Jay Garland constructed this blog to enable readers to use an index to choose what material they wanted to read and in what order to do so. Blogs are programmed to appear in the reverse order from when they were written, the last entry appearing first. Using the index appearing in the margin to the right of this blog and down a bit, you can explore this material as you choose, instead of in the bizarre order in which it appears. In the index “DF” stands for one of the 23 distinctive features of New Earth Institute. In each case the 23 items are capitalized to distinguish them from other items.
Three recommended blogs that give an initial orientation to NEI: Starting with “Jay and Toni Garland's Bio” and “Jay Garland's Abiding Passion” will give you the life experience of the author and his wife, as well as the reasons that compelled them to innovate. The third recommended blog iis “A Space of Love,” New Earth Institute’s mission statement.
If you wish to comment on any section of the blog simply click on the word “Comments” immediately following the individual blog post. Any comments will be appreciated.
Soul Making
Some people may be immediately offended by the idea of soul-making, especially if it is part of an educational process. It makes some want to grab some bricks to reinforce the boundaries between religious beliefs and things that may be discussed in an school setting. My contention, however, is that soul-making is the heart of authentic education.
I have discussed the soul in a separate blog titled “Soul Education,” I quote a portion of that blog below:
“The soul (variously defined as our immaterial essence, our animating principle, the cause of our individual life, a person’s total self, a Nourishing Mother that feeds us, or as our moral and emotional nature) witnesses our life as a detached observer of our thoughts and deeds and emotional reactions.
“Soul is both the intelligence and deep experience that stands behind our secret self, our quintessence, our vitality, our creative essence, our being, our spirit, our heart, our courage, and our conscience. It is, at the same time, the source of our deepest longings and yearnings. It is the source of our desire to surrender our personal needs and serve humanity, all life forms, Mother earth, the World, the Universe, or God.
“The soul is our I AM, the root of our being.
“As such soul is the seat of our consciousness. Our soul witnesses our life. It is our deep, reflective pool that mirrors for us our thoughts, emotions, and deeds. It allows meaning to enter and float throughout our life. Soul turns outward events into our very own experiences of personal truth.
“Among the souls many allies and guides are Nature (Nature which simply is; Nature cannot be misguided or wrong – only humans can), Imagination (the Force behind all Creation – here I refer to the constructive, not the destructive, nefarious forms of imagination eager to cause suffering, despair, and annihilation), unvarnished Honesty, Universal Truth (our soul is happy when are we aligned with it, miserable when we are not), Beauty (which arrests our running thought life and leaves us dumb), a Nourishing Spirit, and certain feelings such as Unconditional Love, Gratitude, Joy, Empathy, Awe, ands Compassion).”
In contrast to soul education is modern, industrial, compulsory education that serves ego personalities with normal consciousness bordering on unconsciousness. Ego consciousness may be compared with the awareness in Plato’s, cave, where man reacts to shadows, not realities. Ego awareness takes things literally, personally and is only interested in practical and habitual matters. It is well defended from truth by what Freud called the ego defense mechanisms (denial: deny the existence of anything that threatens your image; projection: project onto others what you deny in yourself; reaction formation: changing your real emotions to their opposite; repression: forgetting what you don’t want to remember: displacement: kicking the dog after being screamed at by your father; dissociation: splitting off sections of your memory that are too painful to remember).
I have chosen to initiate a new paradigm of education based on soul, one that incorporates soul-making into many aspects of its program. But what does soul-making look like? How would one recognize it? Below are six way that New Earth Institute proactively influences and encourages soul development.
1. Relationships. When adults relate to children as sacred. beautiful, intelligent souls with great creative potential. rather than bodies with egoistic minds that need to be programmed according to a set curriculum, these soul mentors support and help awaken the child’s innate consciousness, talents, and abilities and gives that child permission to relate to others in the same way. Of course when parents who relate to their child in the same way, have even a stronger effect. When a child is recognized for his depth of sensitivity, understanding, wisdom, imagination, love, joy, and awe, her deepest nature is validated and she responds in kind.
2. Expression. In any creative activity where students witness simple demonstrations, but later are
given the freedom to express themselves according to their own lights, soul is operative; soul expressing its own preoccupations, its own agenda (rather than the school’s agenda) is soul building its own awareness. Areas of creative activity are, but are not limited to, free play, playing with water, paper and book making, dance, singing, music making, instrument making, cooking, baking, dress up, drama, drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery, print-making, collage, batik, mural-making, mosaics, writing poetry, stories, plays, carving of all kinds, science experiments, gardening, and endless other activities relating directly with Nature.
3. Asking Questions. Instead of asking questions to test the “knowledge” of students, ask them open
-ended questions that invite wonder and imagination. Instead of teaching facts and theories, let them explore the facts, develop the theories, and present their conclusions to others. Conformity to a set curriculum obviates original, creative thinking; It’s important to know what books say and to understand what teachers are saying. Even what experts say. But it more critical to the learner to be proactive and to create what feels intuitively right to them. To break the grip of unthinking dogma, ask what do you the student think about so and so? It asks students to ask themselves to ponder, to question how everything in this world works rather than passively memorize “the right answer.”
It is natural for children to be curious about everything, but most have been trained out of their innate proclivity.
Student also need to be asked those questions about who are we?, what we are doing? and why? Until they create the habit of asking them themselves like they used to do all the time.
4. Living Material. Teachers who appreciate, understand, and use living material (fairy tales, folk tales, legends, creation stories, myths, short stories and literature with many layers of meaning written in the figurative language of the soul [full of images, symbols, analogies, similes and metaphors, synecdoches (“tree at my window, window tree”), apostrophes (“all hands on deck”), metonymies (“the injured boy holds up his hand as if to keep the life from spilling”), allegories or parables, paradoxes, hyperboles, understatements, and ironies.] feed the soul.
In contrast, if one teaches to the ego who sees everything literally and unimaginatively, one uses material with literal language, like is used in many children’s’ books or elementary science books.
5. Models of Intelligences. Learn about, discuss, and research peoples and cultures that do not rely on schools to develop the intelligence of the young. Learn how primitive peoples discover the vital information and understanding that sustains their cultures. Empathetic anthropology has much to offer in this regard. Learn what’s amazing about people who employ the lowest levels of technology. Why are their ways of life sustainable and ours aren’t? Why can they commune with nature? Study the great wisdom the came out of India: the Vedas, the Mahabharata. Learn from Native Americans who have more to teach us about sustainable living and self-reliance than most universities. Why do they know many things that we don’t? Study the life of the people who seeming learned knowledge overnight, like the ancient Greeks who invented or greatly transformed history, drama, science, architecture, philosophy, medicine, sculpture, justice, war strategies, and when perplexed, turned to their greatest authorities: oracles. How did the great flowering of the Renaissance in Florence, Italy happen within a few decades? Why did it abruptly end? Study the great mystics whose vast knowledge came from their inner nature. Together read the poets who transmit so much wisdom to the soul.
5. Talk about Relationships. Weekly Forums abide by specific rules to guarantee non-violent communications (no attacking others). Here ANYTHING may be brought up and discussed. Meeting provides chances to honestly discuss your loves, hopes, goals, resentments, dislikes, and disappointments in an environment that preserves respect for one another.
In volatile situations that erupt at school, we discuss the choices each of us made, what other options we could have chosen, how we feel about ourselves, who we want to become, and tenets we would like to live by. It is an opportunity to reflect upon our thoughts, desires and actions, to consider in the presence of others. It’s a time to entertain alternative possibilities and scenarios, to listen to suggestions and advice, and decide to change something about our habitual patterns, or not. Forum provide a chance to see how our fantasy life fails us in relationships and what we can to do heal what has been wounded. Unconsciousness become aware of its own face. The emphasis is on NOT feeling trapped by our personalities, but on choosing a new way we want to be. Our Forum urges us to examine our experiences and reflect on our identity; much of the language used is figurative.
Forum discussions can lead to the realization that we have conflicting, internal forces, feelings, ideas, thoughts, ambitions, that on some level we are at war with ourselves, and that often we present different personalities to different people. Real discussions that penetrate the veneer of smooth social interactions often lead to life-long friendships.
The object for Meeting is always the same: discovering who we are in this moment and who we wish to be.
6. Observe Nature. Nature, God’s perfection is our greatest Model. We can learn much about nature that increases our appreciation of its workings. But nature, like silence, can also be a significant teacher herself. In a rural setting, near a vast wilderness we have manifold opportunities to commune with nature. What setting could be better?
7. Listen to Students. Differentiate when ego is speaking (the focus is on control, developmental fantasies (i.e. being a hero), coping, “me”, the practical, or the manipulation of objective reali{using literal language} and when the soul is speaking (the focus is on images, reflection, insight, beauty, awe, and awareness {using impersonal or figurative language}. Adults must reply in kind. While dealing with ego needs, one must address the ego’s concerns. When dealing with soul talk one must listen and learn, ask questions, and respond with soul speech.
8. Provide Quiet Time, Guided Meditations, and teaching simple breathing and meditation
techniques.
A school cannot cause soul-building experiences. But it can, through its intention and activities, allow them to happen spontaneously.
