Jay Garland’s Abiding Passion

This description of New Earth Institute emerges from my need to create a school worthy of the divine nature of the children, adolescents, and adults it serves. This portrait of a new school is a work in progress to be amended and improved by people of good will. I sent this to you for two reasons. I seek critiques, suggestions, amendments, comments, and honest reactions if you feel called to respond. And, since the undertaking of a new school requires tremendous effort and determination, I hope that a few of you will want to participate in New Earth Institute’s birth and development. Even if you find this description unrealistic or misguided I, seek your comments.

My life has been devoted to first founding and then running two schools dedicated to raising human awareness. By this I mean helping students co-create a sense of connectivity to the world around them, one that transcends the tangible to also embrace the intangible. It was clear to me from the beginning that raising consciousness creates brighter, more creative and more compassionate students. For only by lifting one’s consciousness can one transform one’s worldview, shift one’s attitude, alter outer circumstances, witness truth and beauty all around you, and experience genuine happiness. My observation today is that individual evolution determines the shape and nature of the future, individually and collectively.

Today I am deeply concerned about the current model of mass, compulsory, industrial education based on the assembly line model of efficient, pernicious factories. Here students become the products, assembled over a twelve-year span, formed to be obedient, conforming “high school graduates. After all, just sitting at a desk for 12 years destroys the will, cripples the spirit, and dumbs intelligence. The effect of this system of mass, compulsory education, widely adopted in the nineteenth century during The Industrial Revolution, is to produce a mechanical, materialistic worldview marked by lifeless thought patterns that can only continue to degrade the air we breathe, and the water we drink, affecting the entire ecosystem of the earth, doing violence to life all over the world.

Sadly, this dumbing process can begin at home when parents make all or most decisions for a child. Often a child will come to his own conclusion: there’ no point in trying to think for oneself. Everything has been decided already.

Many teachers autocratically run their classes as Queens or Kings. They make the rules and decisions and the consequences. Many psychological forces conspire to compel students to think like their teacher. Constrained in their own thinking, many students reluctantly give up independent thought. But even worse they resist the thinking promulgated by the teacher; we all know that resistance can permanently slow down thinking. Unless, at a later point, one deals with the resistance and consciously makes a new choice, the pattern remains.

My sense of urgency propels me to offer a radical model of education, one that is in harmony with the ecosystem, one that empowers students to proactively transform their environment now while learning crucial life skills in the process