Time to End the 20-th Century Education - Part II

Acknowledging the soul factor

The Industrial Revolution and the tremendous success of the sciences, which led us to almost overwhelming technological progress and economic growth without parallels in human history, were the products of the Age of Enlightenment. It is mainly because of this movement of the 18^th century, which draws its thought from the philosophy of the founders of modern science, like Galileo and Newton, that nowadays we can drive cars, use computers, transport ourselves throughout the world, or communicate with a space probe at the edge of the solar system. The Age of Enlightenment allowed humanity to make a big leap forward and ultimately transformed our society.

However, this seemingly unstoppable material success of human reason and the marvelous power of scientific thinking have lured us into a materialistic belief system that has become a more or less unconscious, deeply engraved conviction: namely, that every problem can be solved only inside a strictly material, rational and analytic thinking framework. Every institutional order must be organized according to purely mental and mechanical rules. Every job and activity is worth pursuing if it serves a material purpose and every form of knowledge is true knowledge only if it can be falsified by science, as scientific truth has become the only possible truth. And, of course, every true education is that which teaches rational, analytic, and logical thought processes, such as mathematics and science, and prepares the young mind for its future job and making it for a living. This is because these are the skills that created our modern advanced industrial-technological society and which allowed for all its practical material applications and utilitarian purposes. This is at the root of the modern obsession with STEM education that considers arts and humanities as secondary little brothers but with no true educational let alone practical value. ‘Learning’ has become synonymous almost exclusively with mental activity, information retrieval and analysis, rational thinking, and analytic skills. The skills and growth of the emotional, physical, intuitive, creative, and spiritual dimensions of the human being receive only scarce or secondary attention, if any. In our modern conception of education, learning is about learning to think, whereas learning through feeling, perceiving and intuition is an ability that we do not believe composes what we nowadays think that education in schools, colleges, and universities should be. It remains a personal matter, at best.

The Enlightenment and all its thought and philosophical movements were – and will remain – essential ingredients for the progress of the human race. However, it is time to reconsider it and recognize its limits. The human being is not only a thinking being. Our problems won't be solved only with scientific means. The challenges we must confront, even those of a technical nature, can't be addressed with technology alone (for example, the potential civilization collapse due to climate change and ecological overshoot). Our educational model, which fosters only the power of the mind while neglecting the other potential powers, skills, and abilities of the child, is not only a limited form of education but also a dangerous one. There is too much emphasis in our society on analytic rigor, which leaves almost no room for other cognitive functions, such as intuition, feeling, and inspiration.

In this regard, it might be instructive to rediscover the approach of Swiss pedagogue J. H. Pestalozzi, who conceived of the child's education from different perspectives as an integrated whole and which resulted from a synergy of different levels of existence. Physical, emotional, moral, and ethical education was not subservient to intellectual education. ‘Hands-on’ learning was not considered less essential than ‘mind-on’ learning. He became known for his ‘hands-heart-head’ paradigm, which conceives of balanced physical, emotional, and mental development, avoiding an exaggerated emphasis on one or the other levels. Love, feelings, matter, and thought are equally part of the healthy development of our body, emotions, and mind. The goal is to educate the whole without giving in to the temptation to favor too much or repress the parts. Music, drawing, painting, or physical exercise were not considered less important than math or language. Pestalozzi’s concept of knowledge is not reduced to an intellectual exercise applied to dry facts and data analysis but is also an insight that arises from a lived experience and sensory perceptions. Real learning comes from one's own experience at all levels: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. The moral powers of the heart, such as love, compassion, or gratitude, should not be neglected, not even in classrooms. Living the environment in nature through direct experience of the senses is as important a central exercise as – if not more important than – any verbal learning based on books.

Pestalozzi lived in a society that is now two-and-a-half centuries removed from ours. Not everything must be accepted and integrated into our modern pedagogical concepts; some we might even reject and consider outdated. However, more than ever, this integrative fundamental principle remains real.