I have discussed the soul in a separate blog titled “Soul Education,” I quote a portion of that blog below:
“The soul (variously defined as our immaterial essence, our animating principle, the cause of our individual life, a person’s total self, a Nourishing Mother that feeds us, or as our moral and emotional nature) witnesses our life as a detached observer of our thoughts and deeds and emotional reactions.
“Soul is both the intelligence and deep experience that stands behind our secret self, our quintessence, our vitality, our creative essence, our being, our spirit, our heart, our courage, and our conscience. It is, at the same time, the source of our deepest longings and yearnings. It is the source of our desire to surrender our personal needs and serve humanity, all life forms, Mother earth, the World, the Universe, or God.
“The soul is our I AM, the root of our being.
“As such soul is the seat of our consciousness. Our soul witnesses our life. It is our deep, reflective pool that mirrors for us our thoughts, emotions, and deeds. It allows meaning to enter and float throughout our life. Soul turns outward events into our very own experiences of personal truth.
“Among the souls many allies and guides are Nature (Nature which simply is; Nature cannot be misguided or wrong – only humans can), Imagination (the Force behind all Creation – here I refer to the constructive, not the destructive, nefarious forms of imagination eager to cause suffering, despair, and annihilation), unvarnished Honesty, Universal Truth (our soul is happy when are we aligned with it, miserable when we are not), Beauty (which arrests our running thought life and leaves us dumb), a Nourishing Spirit, and certain feelings such as Unconditional Love, Gratitude, Joy, Empathy, Awe, ands Compassion).”
In contrast to soul education is modern, industrial, compulsory education that serves ego personalities with normal consciousness bordering on unconsciousness. Ego consciousness may be compared with the awareness in Plato’s, cave, where man reacts to shadows, not realities. Ego awareness takes things literally, personally and is only interested in practical and habitual matters. It is well defended from truth by what Freud called the ego defense mechanisms (denial: deny the existence of anything that threatens your image; projection: project onto others what you deny in yourself; reaction formation: changing your real emotions to their opposite; repression: forgetting what you don’t want to remember: displacement: kicking the dog after being screamed at by your father; dissociation: splitting off sections of your memory that are too painful to remember).
I have chosen to initiate a new paradigm of education based on soul, one that incorporates soul-making into many aspects of its program. But what does soul-making look like? How would one recognize it? Below are six way that New Earth Institute proactively influences and encourages soul development.
1. Relationships. When adults relate to children as sacred. beautiful, intelligent souls with great creative potential. rather than bodies with egoistic minds that need to be programmed according to a set curriculum, these soul mentors support and help awaken the child’s innate consciousness, talents, and abilities and gives that child permission to relate to others in the same way. Of course when parents who relate to their child in the same way, have even a stronger effect. When a child is recognized for his depth of sensitivity, understanding, wisdom, imagination, love, joy, and awe, her deepest nature is validated and she responds in kind.
2. Expression. In any creative activity where students witness simple demonstrations, but later are
given the freedom to express themselves according to their own lights, soul is operative; soul expressing its own preoccupations, its own agenda (rather than the school’s agenda) is soul building its own awareness. Areas of creative activity are, but are not limited to, free play, playing with water, paper and book making, dance, singing, music making, instrument making, cooking, baking, dress up, drama, drawing, painting, sculpture, pottery, print-making, collage, batik, mural-making, mosaics, writing poetry, stories, plays, carving of all kinds, science experiments, gardening, and endless other activities relating directly with Nature.
3. Asking Questions. Instead of asking questions to test the “knowledge” of students, ask them open
-ended questions that invite wonder and imagination. Instead of teaching facts and theories, let them explore the facts, develop the theories, and present their conclusions to others. Conformity to a set curriculum obviates original, creative thinking; It’s important to know what books say and to understand what teachers are saying. Even what experts say. But it more critical to the learner to be proactive and to create what feels intuitively right to them. To break the grip of unthinking dogma, ask what do you the student think about so and so? It asks students to ask themselves to ponder, to question how everything in this world works rather than passively memorize “the right answer.”
It is natural for children to be curious about everything, but most have been trained out of their innate proclivity.
Student also need to be asked those questions about who are we?, what we are doing? and why? Until they create the habit of asking them themselves like they used to do all the time.
4. Living Material. Teachers who appreciate, understand, and use living material (fairy tales, folk tales, legends, creation stories, myths, short stories and literature with many layers of meaning written in the figurative language of the soul [full of images, symbols, analogies, similes and metaphors, synecdoches (“tree at my window, window tree”), apostrophes (“all hands on deck”), metonymies (“the injured boy holds up his hand as if to keep the life from spilling”), allegories or parables, paradoxes, hyperboles, understatements, and ironies.] feed the soul.
In contrast, if one teaches to the ego who sees everything literally and unimaginatively, one uses material with literal language, like is used in many children’s’ books or elementary science books.
5. Models of Intelligences. Learn about, discuss, and research peoples and cultures that do not rely on schools to develop the intelligence of the young. Learn how primitive peoples discover the vital information and understanding that sustains their cultures. Empathetic anthropology has much to offer in this regard. Learn what’s amazing about people who employ the lowest levels of technology. Why are their ways of life sustainable and ours aren’t? Why can they commune with nature? Study the great wisdom the came out of India: the Vedas, the Mahabharata. Learn from Native Americans who have more to teach us about sustainable living and self-reliance than most universities. Why do they know many things that we don’t? Study the life of the people who seeming learned knowledge overnight, like the ancient Greeks who invented or greatly transformed history, drama, science, architecture, philosophy, medicine, sculpture, justice, war strategies, and when perplexed, turned to their greatest authorities: oracles. How did the great flowering of the Renaissance in Florence, Italy happen within a few decades? Why did it abruptly end? Study the great mystics whose vast knowledge came from their inner nature. Together read the poets who transmit so much wisdom to the soul.
5. Talk about Relationships. Weekly Forums abide by specific rules to guarantee non-violent communications (no attacking others). Here ANYTHING may be brought up and discussed. Meeting provides chances to honestly discuss your loves, hopes, goals, resentments, dislikes, and disappointments in an environment that preserves respect for one another.
In volatile situations that erupt at school, we discuss the choices each of us made, what other options we could have chosen, how we feel about ourselves, who we want to become, and tenets we would like to live by. It is an opportunity to reflect upon our thoughts, desires and actions, to consider in the presence of others. It’s a time to entertain alternative possibilities and scenarios, to listen to suggestions and advice, and decide to change something about our habitual patterns, or not. Forum provide a chance to see how our fantasy life fails us in relationships and what we can to do heal what has been wounded. Unconsciousness become aware of its own face. The emphasis is on NOT feeling trapped by our personalities, but on choosing a new way we want to be. Our Forum urges us to examine our experiences and reflect on our identity; much of the language used is figurative.
Forum discussions can lead to the realization that we have conflicting, internal forces, feelings, ideas, thoughts, ambitions, that on some level we are at war with ourselves, and that often we present different personalities to different people. Real discussions that penetrate the veneer of smooth social interactions often lead to life-long friendships.
The object for Meeting is always the same: discovering who we are in this moment and who we wish to be.
6. Observe Nature. Nature, God’s perfection is our greatest Model. We can learn much about nature that increases our appreciation of its workings. But nature, like silence, can also be a significant teacher herself. In a rural setting, near a vast wilderness we have manifold opportunities to commune with nature. What setting could be better?
7. Listen to Students. Differentiate when ego is speaking (the focus is on control, developmental fantasies (i.e. being a hero), coping, “me”, the practical, or the manipulation of objective reali{using literal language} and when the soul is speaking (the focus is on images, reflection, insight, beauty, awe, and awareness {using impersonal or figurative language}. Adults must reply in kind. While dealing with ego needs, one must address the ego’s concerns. When dealing with soul talk one must listen and learn, ask questions, and respond with soul speech.
8. Provide Quiet Time, Guided Meditations, and teaching simple breathing and meditation
techniques.
A school cannot cause soul-building experiences. But it can, through its intention and activities, allow them to happen spontaneously.
A Balance of Feminine and Masculine Traits
In a significant and powerful way, each one of us is both male and female. Even though outwardly, we’re either male or female, inwardly we’re capable of expressing and experiencing the full spectrum of masculine and feminine traits. Whether the expression of each of these traits is met with joy or horror, whether we delight in our potential or deny it and bury it in our bodies, each trait continues to have the power and energy to mold our life.
Although we may claim we never had a say in the nature of our identity, the truth is, as creative beings, we determined, desired, and espoused, our identification, our personality, our selfdom. The magical (or grim) game of choosing our own identity empowers and disempowers us in myriad and subtle ways … until we decide to revise our identity by choosing again.
Those attributes we embrace, whether labeled positive or negative, make up our ego identity; those we deny become the basis of hating and judging ourselves and hating and judging others through the mechanism of projection.
We create our consciousness by choosing what characteristics to grasp or entwine ourselves around and what to reject and disown. It’s all a creative game we willingly partake in although the consequences, as I’m sure you appreciate, are legion and inescapable, UNTIL the moment we elect to embrace an altered identity. Then the exterior world adjusts swiftly and irrevocably to our revised decision.
So given these life axioms about creating identity, let’s open our eyes to the world about us.
