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom is that education must first and foremost permit discovery of self with all this implies. And they must also provide ways to nurture curiosity and creativity as well as mastery of the facts and ideas upon which to build a successful life.

Many tools of present education could be better used in new ways. Lectures for example are useful techniques for teaching. However, there are few people who possess the broad knowledge, speaking ability, and philosophical scope to give inspired presentations that are also based on reality. Those who exist must be utilized through films and television to give students lectures to provide motivation, direction, and realization of the broad aspects of knowledge. Those who regularly meet with the student need a different skill. They need to be warm and caring people, who are supportive. They must be able to help students with the problems of application and understanding that arise in the training of each mind. Inspiring lectures will help provide motivation and appreciation of knowledge. Skillful aid from a loving, kindly, understanding adult will provide a foundation for mastering the relationship between knowledge and successful living.

Schools might profitably have class breakdown on the basis of aptitude, intelligence, and interest. It is foolish to say that every child must be treated the same because democracy demands this. Democracy demands that all children be taught how to develop as a human being while developing their full intellectual capacity. If one child is ready for a given subject at eight years of age while another is not ready until fourteen years of age, than the procedure to be used should be obvious.

If one student has an interest and aptitude in astronomy and another in mechanics, must they both have the same course materials? It seems impossible to believe so. Must a writer take the same zoology course as a physician? Must a salesperson have the same training as a mathematician? Obviously a separate course cannot be taught for each individual, but courses could be set up so that different components could be utilized according to individual needs. Programmed learning and use of computers with expert systems, etc. will make the foregoing more possible.

If grades must be given in school, the system for doing so must be different from the one in general practice at this time. The present grading system is psychologically unsound. It rests on many false assumptions and is archaic, manifestly unfair, and unfit for schools desiring to produce good citizens. Although class competition seems good, it is only so when those competing are equal in intelligence, aptitude, and interest. Pupils in fact should be taught to compete against themselves. Grades should relate to mastery of material, rather than who is better than whom. Motivation should be reinforced from mastery not superiority of one person over another. With programmed learning the student would be able to master the factual data of education at their own rate. They would be able to integrate information at a rate commensurate with their ability to understand.

Our education system should be based on life-time learning. The foregoing can best be achieved if students who wish are able to intermix work, travel, and other activities with formal schooling. Education is more useful when it is extended over a person's entire life, rather than massed together as it now is. Perhaps, schooling should consist of a mastery of basic skills combined with a good liberal educational background and a solid philosophical foundation. Finding an area of curiosity and interest to focus one's efforts for following the EIGHTH WAY might very productively be included as part of the educational process, at least for schools run by a CPASR (Center for the Practical Application of a Science of Religion).

This curiosity and interest should help the individual focus on where to direct their life work. After mastering the basic skills of learning then they could begin practical work in that field and extend their education by correspondence courses, night courses, computer programmed learning courses, and other part-time attendance of regular school courses mixing learning and application.

However, it is the bigger issues of preparing our youth to take their place in society as effective, responsible participants that has escaped current Western society. The following thoughts by James Hemming provide ideas and considerations that are relevant to this bigger issue.

ROLES FOR YOUTH: TEENAGE VIOLENCE[1]

"H.G. Wells pointed out that any society will be in trouble if it fails to give its young men something significant to do. This is so because young men crave to make a mark, prove themselves, gain prestige. If an outlet for this need is denied them, there is sure to be an explosive reaction of some kind. Another factor is that young men are subject to a powerful sex drive. They are at their most virile in their late teens and early twenties. This, too, can be a source of tension, frustration and revolt.

"Young women are also subject to stresses in plenty, but their stresses are different from those which affect young men. For one thing, young women have a built-in source of obvious value as the bearers of children. Because of the male's much slighter role in procreation, the drive of young men to prove their value is all the more often the source of physically violent behavior than young women. I shall, then, concentrate on male teenagers.

"Social anthropologists have shown us that simpler societies were well aware of the importance of outlets for the physical vigour and sex drive of young males, and of meeting their hunger for significance and status. The tribal communities always provided their young men with some sort of initiation period, which was a challenge to courage and vigour, and then followed this by a ceremony of welcome and rejoicing which bestowed adult status on their initiates. The failure rate was negligible. Senseless violence among the young men was never a problem because they were assured of personal dignity and value.

"I shall have more to say on adolescent cultures in tribal society but, for the moment, let us notice the difference between the road to adulthood in simple communities and what we have to offer. Our young people spend much of their adolescence boxed up in school pursuing courses of study that are often experienced as boring because they lack interest, activity, and relevance to life. The often unwilling students are then thrown, after months of tortuous preparation, into a once-for-all examination which stamps many of them as inferior. These rejects can find themselves out in society without any rewarding sense of social significance. They may even be unwanted in the job market. They are, in fact, left to drift.

"There is, however, one quick way into the limelight for the young men -- by using their muscles. A fracas with other young men, or the police, easily gives them star status among their pals, and at least some recognition that they exist from society as a whole. Can we wonder, then, that these under-achieving, unrecognized young males are easily lured into a 'bit of bovver' to satisfy their status hunger. This also helps to solve their pairing-off problem. A boy, having left school with a couple of low-grade CSEs, or even worse, and with no job in sight, is unlikely to attract the interest of girls by just being there. In contrast, gang leaders and their lieutenants rarely lack a coterie of admirers.

"Back to social anthropology. I shall have time only for a brief look at one traditionally pastoral society (the Xhosa) and one traditionally warrior society (the Masai) with a glance, also, at the similar customs of the Zulus.