Education is a never-ending process. It lasts until the end of our lives. Precisely for this reason, it can't be reduced to school and college attendance alone. It must embrace all of a human’s mental, physical emotional, intuitive, and spiritual existence. Education should be a process of self-discovery by which the child becomes aware of all these planes and parts and learns to develop and use them consciously. It is about an ‘integral education’ that invites us to a more holistic perspective. An integral education is much more than a school which prepares a student for a future job. Physical education not only prepares one for physical strength but can also teach moral values such as discipline, endurance, method, and patience or suggest physical norms like correct hygiene and healthy eating habits. Emotional education – an aspect that is almost completely ignored in conventional schools – can help develop one's character and self-control, as well as enlarge us by encouraging us to develop feelings of love, beauty, and compassion. The spiritual dimension must be discovered and disclosed by education as well. Questions about the meaning of life, the purpose of our existence, and our true identity should not be dismissed as childish quests. On the contrary, they should be encouraged and nurtured. An intuitive education aims to develop intuition, inspiration, curiosity, and higher cognitive faculties or skills. And, of course, in this integral vision, mental education has its place. However, it should proceed hand in hand with the other forms of education, without being regarded as the ultimate cognitional crone at the top of a pyramidal concept.

Therefore, what we need at this stage is a realization of how limited and restricted our concept of education is. We need a wider, all-embracing understanding of human nature. From there, we must draw our conclusions and proceed.

Acknowledging the soul factor

With this integral and integrative approach¹, it is no longer difficult to recognize how even more important than contributing to financial security, education is expected to bring to the individual a means to achieve a degree of self-perfection, through a progression of consciousness. This can only happen if we discard our long-held and widely accepted academic attitudes in favor of a new understanding of the human being. Instead of brilliant students, we must look for the living souls that feel the 'fire of progress'. Under the free-progress system, people align with themselves, students learn to align with their 'inner guidance system', and progress is guided by an inner inspiration, and is not subject to habits, conventions, or preconceived pedagogical ideas or theories.

There is now an increasing awareness that most of our top-down educational systems do not foster creativity and freedom, and, in fact, hamper the genius and the intuitive thinker. An important acknowledgment, which, however, as we have seen, isn’t new. Many are realizing the misalignment between the ideals we have about liberating a new spirit and the everyday reality in primary and secondary schools. But, to the best of my knowledge, there are at present only sporadic attempts to look for concrete ways for this misalignment to be repaired. A bottom-up approach for a fully-fledged professional higher education is also overdue. Once we have acknowledged the lack of freedom for creativity in schools and colleges, what should the next practical step be?

Of course, we hear about reforms, the need for change, and new laws, and appeal to those in charge and responsible for educating new generations to change their mind, and take action. But so far not much has changed in these respects. Why? Sure, shifts take time to take effect. This shift is still in progress and yet not complete. However, the number of people who woke up and realized the limits and intrinsic failure of the actual system has grown enormously in the last years. And yet the very same people working, teaching, and conducting research in these institutions seem unable to change much. If they are part of the same academic system, why do they not make a difference? There must be something missing.

The point is that any attempt to reform education, without a profound understanding of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual in his/her multi-dimensional spiritual aspects, will never be able to go far enough, and will always contain the seed of an unconscious mechanical reformulation of the past. For example, intuitions or revelations are considered interesting side effects at best, but the higher states of consciousness of the seer or intuitive genius are not deemed worthy to be nurtured and exercised. In this new view, the only real teacher, or professor, is the inner soul, with its guidance, where the intuition of truth can come only from within and above. We should accept that every human being is not unique and indispensable but has a mission, an inner plan, or an existential program listed in its soul. And it is this inner soul with its existential program that must have the central command and priority. A school or university may provide all the structures, technology, teaching, and assistance to develop all of our psychological planes, but real integral development will continue to elude us unless we submit to the guidance of this sacred inner presence in us. In other words, the ideal of freedom and progress of the soul and the inner consciousness is more urgent than the preoccupation with acquiring skills and intellectual knowledge. Not only is the latter less important than the former but the latter can’t follow integrally without the former. Therefore, the priority at present is to identify how to create the practical conditions that could lead to this inner freedom and progress in our worldly existence. Beyond an abstract declaration of intent, there haven’t been many proposals so far for the high school, university, and research levels.