What then is the cause of what we see occurring in the world at the present moment. The financial abuses, the daily destruction by sophisticated, high-tech weapons, endless wars, coups, the canyonesque gap between the super rich and the impoverished, industrial farming poisoning those who eat mass- produced foods, supermarkets stuffed with genetically modified “food” products undermining health,. failed schools that produce graduates with no life skills, a health care system based on harmful drugs, heavily polluted air and water that sickens everyone that breathes and drinks, oceans that are becoming cesspools --- who is responsibility for this disaster of untold dimensions? This ever creeping calamity of the Industrial Age that has made Mother Earth toxic? Who or What has changed Paradise into Hell?
My answer: For the last five thousand years we (both males and females) have chosen to support the notion that males have the right to rule females. Most males have no problem with this idea; it becomes part of their identity that they are naturally or by God’s decree, or by brute force the superior gender. And women have bought into that notion and identify with those who must submit to male power over them, with some notable exceptions … until recent times.
Right now we are in a transition of switching from male to female dominion.
We have experienced five thousands of years of total domination of Planet Earth by an extreme form of Patriarchy, the systematic, conscious practice of awarding men power, wealth, property and the right to make crucial decisions for themselves and their family.
Patriarchy and hierarchy always go hand in glove. Where precisely does hierarchy reign? In the business world in general, in corporate board rooms and corporate offices in particular. In government at every level including our secret government (see National Security Act of 1947 for this horror); in schools from pre-schools to graduate schools; in churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, and ashrams; in corporations of all kinds (banks, chain stores, supermarkets), in insurance companies, in health care systems (public and private), in the financial markets, in the real estate markets; in non-profit corporations; in every branch of the military, etc. And patriarchy with its hierarchical prerogatives sleeps in the beds of many families as well.
What is the value system of unchecked patriarchy? Relentless Power Over others (Might makes right), the bottom line, aggression, violence, Fascism, Pure Capitalism, duplicity, spying, mafia-like intimidation (scare tactics), torture of enemies, relentless misinformation and propaganda, a penchant for retaliation and revenge, a perpetual deluge of public relations and advertising (continuous lying), and a breezy attitude that me or my buddy or my religion or my country are right even when we’re wrong and the fantasy or reality of f___ anything that moves!
Want to see it all played out. Turn on television! Its being acted out all day and all night.
Of course ingrained patriarchy instinctively pursues the systematic devaluation, degradation, and humiliation of feminine qualities and traits, so Unconditional Love, Honesty, Gentleness, Protection of the innocent, Nourishment of the dependent, Empathy, Compassion, Sharing, Crying and Grieving and Suffering, Art and Beauty, Intuition and Universal Truth are OUT! So they are ridiculed by macho men as traits of the weak and lowly, the feminine and effeminate.
Of course not all men identify with power, control, deception, and holding their cards close to the chest. But all men understand the macho stance and mask; probably most have practiced extreme patriarchy at some point in their lives.
And of course all women don’t identify with the positive, feminine qualities listed above either. Many have accepted a superficial relationship to themselves and others at the price of an authentic experience of themselves. Some, like some men, are overly emotional, overly jealous, overly possessive, overly controlling, or overly needy for approval.
But all of us have been forced to deal with or are privileged to benefit from the injustices and ruthlessness of patriarchy, and all of us have taken our particular stand concerning it in life.
Until now! In case you haven’t noticed, patriarchal tactics and gambits have been fully exposed for what they are, methods of intimidation designed to coerce others. The greed, the lies, the guile, the fraud, the hypocrisy of the suit-and-tie “professional” stance has been revealed, especially in the past decade.
In The Serpent of Light Drunvalo Melchizedek, who actively traced the journey, details how indigenous people recently followed the kundalini serpent energy from male-dominated Tibet, the power center of the earth for the last 13,000 years, to its new location between Chile and Peru the new home of feminine energy and power. This migration symbolizes the shift of power from male to female that has just begun.
Look at education. It is a telling development that females now outperform males in an educational system based on male values, especially in competition for grades and jobs in our patriarchal good-old-boys system.
You’ve no doubt noticed that our patriarchal, hierarchical system of education is fast dying, losing support as it fails to educate despite the enormous resources poured into it, the endless attempts at reform, experiments with magnet schools and charter schools. Despite the fact that the public is forced to pay more and more for compulsory, public, “free” education, its natural demise is part of the same transition from patriarchal, hierarchical, industrial, corporate power OVER system to the matriarchal, egalitarian, nature-based, power With, new paradigm that hopefully incorporates a balance of masculine and feminine traits in a new society.
For education it means a big change. It means harmonizing both masculine and feminine virtues by radically upgrading feminine values. Creativity rather than analytical, intellectual knowledge will become the basis for education, Nature instead of abstract Science will dominate the core curriculum, Communication and Cooperation, not “Keep Quiet!” and Competition will dictate operations, empowering Artistic, Creative Expression will replace Endless Testing, Intuition and Feeling and Joyful Movement will complement Thinking!
New Earth Institute is based largely on this switch to a balance of masculine and feminine traits within boys and girls, men and women, students and teachers. NEI’s values: Communion with Nature, Self-knowledge, Self-reliance, Self-expression, Cooperation and Compassion, Giving and Forgiving, Non-violent Communication, and Interpersonal Growth will form the basis of school activity.. Our education will be Holistic; it recognizes both feminine and masculine values and integrates and explores all the ways of obtaining valuable information: thoughts, feelings, intuition, and body movement.
We will have an outstanding academic program. Our studies will take an interdisciplinary approach and examine how the different branches of knowledge connect to form a holistic picture of the Holistic Universe. As all living things and the whole of Nature is connected in a cooperative, symbiotic way (the new sciences of Ecology and Quantum Physics are examples of new, holistic ways to study Nature), we will explore how people of all places, societies, and times are connected by a common psyche, common needs, and desires, and how different cultures and societies meet those needs and desires.
The beauty of mathematics will be used to enlighten nature, science, art, music, theater, and dance. Original scientific experiments will examine how Nature works. Art will reveal how different cultures interpret reality. Music will reveal not only its mathematical underpinnings, but how different cultures express their central values. Drama will teach us much about psychology, personality traits, personal relationships, human conflict and, in some cases, conflict resolution, as well as history, fantasy, and imagination. Dance will offer another way to express what is inexpressible with words. Beauty will shine forth in all areas and be created in all the arts.
With feminine values well represented in our curriculum, we will strive to let boys and girls, men and women flower fully and embrace the best of masculine and feminine traits.. Like Leonardo De Vinci, the model of Renaissance Man (multi-talented, multi-faceted), we will taste and sample all the academics and all the arts and bless our Mother Earth.
Although we may claim we never had a say in the nature of our identity, the truth is, as creative beings, we determined, desired, and espoused, our identification, our personality, our selfdom. The magical (or grim) game of choosing our own identity empowers and disempowers us in myriad and subtle ways … until we decide to revise our identity by choosing again.
Those attributes we embrace, whether labeled positive or negative, make up our ego identity; those we deny become the basis of hating and judging ourselves and hating and judging others through the mechanism of projection.
We create our consciousness by choosing what characteristics to grasp or entwine ourselves around and what to reject and disown. It’s all a creative game we willingly partake in although the consequences, as I’m sure you appreciate, are legion and inescapable, UNTIL the moment we elect to embrace an altered identity. Then the exterior world adjusts swiftly and irrevocably to our revised decision.
So given these life axioms about creating identity, let’s open our eyes to the world about us.
What then is the cause of what we see occurring in the world at the present moment. The financial abuses, the daily destruction by sophisticated, high-tech weapons, endless wars, coups, the canyonesque gap between the super rich and the impoverished, industrial farming poisoning those who eat mass- produced foods, supermarkets stuffed with genetically modified “food” products undermining health,. failed schools that produce graduates with no life skills, a health care system based on harmful drugs, heavily polluted air and water that sickens everyone that breathes and drinks, oceans that are becoming cesspools --- who is responsibility for this disaster of untold dimensions? This ever creeping calamity of the Industrial Age that has made Mother Earth toxic? Who or What has changed Paradise into Hell?
My answer: For the last five thousand years we (both males and females) have chosen to support the notion that males have the right to rule females. Most males have no problem with this idea; it becomes part of their identity that they are naturally or by God’s decree, or by brute force the superior gender. And women have bought into that notion and identify with those who must submit to male power over them, with some notable exceptions … until recent times.
Right now we are in a transition of switching from male to female dominion.
We have experienced five thousands of years of total domination of Planet Earth by an extreme form of Patriarchy, the systematic, conscious practice of awarding men power, wealth, property and the right to make crucial decisions for themselves and their family.
Patriarchy and hierarchy always go hand in glove. Where precisely does hierarchy reign? In the business world in general, in corporate board rooms and corporate offices in particular. In government at every level including our secret government (see National Security Act of 1947 for this horror); in schools from pre-schools to graduate schools; in churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, and ashrams; in corporations of all kinds (banks, chain stores, supermarkets), in insurance companies, in health care systems (public and private), in the financial markets, in the real estate markets; in non-profit corporations; in every branch of the military, etc. And patriarchy with its hierarchical prerogatives sleeps in the beds of many families as well.