"In Xhosa the adolescents run their own culture. This includes dances, trips, discussions, club-fighting and love-making. All the boys carry clubs and may challenge one another to duels, under prescribed rules or just letting off high spirits -- bruises are exchanged but real damage is rare. It is no more lethal than, say, a tough game of foot-ball. After initiation, in the late teens, the young men put away their clubs because, "Only boys settle things with the stick." In future, differences are to be accommodated with discussion. This system helps the young males to test one another and find out where each fits in.

"Sex life among the Xhosa youth is active and friendly. The young pair off, and sleep together, in an uninhibited but caring way. Penetration is not approved of because of the need to avoid pregnancy before marriage, but sexual relief is attained. The girl keeps her vagina covered throughout. Boys who become uppish, and seek complete penetration learn to be more thoughtful. Everyone knows what is going on and who is going with whom. One remarkable aspect of this arrangement is that nobody seems to be isolated. To leave members of the group out is considered to be bad manners.

"The love life of the Masai, and young Zulu, was traditionally very similar. Masai youth was challenged and extended by learning to live in the bundu, and by training in military arts, but the young men joined the girls for love-making in the evening. An account of how the system worked among the Zulus is given in THE ZULU PEOPLE by A.H. Bryant, who lived among the Zulus for 25 years. 'External sexual intercourse between the unmarried is universally practiced among the Zulus without any qualms of conscience. It is practiced only by free and mutual consent on both sides and only within certain lawful bounds. Even among lovers, an undeliberate impregnation of a girl was, in former times, a transgression hardly less grave than was that of rape itself. Incredible as it may seem prior to the white man's coming, both offenses were, in Zululand, virtually unheard of; they were so rare.'

"I have referred to these practices because I believe that sexual frustration -- lack of a really loving relationship -- is a more influential source of violence among young males than is commonly realized. I had one young man come to me -- short, not very prepossessing, with a low-paid job -- to tell me that, if he could not get a girl soon, he would commit suicide. Or, of course, it might have been some other desperate act. A social worker got him involved in activities with other young people, but one wonders how many lonely males are in similar straits.

"Sex love, in the kind of simple societies I have mentioned, is uninhibited but orderly. In our society, it is pseudo-free and disorderly; nobody knows what the rules are. This leads to stress and tension which, on top of other frustrations, may provoke either violent demonstration or retreat into fantasy and drug dependence.

"We see, then, the prevailing school system, social indifference to youth's hunger for significance, and the experience of sexual rejection may all be components in generating a violent response among our less fortunate young males.

"One more factor must be considered. In the first era of mass unemployment -- the 1930s -- young people were not so big, not so fit, and did not mature so early as is the case today. A politician recently suggested that there was less violence in the 1930s than now because moral values were securely in place then. I suggest that the comparative tameness of the young in the 1930s was due more to malnutrition and retarded development than to superior quality of self-restraint.

"What is the cure for violence? Obviously it is to give our vigorous, but frustrated, young people the outlets, personal value, and significance they need in order to mature as adults. Until we succeed in that we can only expect the situation to worsen. Those adults who extend themselves criticizing the young would not put up for five minutes with the sort of frustration many of our young people have to endure day after day, month after month and year after year."

Through understanding and utilizing the previously mentioned considerations society should be able to look in new ways at human adolescence. I believe that it is likely that there is an issue buried here that has thus far eluded those who study human development. It seems likely to me that our early ancestors solved the problem of genetic diversity in a way similar to the chimpanzees. When they reach sexual maturity the males leave the tribe and find another group to join and bring new genes into.

My guess is that it was also the adolescent human male that traveled since historical records indicate that adolescent males tend to be a mystery to society. They have traditionally been the ones who have cut themselves off from their parents during puberty while girls have been more social, more obedient, more willing to go along with family rules and plans. (Also see Chapter XV.)

This doesn't mean that we try to duplicate early human development. At a critical level, humanity is in the process of inventing itself. However, we must take these "soft-wired" issues into consideration and ensure that what is presented does not create an environment where failure is the most likely outcome. Part of this would be to provide more options during adolescence. In addition it seems to me that we should spread education over a life time and not try to squeeze it all into the first part of life. Particularly, adolescence.

Every individual should be intimately involved in the important parts of society. They need to be productive as well as learn about more abstract things. Educational institutions should be intimately connected and integrated with all other institutions. Persons must be able to step from one to the other easily. If individuals have an aptitude for a certain subject, an opportunity should be opened for them to use it rather than channeling them in a thousand different directions and placing hundreds of obstacles in their path. When workers come to the place in their career where more knowledge and training are needed, they could attend classes to obtain that information.

Even more important is the dissemination of education, "...we cannot afford to let the mass of humanity be uneducated."[2] For to do so removes these individuals from the path to become Wise Persons. So instead of helping to create a Wise Community they become obstacles to make the process even more difficult. Every attempt that is made to advance society is halted by the ignorance of those individuals. Customs press on the society from every side. Tradition keeps the society from refocusing its efforts. Irrationalities become deciding factors in many people's decisions. Only through total life education can the foregoing be prevented. This process must be of sufficient scope to allow persons to know themselves and to feel a real oneness with their fellow humans, rather than hypothetical agencies such as God, angels, the environment, all living things, etc.

At the present time individuals can be more successful and useful to themselves and society if they are specialists. Two things concerning the foregoing must be kept in mind, however: a). Individuals must have a broad enough general education to be aware of the important truths of the Science of Religion. b). Persons need not be stopped with one specialty. If they are interested in more than one thing and are willing to expend the energy to become specialized in more than one area, they should be encouraged to do so. The foregoing will surely be rewarding, not only to the individual but also to society.

2. MATHEMATICS FOR THE MILLIONS, Lancelot Hogben, p. 273, W.W. Norton, New York, 1951.