What is the value system of unchecked patriarchy? Relentless Power Over others (Might makes right), the bottom line, aggression, violence, Fascism, Pure Capitalism, duplicity, spying, mafia-like intimidation (scare tactics), torture of enemies, relentless misinformation and propaganda, a penchant for retaliation and revenge, a perpetual deluge of public relations and advertising (continuous lying), and a breezy attitude that me or my buddy or my religion or my country are right even when we’re wrong and the fantasy or reality of f___ anything that moves!
Want to see it all played out. Turn on television! Its being acted out all day and all night.
Of course ingrained patriarchy instinctively pursues the systematic devaluation, degradation, and humiliation of feminine qualities and traits, so Unconditional Love, Honesty, Gentleness, Protection of the innocent, Nourishment of the dependent, Empathy, Compassion, Sharing, Crying and Grieving and Suffering, Art and Beauty, Intuition and Universal Truth are OUT! So they are ridiculed by macho men as traits of the weak and lowly, the feminine and effeminate.
Of course not all men identify with power, control, deception, and holding their cards close to the chest. But all men understand the macho stance and mask; probably most have practiced extreme patriarchy at some point in their lives.
And of course all women don’t identify with the positive, feminine qualities listed above either. Many have accepted a superficial relationship to themselves and others at the price of an authentic experience of themselves. Some, like some men, are overly emotional, overly jealous, overly possessive, overly controlling, or overly needy for approval.
But all of us have been forced to deal with or are privileged to benefit from the injustices and ruthlessness of patriarchy, and all of us have taken our particular stand concerning it in life.
Until now! In case you haven’t noticed, patriarchal tactics and gambits have been fully exposed for what they are, methods of intimidation designed to coerce others. The greed, the lies, the guile, the fraud, the hypocrisy of the suit-and-tie “professional” stance has been revealed, especially in the past decade.
In The Serpent of Light Drunvalo Melchizedek, who actively traced the journey, details how indigenous people recently followed the kundalini serpent energy from male-dominated Tibet, the power center of the earth for the last 13,000 years, to its new location between Chile and Peru the new home of feminine energy and power. This migration symbolizes the shift of power from male to female that has just begun.
Look at education. It is a telling development that females now outperform males in an educational system based on male values, especially in competition for grades and jobs in our patriarchal good-old-boys system.
You’ve no doubt noticed that our patriarchal, hierarchical system of education is fast dying, losing support as it fails to educate despite the enormous resources poured into it, the endless attempts at reform, experiments with magnet schools and charter schools. Despite the fact that the public is forced to pay more and more for compulsory, public, “free” education, its natural demise is part of the same transition from patriarchal, hierarchical, industrial, corporate power OVER system to the matriarchal, egalitarian, nature-based, power With, new paradigm that hopefully incorporates a balance of masculine and feminine traits in a new society.
For education it means a big change. It means harmonizing both masculine and feminine virtues by radically upgrading feminine values. Creativity rather than analytical, intellectual knowledge will become the basis for education, Nature instead of abstract Science will dominate the core curriculum, Communication and Cooperation, not “Keep Quiet!” and Competition will dictate operations, empowering Artistic, Creative Expression will replace Endless Testing, Intuition and Feeling and Joyful Movement will complement Thinking!
New Earth Institute is based largely on this switch to a balance of masculine and feminine traits within boys and girls, men and women, students and teachers. NEI’s values: Communion with Nature, Self-knowledge, Self-reliance, Self-expression, Cooperation and Compassion, Giving and Forgiving, Non-violent Communication, and Interpersonal Growth will form the basis of school activity.. Our education will be Holistic; it recognizes both feminine and masculine values and integrates and explores all the ways of obtaining valuable information: thoughts, feelings, intuition, and body movement.
We will have an outstanding academic program. Our studies will take an interdisciplinary approach and examine how the different branches of knowledge connect to form a holistic picture of the Holistic Universe. As all living things and the whole of Nature is connected in a cooperative, symbiotic way (the new sciences of Ecology and Quantum Physics are examples of new, holistic ways to study Nature), we will explore how people of all places, societies, and times are connected by a common psyche, common needs, and desires, and how different cultures and societies meet those needs and desires.
The beauty of mathematics will be used to enlighten nature, science, art, music, theater, and dance. Original scientific experiments will examine how Nature works. Art will reveal how different cultures interpret reality. Music will reveal not only its mathematical underpinnings, but how different cultures express their central values. Drama will teach us much about psychology, personality traits, personal relationships, human conflict and, in some cases, conflict resolution, as well as history, fantasy, and imagination. Dance will offer another way to express what is inexpressible with words. Beauty will shine forth in all areas and be created in all the arts.
With feminine values well represented in our curriculum, we will strive to let boys and girls, men and women flower fully and embrace the best of masculine and feminine traits.. Like Leonardo De Vinci, the model of Renaissance Man (multi-talented, multi-faceted), we will taste and sample all the academics and all the arts and bless our Mother Earth.
Soul Education
The soul (variously defined as our immaterial essence, our animating principle, the cause of our individual life, a person’s total self, a Nourishing Mother that feeds us or as our moral and emotional nature) witnesses our life as a detached observer of our thoughts and deeds and emotional reactions.
Soul is both the intelligence and deep experience that stands behind our secret self, our quintessence, our vitality, our creative essence, our being, our spirit, our heart, our courage, and our conscience. It is, at the same time, the source of our deepest longings and yearnings. It is the source of our desire to surrender our personal needs and serve humanity, all life forms, Mother earth, the World, the Universe, or God.
The soul is our I AM, the root of our being.
As such soul is the seat of our consciousness. Our soul witnesses our life. It is our deep, reflective pool that mirrors for us our thoughts, emotions, and deeds. Soul allows meaning to enter and float throughout our life. Soul turns outward events into our very own experiences of personal truth.
Among the souls many allies and guides are Nature (Nature which simply is; Nature cannot be misguided or wrong – only humans can), Imagination (the Force behind all Creation – here I refer to the constructive, not the destructive, nefarious forms of imagination eager to cause suffering, despair, and annihilation), unvarnished Honesty, Universal Truth (our soul is happy when are we aligned with it, miserable when we are not), Beauty (which arrests our running thought life and leaves us dumb), a Nourishing Spirit, and certain feelings such as Unconditional Love, Gratitude, Joy, Empathy, Awe, ands Compassion).
Notice that the Soul and its Allies and Guides – Nature, constructive Imagination, Honesty, Truth, Beauty and the feelings of Unconditional Love, Gratitude, Joy, Empathy, Awe and Compassion, Conscience, the Nourishing Mother Earth, are all qualities of the Divine Female representing the inner egalitarian, meditative life in contradistinction to Male qualities of Aggression, Competition, Combat, The Will to Power Over Others, expressed for millennia through patriarchal, Hierarchical Structures like Corporations, the Good, Old Boys Network, and the Mafia with a small Elite who hoard their wealth against a rainy day, and then the disenfranchised faceless masses who live in poverty on the crumbs left over from the table of the rich, the hierarchical churches who demand tithing, the Insurance Companies and Health Care Giants who extort money from the intimidated who live in fear.
In our hierarchical compulsory, government school system, the very concept of Soul is banished from education; the verdict is soul is illusory, not a part of reality (you can tell by its absence in the curriculum or in any discussion about education. In that patriarchal system our essence and our being is denied and violated. This is what I experienced as a second grader but I had no words to describe why I didn’t belong in that educational system, why I couldn’t relate to it. I just knew instinctively that I was an outsider.
Soul experience, and the ascendancy of Feminine values (along with constructive male values) constitutes the very foundation and fabric of authentic education. Communion and cooperation with the Natural World should be the heart of authentic education. Our inner being should be reflected in the many activities we participate in every day.
We should be free to express all our feelings in non-violent, non-abusive, considerate ways. Our feelings are inexplicable linked to our being, our nature; they can’t be forbidden. Unless they are expressed and released, they cause over time sickness, depression, isolation, and angst.
We should be free to dance, to make music, to draw, to paint, to put on plays, to sculpt, etc. Free to participate in crafts, the making of useful, beautiful things. Free to help design and create the space we share with others.
And what of academics? If the expressive side of academics, the use of language, the writing of plays, poetry, short stories, novels, is not graded, but shared, it brings joy and the satisfaction of having communicated what is in one’s heart and soul.
To have vitality academics must be taught imaginatively and interactively through asking a million questions, giving students ample opportunity to imagine, to think, to speak, and express their ideas.
Science, if it is taught as something to do (conduct original scientific experiments, adjust your hypothesis, redesign the experiment and repeat the process until satisfied) and not as something to believe in blindly, will create enthusiasm for new discoveries. And science taught in some depth so that one understands the nature of interrelationships involved and includes the many unsolved mysteries, is appropriate and life giving, especially if the instructor does not talk more than two minutes at a time and asks questions and allows time for students to formulate their own questions.
I’m all for the academic studies IF they support our soul essence, IF the studies are stripped of dogma, the endless memorization of facts out of context, the practice of incessant testing and the fear and trauma it induces. Academics ought to be a joyful activity motivated by the thrill of discovery. Otherwise academic knowledge, and in particular, scientific knowledge can be harmful once incorporated into opportunistic minds. What opportunistic minds?
Think of those who used their knowledge to develop the weapons of mass destruction used today and every day, every year: atomic weapons, germ warfare, agent orange, uranium tipped bombs, burning phosphorus, and land mines. Think of the irreparable harm done by industrial agriculture which sells the byproducts of war as fertilizer, guaranteeing that the crops they are sprayed on will be poisoned. Think of those bright people who create and patent genetically modified organisms and those who persuade or force farmers around the world to grow unhealthy food just to make a profit, food unsuitable for human consumption. Surplus nerve gas is used to make pesticides to spray on the crops we unsuspectingly eat!
The majority of products in supermarkets today contain two ubiquitous gmo’s (genetically modified organisms): corn (syrup) and soy bean oil, both intended to increase the profits of a few giant corporations, both unsuitable for human consumption. Think of all the drugs being dispensed by doctors and health care professions, drugs intended to mask symptoms and not to cure a condition. The already vulnerable and helpless are told, “You have to take this drug every day for the rest of your life.”
Think of the individuals tortured “scientifically,” that is, under the direction of psychologists and doctors, every day in prisons around the world. Think about global pollution, global warming, extreme weather patterns, the sinking of nations, giant oil spills. All these atrocities were perpetuated knowingly by people with the requisite knowledge to predict the outcome. Is modern technology wonderful? Will it save our planet? Are the people who benefit from selling their superior knowledge creating a better life for the rest of us?
Educators should face up the fact that that forms of education which crush the soul, breed violence, poverty, and misery everywhere. It is its hallmark as well as that of its counterpart: the military hierarchy that preaches the use of shock and awe! Such education unmasked is obviously a deadly, destructive force.
Teachers bear a heavy burden. They are responsible for what they teach or don’t teach whether they are part of the compulsory educational system or not. They can have a profound impact on the educational process if they see students a soul beings, if they talk to students as soul beings who possess amazing intelligence and special gifts, if they meditate from time to time on the essence of their students. For teachers who view their students in this way, much information will be revealed about their students special needs, interests, and talents. As Allan Bloom says, "There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech."
If total disaster is to be averted, Soul Education, with its capacity to awaken students and teachers to the constant presence and reality of our light-infused, powerful soul entities, must replace the current mission of schools: turning out intellectuals willing to compete for grades, for recognition for academic achievement alone, and entry into institutions of higher education where they learn detailed knowledge that may be used for ill or good. This educational system was designed to produce and endless pool of university professors and not much else.
I am committed to Soul Education because I believe that only Soul Education can create a new, transformative, revolutionary culture capable of saving our planet Earth. Staying the course, for me, is unthinkable. What do you think?
Soul is both the intelligence and deep experience that stands behind our secret self, our quintessence, our vitality, our creative essence, our being, our spirit, our heart, our courage, and our conscience. It is, at the same time, the source of our deepest longings and yearnings. It is the source of our desire to surrender our personal needs and serve humanity, all life forms, Mother earth, the World, the Universe, or God.
The soul is our I AM, the root of our being.
As such soul is the seat of our consciousness. Our soul witnesses our life. It is our deep, reflective pool that mirrors for us our thoughts, emotions, and deeds. Soul allows meaning to enter and float throughout our life. Soul turns outward events into our very own experiences of personal truth.
Among the souls many allies and guides are Nature (Nature which simply is; Nature cannot be misguided or wrong – only humans can), Imagination (the Force behind all Creation – here I refer to the constructive, not the destructive, nefarious forms of imagination eager to cause suffering, despair, and annihilation), unvarnished Honesty, Universal Truth (our soul is happy when are we aligned with it, miserable when we are not), Beauty (which arrests our running thought life and leaves us dumb), a Nourishing Spirit, and certain feelings such as Unconditional Love, Gratitude, Joy, Empathy, Awe, ands Compassion).
Notice that the Soul and its Allies and Guides – Nature, constructive Imagination, Honesty, Truth, Beauty and the feelings of Unconditional Love, Gratitude, Joy, Empathy, Awe and Compassion, Conscience, the Nourishing Mother Earth, are all qualities of the Divine Female representing the inner egalitarian, meditative life in contradistinction to Male qualities of Aggression, Competition, Combat, The Will to Power Over Others, expressed for millennia through patriarchal, Hierarchical Structures like Corporations, the Good, Old Boys Network, and the Mafia with a small Elite who hoard their wealth against a rainy day, and then the disenfranchised faceless masses who live in poverty on the crumbs left over from the table of the rich, the hierarchical churches who demand tithing, the Insurance Companies and Health Care Giants who extort money from the intimidated who live in fear.
In our hierarchical compulsory, government school system, the very concept of Soul is banished from education; the verdict is soul is illusory, not a part of reality (you can tell by its absence in the curriculum or in any discussion about education. In that patriarchal system our essence and our being is denied and violated. This is what I experienced as a second grader but I had no words to describe why I didn’t belong in that educational system, why I couldn’t relate to it. I just knew instinctively that I was an outsider.
Soul experience, and the ascendancy of Feminine values (along with constructive male values) constitutes the very foundation and fabric of authentic education. Communion and cooperation with the Natural World should be the heart of authentic education. Our inner being should be reflected in the many activities we participate in every day.
We should be free to express all our feelings in non-violent, non-abusive, considerate ways. Our feelings are inexplicable linked to our being, our nature; they can’t be forbidden. Unless they are expressed and released, they cause over time sickness, depression, isolation, and angst.
We should be free to dance, to make music, to draw, to paint, to put on plays, to sculpt, etc. Free to participate in crafts, the making of useful, beautiful things. Free to help design and create the space we share with others.
And what of academics? If the expressive side of academics, the use of language, the writing of plays, poetry, short stories, novels, is not graded, but shared, it brings joy and the satisfaction of having communicated what is in one’s heart and soul.
To have vitality academics must be taught imaginatively and interactively through asking a million questions, giving students ample opportunity to imagine, to think, to speak, and express their ideas.
Science, if it is taught as something to do (conduct original scientific experiments, adjust your hypothesis, redesign the experiment and repeat the process until satisfied) and not as something to believe in blindly, will create enthusiasm for new discoveries. And science taught in some depth so that one understands the nature of interrelationships involved and includes the many unsolved mysteries, is appropriate and life giving, especially if the instructor does not talk more than two minutes at a time and asks questions and allows time for students to formulate their own questions.
I’m all for the academic studies IF they support our soul essence, IF the studies are stripped of dogma, the endless memorization of facts out of context, the practice of incessant testing and the fear and trauma it induces. Academics ought to be a joyful activity motivated by the thrill of discovery. Otherwise academic knowledge, and in particular, scientific knowledge can be harmful once incorporated into opportunistic minds. What opportunistic minds?
Think of those who used their knowledge to develop the weapons of mass destruction used today and every day, every year: atomic weapons, germ warfare, agent orange, uranium tipped bombs, burning phosphorus, and land mines. Think of the irreparable harm done by industrial agriculture which sells the byproducts of war as fertilizer, guaranteeing that the crops they are sprayed on will be poisoned. Think of those bright people who create and patent genetically modified organisms and those who persuade or force farmers around the world to grow unhealthy food just to make a profit, food unsuitable for human consumption. Surplus nerve gas is used to make pesticides to spray on the crops we unsuspectingly eat!
The majority of products in supermarkets today contain two ubiquitous gmo’s (genetically modified organisms): corn (syrup) and soy bean oil, both intended to increase the profits of a few giant corporations, both unsuitable for human consumption. Think of all the drugs being dispensed by doctors and health care professions, drugs intended to mask symptoms and not to cure a condition. The already vulnerable and helpless are told, “You have to take this drug every day for the rest of your life.”
Think of the individuals tortured “scientifically,” that is, under the direction of psychologists and doctors, every day in prisons around the world. Think about global pollution, global warming, extreme weather patterns, the sinking of nations, giant oil spills. All these atrocities were perpetuated knowingly by people with the requisite knowledge to predict the outcome. Is modern technology wonderful? Will it save our planet? Are the people who benefit from selling their superior knowledge creating a better life for the rest of us?
Educators should face up the fact that that forms of education which crush the soul, breed violence, poverty, and misery everywhere. It is its hallmark as well as that of its counterpart: the military hierarchy that preaches the use of shock and awe! Such education unmasked is obviously a deadly, destructive force.
Teachers bear a heavy burden. They are responsible for what they teach or don’t teach whether they are part of the compulsory educational system or not. They can have a profound impact on the educational process if they see students a soul beings, if they talk to students as soul beings who possess amazing intelligence and special gifts, if they meditate from time to time on the essence of their students. For teachers who view their students in this way, much information will be revealed about their students special needs, interests, and talents. As Allan Bloom says, "There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech."
If total disaster is to be averted, Soul Education, with its capacity to awaken students and teachers to the constant presence and reality of our light-infused, powerful soul entities, must replace the current mission of schools: turning out intellectuals willing to compete for grades, for recognition for academic achievement alone, and entry into institutions of higher education where they learn detailed knowledge that may be used for ill or good. This educational system was designed to produce and endless pool of university professors and not much else.
I am committed to Soul Education because I believe that only Soul Education can create a new, transformative, revolutionary culture capable of saving our planet Earth. Staying the course, for me, is unthinkable. What do you think?
5. A Space of Love
It is the intention of New Earth Institute to create and maintain a Space of Love. Our first priority as an educational institution is to commit to love as best we can at all times. For an environment of loving acceptance that encourages intelligence to function unimpeded by fear, by censure, by ridicule, by rebuke, all participants agree to honor and respect themselves and others.
In this Space of Love natural affection (hugging, touching with permission) is not regarded with suspicion, but deemed appropriate to loving individuals. It’s a sign that love, not fear, rules, that demonstrations of love are natural, not evil.
In a climate of love, life flourishes in the open rather than hides in the shadows. This is a climate. of brotherhood and sisterhood. Love, not fear, protects us like a gentle lioness.
FREEDOM
The Space of Love is also a pledge to freedom of thought, freedom of feeling, and freedom of expression. But freedom is not license to harm; At NEI we forfeit our right to harm others in overt and subtle ways. Here we are accountable for our words and deeds. Here we learn how to communicate non-violently and non-aggressively. We agree to honor others at all times. We learn to communicate our negative emotions --- anger, hate, jealousy, fear, suspicion --- in a way that communicates our truth, but preserves respect for the other.
Free people occasionally make waves. Except on the basics about how we treat each other, there is room for disagreement, for difference of opinion, for eccentricity, for individuality, for originality.
ORIGINALITY
At New Earth Institute the spark of originality is celebrated. Love does not accept mediocrity; conformity is not the norm. We applaud the genius and creativity of everyone. The fires of enthusiasm and passion shine brightly here. Flowers only bloom in the presence of light and love.
TEACHERS
Teachers here are not authority figures. They do not pretend to, and are not expected to know all the answers; they are capable of routinely admitting their ignorance. Questions, not answers, is the name of our game. The dominant question is not “Who knows the answer,” but who is interested in discovering the answer. Inquiry is our modus operandi.
Here there is no hierarchy, breeding fear and retribution. A teaching style that depends on earned authority rather than artificial authority teaches a different lesson to students, a lesson of freedom and respect; arrogance has no legitimacy in relationships among free people. At NEI the title does not possess authority; the individual who merits authority may.
Teachers are not in a class by themselves. Since they have no automatic and instant authority, they can be openly criticized and challenged.
TEACHERS AS STUDENTS
Unless teachers are avid students themselves, they fail to fulfill their role.
To ensure our Space of Love, it is expected that each teacher makes a regular practice of expanding his or her consciousness, discovering and coming to terms with his or her shadow self, so that he or she does not contaminate students with unresolved issues and well-disguised negativity.
In this Space of Love natural affection (hugging, touching with permission) is not regarded with suspicion, but deemed appropriate to loving individuals. It’s a sign that love, not fear, rules, that demonstrations of love are natural, not evil.
In a climate of love, life flourishes in the open rather than hides in the shadows. This is a climate. of brotherhood and sisterhood. Love, not fear, protects us like a gentle lioness.
FREEDOM
The Space of Love is also a pledge to freedom of thought, freedom of feeling, and freedom of expression. But freedom is not license to harm; At NEI we forfeit our right to harm others in overt and subtle ways. Here we are accountable for our words and deeds. Here we learn how to communicate non-violently and non-aggressively. We agree to honor others at all times. We learn to communicate our negative emotions --- anger, hate, jealousy, fear, suspicion --- in a way that communicates our truth, but preserves respect for the other.
Free people occasionally make waves. Except on the basics about how we treat each other, there is room for disagreement, for difference of opinion, for eccentricity, for individuality, for originality.
ORIGINALITY
At New Earth Institute the spark of originality is celebrated. Love does not accept mediocrity; conformity is not the norm. We applaud the genius and creativity of everyone. The fires of enthusiasm and passion shine brightly here. Flowers only bloom in the presence of light and love.
TEACHERS
Teachers here are not authority figures. They do not pretend to, and are not expected to know all the answers; they are capable of routinely admitting their ignorance. Questions, not answers, is the name of our game. The dominant question is not “Who knows the answer,” but who is interested in discovering the answer. Inquiry is our modus operandi.
Here there is no hierarchy, breeding fear and retribution. A teaching style that depends on earned authority rather than artificial authority teaches a different lesson to students, a lesson of freedom and respect; arrogance has no legitimacy in relationships among free people. At NEI the title does not possess authority; the individual who merits authority may.
Teachers are not in a class by themselves. Since they have no automatic and instant authority, they can be openly criticized and challenged.
TEACHERS AS STUDENTS
Unless teachers are avid students themselves, they fail to fulfill their role.
To ensure our Space of Love, it is expected that each teacher makes a regular practice of expanding his or her consciousness, discovering and coming to terms with his or her shadow self, so that he or she does not contaminate students with unresolved issues and well-disguised negativity.
Authentic Education as Inspiration
Education without inspiration is like fast foods without nutrition. It desiccates the soul and leeches vitality. Inspiration nourishes the higher self; it is our eagle that soars. Inspiration expands perspective so that the spark in us is set aflame. Our viewpoint becomes exalted; we are awakened to our potential.
Mankind without a vision, degenerates. He lives only on the lower mental plane, cut off from what is life giving. He is vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, servitude, and degradation. He becomes a blind man, having no capacity to distinguish what is invigorating from what is destructive. He works only for pay; he’s enthralled to his paymaster; he lives without hope.
Inspiration come from within although it may be triggered from the outside. It is a sudden recognition of one’s own authenticity as a child of Nature. Inspiration animates, quickens us to move in a new direction, spurs us to do what seemed impossible. It is an encounter with the deepest truth.
The hidden source of this divine arousal is life itself. Life triggers life by provoking a genuine living response.
When a teacher teaches not to the mind alone, but to the sentient being behind the mind, he speaks to the soul. When a student is directly addressed in this way, he responds with his imagination as well as his reason. He awakens!
The materials used is teaching must be those that possess life in the first place. Facts and abstract concepts will not do. Information out of context is dead. Theories without live demonstrations are dead weight to be memorized and carried for life like a mental ball and chain.
What has the power to ignite students is fairy tales, pregnant stories, the great myths of the world, poetry, song, dance, drama, and art.
Not dead scientific dogma and encyclopedic information, but science as careful observation and interaction with living Nature. A trip into the wilderness where life abounds, planting and tending a garden where organic interfaces with inorganic, communicating with animals in a climate of love and respect --- these uplift and stir the imagination.
The wonders of mathematics, especially as it interact with nature, sacred geometry, and architecture.! Seeing the beautiful patterns of numbers, becoming mentally dexterous and playing with numbers -- this inspires.
History --- not as a succession of conquests or a series of dates --- but as absorbing biographies and dramas with endless interconnections and fascinating sidebars --- inspires. Anthropology, the panorama of the cultural experiments of man through time and space --- when other cultures are not viewed with disgust like the study of slimy, alien beings, but empathetically and imaginatively, excites and stirs the imagination.
Mankind without a vision, degenerates. He lives only on the lower mental plane, cut off from what is life giving. He is vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation, servitude, and degradation. He becomes a blind man, having no capacity to distinguish what is invigorating from what is destructive. He works only for pay; he’s enthralled to his paymaster; he lives without hope.
Inspiration come from within although it may be triggered from the outside. It is a sudden recognition of one’s own authenticity as a child of Nature. Inspiration animates, quickens us to move in a new direction, spurs us to do what seemed impossible. It is an encounter with the deepest truth.
The hidden source of this divine arousal is life itself. Life triggers life by provoking a genuine living response.
When a teacher teaches not to the mind alone, but to the sentient being behind the mind, he speaks to the soul. When a student is directly addressed in this way, he responds with his imagination as well as his reason. He awakens!
The materials used is teaching must be those that possess life in the first place. Facts and abstract concepts will not do. Information out of context is dead. Theories without live demonstrations are dead weight to be memorized and carried for life like a mental ball and chain.
What has the power to ignite students is fairy tales, pregnant stories, the great myths of the world, poetry, song, dance, drama, and art.
Not dead scientific dogma and encyclopedic information, but science as careful observation and interaction with living Nature. A trip into the wilderness where life abounds, planting and tending a garden where organic interfaces with inorganic, communicating with animals in a climate of love and respect --- these uplift and stir the imagination.
The wonders of mathematics, especially as it interact with nature, sacred geometry, and architecture.! Seeing the beautiful patterns of numbers, becoming mentally dexterous and playing with numbers -- this inspires.
History --- not as a succession of conquests or a series of dates --- but as absorbing biographies and dramas with endless interconnections and fascinating sidebars --- inspires. Anthropology, the panorama of the cultural experiments of man through time and space --- when other cultures are not viewed with disgust like the study of slimy, alien beings, but empathetically and imaginatively, excites and stirs the imagination.
Education Today: America in the Prussian Shadow
Horace Mann, the first Superintendent of Schools in America, loved order above all, and as he had been frustrated in trying to standardize Massachusetts schools, he saw the already completed Prussian model as a shortcut to his goal. His success in adopting Prussian-style schools changed the course not only of American education, but of American history, as well.
For Mann imported a cynical system created by elite Prussian industrialists in order to produce a fascist state with an ideology that promoted:
* Dictatorial government.
* A centralized control of the national economy, political decisions, military life and operations, and education.
* Stiff and violent repression of any opposition or any variance in ideas.
* Censorship of artistic expression.
* Record keeping and regular surveillance of its citizens.
* Unquestioned nationalism.
Prussia’s highest virtue was absolute obedience to authority. For the small group of industrialists, the goal was generating the highest profits possible in a state that sponsored an invincible army. There were, in short, no individual rights or liberties, except for the elite. All power was held by the state, controlled by the industrialists.
Yet even Prussia’s educational system, which Mann investigated, had two faces.. For the elite, the Realschule was to be the place where true education would take place. Here students would freely interact, discuss topics, debate and, in general, learn to think. Here they would gain leadership skills and become identified with the elite class. Here they would dabble in classical education.
Horace Mann, however, rejected this system of education in favor of the one that specialized in creating human robots for factories and the military.
According to John Gatto’s highly documented Underground History of American Education, 92% of Prussia’s children were forced to attend the school that prepared students for one of two occupations: obedient soldiers in the army, or obedient workers in the factories.
This school for commoners was the Volksschule. It was this model school that Horace Mann chose to adopt and transplant to Massachusetts, the model that was to be eventually adopted by every state in the United States, and then by our federal government, and which has become in everything but name our federal system of compulsory, national education. Everything in this school was designed to break the spirit of individuals and train them to become bored, undifferentiated sheep-workers, willing to relinquish personal dreams for the glory of the state.
Prussia, as the first military-industrial-educational complex to inaugurate the Industrial Revolution, appealed to industrialists in America and throughout the world. Because Prussia represented the triumph of fascist planning and practice, it inspired the would-be fascist industrialists everywhere, as did Hitler’s absolutist beliefs and propaganda in a later age. It maximized and guaranteed obscene profits for the already wealthy. It created an army of compliant, submissive workers for industry and created a military force capable of defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, and exacting revenge on France for humiliating Prussia in the battle of Jena in 1806. It proved to the satisfaction of many that “might makes right,” that to the brutal victor come all the spoils.
As Gatto explains:
“The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
“The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the ‘Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time it would be different.
“In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no long be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that ‘work makes free,’ and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte’s challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther’s plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the ‘Old Deluder Satan’ law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century; only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school as late as 1920. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.
“Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference."
John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education, P.131-132
In the 1840s, the totalitarian state of Prussia adopted many strategies reminiscent of first state educational system of the ancient military camp of Sparta. Those strategies, which clearly reveal the mindset of its proponents, included:
1 Compulsory attendance
2. Regimentation and uniformity and standardization in all aspects of the school day
3. Worship of efficiency and mechanization
4. Centralized control of all schools
5. Planned limited intellectual development
6. Socially Engineered Obedience and Subordination (managing the thought life of children through the new Scientific Psychology of Mind Control and Conditioned Learning)
7. Science at the center of the curriculum
8. Universal Standards for all children
9. State controlled Teacher Certification
10. Segregating children in classrooms by Age
11. Universal Child Labor Laws preventing children from working prescribed for all others.
12. Indoctrination with a rigid, planned curriculum for all grades
13. Forbidding the use of phonics in learning to read
14. Use of Controlled Vocabulary to regulate what students could read and could not read
15. Reliance on State Sponsored Textbooks (information was homogenized, altered, made politically correct, passionless anddull)
16. Social studies (with pointed lessons on how to be an ideal citizen) replaced any knowledge of history and the historical process
17. The use of the bogus science of Phrenology (bumps on the head represent developed and undeveloped regions of the brain) to manage student behavior
18. The state assumed legal guardianship of each child
Prussian schools thus foreshadowed the employment of compulsory schooling for national indoctrination in the United States, in Great Britain, in Soviet Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.
Prussia, it is clear, was a state where absolute control could not even be questioned. This repressive regime totally managed the life of its citizens. The surveillance of the state reached into every aspect of life.
In this way, the system would guarantee education of the state, by the state, and for the state. The child became the moldable property of the state, to be used solely for its purposes.
All 18 of these strategies of fascist Prussia were seized on by Horace Mann and made part of the Massachusetts public schools; most were in place within a decade. There were many in Massachusetts, probably the majority, that could not reconcile individual liberty with compulsory, state-sponsored education, and who strongly resented and resisted turning their children over to the state.
But Mann was a powerful individual with a network of strong political connections gained by his years as a Massachusetts representative and senator. He was known for being a persuasive orator, a successful lawyer, for his office as President of the Massachusetts’ Senate, for his aggressive establishment of educational reforms and forceful attempts to standardize and regulate schools as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and for creating a well-regulated Massachusetts lunatic asylum in Worcester. Everyone who owed him a favor was enlisted to vote or persuaded others to vote for his compulsory school bill. The law passed in Massachusetts in 1852. The Prussian model of education had been successfully transplanted to America. From that point on, America was destined to be controlled by the industrial magnates.
Mann was able to introduce an officially non-sectarian education that, in fact, was based on good Protestant principles that would protect the state from the huge influx of Catholics from Ireland.
Over the next 70 years, battles between proponents of a free educational system (mostly parents) and those who advocated the uniformity that could only be accomplished through compulsory education, a la Prussia, would be waged in every other state as well. The combination of political power and the interests of corporations eventually overcame the unorganized opposition of parents, although 16 states resisted and opposed the process until early in the 20th century.
After their capitulation, individual states used their discretion on how strictly to compel their students to accept the formula based on authoritarian absolutism.
For me, as a student in the compulsory education system (grades K–12), as a teacher working for the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs’ government schools in Inuit (Eskimo) communities in Alaska (I had to leave because the politics of the bureau tore my heart out), as a teacher in a typical private school (I rebelled at the lack of individual expression and the extreme control exercised on the student body), and as the founder of The Well School, compulsory education was repulsive. We refuted the fascistic model and the thinking that inevitably supports it and created, instead, an education devoted to the development of individual consciousness, individual expression, and the knowledge that comes from honoring individual experience.
The irony is that the great majority of teachers working in our national, compulsory, education system are well-meaning individuals, many deeply committed to the welfare of their students, as well as to the obligatory requirements of their job. This irony is compounded by another: the vast, American public is almost totally ignorant that our “public schools” are based on the principles developed by Prussian industrialists `with a lust for absolute power and absolute control over the minds of others. The System
the Prussians devised is a system intended only for exploitation in the service of violence towards others. It works to rob us of genius, of independence and self-reliance, of self-respect, and of an awareness of living creatures.
Americans have, like the Germans and the English (who also copied Prussian educational innovations), interwoven into our national psyche an unconscious adoration of power, regardless of whether we, as individuals, play the part of the wolves or the sheep in our economic drama of survival. We are unconsciously addicted to violence, to brutal competition, to cruelty, to torture, and to indifference.
Today, violence is the mindset of kids, who play at killing day after day in video games. It is the mindset of the movie and television industry, which finds that random, indiscriminate violence creates, for them, excessive profits. It is the mindset of educational bureaucrats who, for a little power over parents and children, sell their soul to the system.
There are other ironies that should be noted. The colonists fought a bitter war to free themselves from the bureaucratic control of the English and English corporations operating in America. Yet, ultimately, every state in this “free” nation voted for bureaucratic control of their children. And now, our federal government, through the Department of Education, directs what we call “voluntary” (there is nothing voluntary about it, for federal monies to state educational agencies can be cut off in an instant), national goals and standards (strict conformity always appealed to fascistic thinking), which every child must accept as the law of the land. We have centralized education, and put children not under the control of their parents or the tutor chosen by their parents, but under the control of a federalized, two-tiered bureaucracy, in which states now bend to the will of a national imperative to create dumbed-down, obedient conformists. Often, the parents’ only recourse is to remove their children from government schools and seek the right of home education under the rules and regulations of their state.
We see that children in America are now owned by the state, as they were in Prussia. They do not only live under the laws of a government that protects their independence and freedom, but according to the multitude of exacting prescriptions of educational bureaucrats, politicians, and educational “experts” who care nothing about raising consciousness.
Is it not odd that Americans see a compulsory, national educational system, still based rigidly on the Prussian model of absolute, fascistic control, a necessity for Democracy? What pretense! What hypocrisy! For over 150 years, Americans had lived with total freedom of educational choices and maintained a level of literacy that cannot be approached today, with all ourmandated, up-to-date, scientific research and instruction by a host of fully certified teachers.
Students who attended the hundreds of common schools in early America were already literate before they left the protection of home to enter the variety of schools of their day. They did not require 12 years to learn to read intelligently or to fail to do so. With no accredited teachers (just mom and pop, or a private, uncertified tutor), one or two years was more than enough to read and understand what most college freshmen cannot read today with 12 long years of compulsory schooling: the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Plutarch, etc.
In this country, most of us have been subjected to compulsory schooling; public schooling (12–13 years in length) functions today as an extended right of passage. Despite its failure to create enthusiastic, curious, creative students, its graduates continue to act as apologists and defendants for U.S. forced schooling. For many of us, the public school system has had much to do with the way we were formed
For Mann imported a cynical system created by elite Prussian industrialists in order to produce a fascist state with an ideology that promoted:
* Dictatorial government.
* A centralized control of the national economy, political decisions, military life and operations, and education.
* Stiff and violent repression of any opposition or any variance in ideas.
* Censorship of artistic expression.
* Record keeping and regular surveillance of its citizens.
* Unquestioned nationalism.
Prussia’s highest virtue was absolute obedience to authority. For the small group of industrialists, the goal was generating the highest profits possible in a state that sponsored an invincible army. There were, in short, no individual rights or liberties, except for the elite. All power was held by the state, controlled by the industrialists.
Yet even Prussia’s educational system, which Mann investigated, had two faces.. For the elite, the Realschule was to be the place where true education would take place. Here students would freely interact, discuss topics, debate and, in general, learn to think. Here they would gain leadership skills and become identified with the elite class. Here they would dabble in classical education.
Horace Mann, however, rejected this system of education in favor of the one that specialized in creating human robots for factories and the military.
According to John Gatto’s highly documented Underground History of American Education, 92% of Prussia’s children were forced to attend the school that prepared students for one of two occupations: obedient soldiers in the army, or obedient workers in the factories.
This school for commoners was the Volksschule. It was this model school that Horace Mann chose to adopt and transplant to Massachusetts, the model that was to be eventually adopted by every state in the United States, and then by our federal government, and which has become in everything but name our federal system of compulsory, national education. Everything in this school was designed to break the spirit of individuals and train them to become bored, undifferentiated sheep-workers, willing to relinquish personal dreams for the glory of the state.
Prussia, as the first military-industrial-educational complex to inaugurate the Industrial Revolution, appealed to industrialists in America and throughout the world. Because Prussia represented the triumph of fascist planning and practice, it inspired the would-be fascist industrialists everywhere, as did Hitler’s absolutist beliefs and propaganda in a later age. It maximized and guaranteed obscene profits for the already wealthy. It created an army of compliant, submissive workers for industry and created a military force capable of defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, and exacting revenge on France for humiliating Prussia in the battle of Jena in 1806. It proved to the satisfaction of many that “might makes right,” that to the brutal victor come all the spoils.
As Gatto explains:
“The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.
“The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the ‘Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time it would be different.
“In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no long be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that ‘work makes free,’ and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.
Prior to Fichte’s challenge any number of compulsion-school proclamations had rolled off printing presses here and there, including Martin Luther’s plan to tie church and state together this way and, of course, the ‘Old Deluder Satan’ law of 1642 in Massachusetts and its 1645 extension. The problem was these earlier ventures were virtually unenforceable, roundly ignored by those who smelled mischief lurking behind fancy promises of free education. People who wanted their kids schooled had them schooled even then; people who didn’t didn’t. That was more or less true for most of us right into the twentieth century; only 32 percent of American kids went past elementary school as late as 1920. If that sounds impossible, consider the practice in Switzerland today where only 23 percent of the student population goes to high school though Switzerland has the world’s highest per capita income in the world.
“Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference."
John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education, P.131-132
In the 1840s, the totalitarian state of Prussia adopted many strategies reminiscent of first state educational system of the ancient military camp of Sparta. Those strategies, which clearly reveal the mindset of its proponents, included:
1 Compulsory attendance
2. Regimentation and uniformity and standardization in all aspects of the school day
3. Worship of efficiency and mechanization
4. Centralized control of all schools
5. Planned limited intellectual development
6. Socially Engineered Obedience and Subordination (managing the thought life of children through the new Scientific Psychology of Mind Control and Conditioned Learning)
7. Science at the center of the curriculum
8. Universal Standards for all children
9. State controlled Teacher Certification
10. Segregating children in classrooms by Age
11. Universal Child Labor Laws preventing children from working prescribed for all others.
12. Indoctrination with a rigid, planned curriculum for all grades
13. Forbidding the use of phonics in learning to read
14. Use of Controlled Vocabulary to regulate what students could read and could not read
15. Reliance on State Sponsored Textbooks (information was homogenized, altered, made politically correct, passionless anddull)
16. Social studies (with pointed lessons on how to be an ideal citizen) replaced any knowledge of history and the historical process
17. The use of the bogus science of Phrenology (bumps on the head represent developed and undeveloped regions of the brain) to manage student behavior
18. The state assumed legal guardianship of each child
Prussian schools thus foreshadowed the employment of compulsory schooling for national indoctrination in the United States, in Great Britain, in Soviet Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.
Prussia, it is clear, was a state where absolute control could not even be questioned. This repressive regime totally managed the life of its citizens. The surveillance of the state reached into every aspect of life.
In this way, the system would guarantee education of the state, by the state, and for the state. The child became the moldable property of the state, to be used solely for its purposes.
All 18 of these strategies of fascist Prussia were seized on by Horace Mann and made part of the Massachusetts public schools; most were in place within a decade. There were many in Massachusetts, probably the majority, that could not reconcile individual liberty with compulsory, state-sponsored education, and who strongly resented and resisted turning their children over to the state.
But Mann was a powerful individual with a network of strong political connections gained by his years as a Massachusetts representative and senator. He was known for being a persuasive orator, a successful lawyer, for his office as President of the Massachusetts’ Senate, for his aggressive establishment of educational reforms and forceful attempts to standardize and regulate schools as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and for creating a well-regulated Massachusetts lunatic asylum in Worcester. Everyone who owed him a favor was enlisted to vote or persuaded others to vote for his compulsory school bill. The law passed in Massachusetts in 1852. The Prussian model of education had been successfully transplanted to America. From that point on, America was destined to be controlled by the industrial magnates.
Mann was able to introduce an officially non-sectarian education that, in fact, was based on good Protestant principles that would protect the state from the huge influx of Catholics from Ireland.
Over the next 70 years, battles between proponents of a free educational system (mostly parents) and those who advocated the uniformity that could only be accomplished through compulsory education, a la Prussia, would be waged in every other state as well. The combination of political power and the interests of corporations eventually overcame the unorganized opposition of parents, although 16 states resisted and opposed the process until early in the 20th century.
After their capitulation, individual states used their discretion on how strictly to compel their students to accept the formula based on authoritarian absolutism.
For me, as a student in the compulsory education system (grades K–12), as a teacher working for the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs’ government schools in Inuit (Eskimo) communities in Alaska (I had to leave because the politics of the bureau tore my heart out), as a teacher in a typical private school (I rebelled at the lack of individual expression and the extreme control exercised on the student body), and as the founder of The Well School, compulsory education was repulsive. We refuted the fascistic model and the thinking that inevitably supports it and created, instead, an education devoted to the development of individual consciousness, individual expression, and the knowledge that comes from honoring individual experience.
The irony is that the great majority of teachers working in our national, compulsory, education system are well-meaning individuals, many deeply committed to the welfare of their students, as well as to the obligatory requirements of their job. This irony is compounded by another: the vast, American public is almost totally ignorant that our “public schools” are based on the principles developed by Prussian industrialists `with a lust for absolute power and absolute control over the minds of others. The System
the Prussians devised is a system intended only for exploitation in the service of violence towards others. It works to rob us of genius, of independence and self-reliance, of self-respect, and of an awareness of living creatures.
Americans have, like the Germans and the English (who also copied Prussian educational innovations), interwoven into our national psyche an unconscious adoration of power, regardless of whether we, as individuals, play the part of the wolves or the sheep in our economic drama of survival. We are unconsciously addicted to violence, to brutal competition, to cruelty, to torture, and to indifference.
Today, violence is the mindset of kids, who play at killing day after day in video games. It is the mindset of the movie and television industry, which finds that random, indiscriminate violence creates, for them, excessive profits. It is the mindset of educational bureaucrats who, for a little power over parents and children, sell their soul to the system.
There are other ironies that should be noted. The colonists fought a bitter war to free themselves from the bureaucratic control of the English and English corporations operating in America. Yet, ultimately, every state in this “free” nation voted for bureaucratic control of their children. And now, our federal government, through the Department of Education, directs what we call “voluntary” (there is nothing voluntary about it, for federal monies to state educational agencies can be cut off in an instant), national goals and standards (strict conformity always appealed to fascistic thinking), which every child must accept as the law of the land. We have centralized education, and put children not under the control of their parents or the tutor chosen by their parents, but under the control of a federalized, two-tiered bureaucracy, in which states now bend to the will of a national imperative to create dumbed-down, obedient conformists. Often, the parents’ only recourse is to remove their children from government schools and seek the right of home education under the rules and regulations of their state.
We see that children in America are now owned by the state, as they were in Prussia. They do not only live under the laws of a government that protects their independence and freedom, but according to the multitude of exacting prescriptions of educational bureaucrats, politicians, and educational “experts” who care nothing about raising consciousness.
Is it not odd that Americans see a compulsory, national educational system, still based rigidly on the Prussian model of absolute, fascistic control, a necessity for Democracy? What pretense! What hypocrisy! For over 150 years, Americans had lived with total freedom of educational choices and maintained a level of literacy that cannot be approached today, with all ourmandated, up-to-date, scientific research and instruction by a host of fully certified teachers.
Students who attended the hundreds of common schools in early America were already literate before they left the protection of home to enter the variety of schools of their day. They did not require 12 years to learn to read intelligently or to fail to do so. With no accredited teachers (just mom and pop, or a private, uncertified tutor), one or two years was more than enough to read and understand what most college freshmen cannot read today with 12 long years of compulsory schooling: the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Plutarch, etc.
In this country, most of us have been subjected to compulsory schooling; public schooling (12–13 years in length) functions today as an extended right of passage. Despite its failure to create enthusiastic, curious, creative students, its graduates continue to act as apologists and defendants for U.S. forced schooling. For many of us, the public school system has had much to do with the way we were formed
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