Hi-tech classrooms, pedagogical research, new didactical methodologies, and the present AI obsession, are all fine, but finally, only an education with a soul, and especially learning for and through the soul, will lead us toward real reform. We need an education for children, an academy for undergraduates and graduates, and research centers that follow the call of the spirit. If people feel increasingly the pressure of stagnation and sameness, this is because these are aspects alien to their soul which develop with change and variation, and in diversity in unity. If nowadays we have to complain about a lack of creativity, this is because the present system is intrinsically designed to hold imprisoned our inner being which naturally tends to freedom, curiosity, passion, inspiration, and aspiration. If there are so many who don’t know what to do with their lives, this is a consequence of the deafness that our society imposes on the inner voice of the soul which knows better than anyone else what our mission is. If, despite all the technological means and material progress around us, we still feel a lack of space for intuition and inspiration, and the number of geniuses who made paradigmatic shifts is woefully low, this is due to the fact that other levels of consciousness of the intuitive mind are not considered, or at best only unconsciously and vaguely recognized. It is for decades that we have been hearing about the great advantages of multi-inter-trans-disciplinarity, but an ever-increasing specialization that dissects and particularizes remains the only possible path, because the intuitive understanding which is naturally holistic and flexible and tends to an all-encompassing view, is meticulously expunged in favor of purely mechanistic and analytic approaches. After all, the word 'university' itself comes from the Latin word 'universitas', noun of 'universus', which means 'all turned into one', or 'the whole', implying universal knowledge as an interdependent whole. Instead, today we have 'multi-' or 'poli-versities', flattened by 'uniformity'. In contrast, it is the ideal of a free progress university to recover the real and original meaning of university. Therefore, revelations, innovations, the realization of dreams, and exceptional cognitive events still remain rare and will remain so forever, if the institutions where new generations of scientists, philosophers, musicians, and artists pursue their activities continue to refuse to open themselves to the higher cognitive dimensions.

If technology alone were the key, why is it that, in this computer and Internet era of ours, with its enormous creative potential, we find ourselves in the middle of an educational crisis, and the most preferred activity of an apparently unmotivated youth is that of playing video games? Sure, online universities, computer networks, open online courses, AI, new digital technologies, social network learning, original didactical tools, teaching strategies, computer-animated graphics, etc., are all fine, and they will undoubtedly contribute to a new cultural renaissance, but they won’t do the job of liberating fully the creative potential inside every one of us. If the role of technology is emphasized too much, it will remain blind to the needs of the human spirit and its potential for advanced knowledge.

We must look further afield, much further afield, towards an understanding of the human psyche as an entity that does not follow a system of conformity and uniformity, but as a soul in evolution, intrinsically unpredictable and aiming at unexpected novelty and multiplicity in diversity. The human soul can’t be grown, nurtured, and controlled like a machine, but must be acknowledged as a process inherent in life. A living soul is not an abstract concept and isn’t a mechanistic entity that can be measured with tests and grades, and its skills and abilities are commanded and controlled by a set of lectures, eventually adding the pressure of fear of failure. The human being has been pressed into such a machine gear for a long time, but, whether we like it or not, something in it wants to progress, to grow, to learn, and will sooner or later break through its restraint and blow it up.

The core assumption of a free progress education paradigm is that everyone is a soul in progress – a being in evolution, a divine spark, and a seed that has the potential to grow and develop. This evolution and development of that divine element already inside every one of us is, however, something highly individualized and personal. In fact, it is futile to believe that there exists a universal formula that sums up all the skills and what is supposed to be the general knowledge and culture that is supposedly good for all and that should be crammed into a school or university curriculum. Everyone’s interests, skills, and strengths are an expression of the soul’s need for self-expression and the desire to evolve through experience. However, these inner needs are diverse, even divergent, between people and the time and rhythm at which each child (or adult) learns something are extremely different. This is not because someone is better than or inferior to someone else, but because our inner being has a wisdom of its own and knows much better than we do what is good or bad for us and whether one thing or another must be learned and whether this or that must be accomplished quickly or slowly. It is a matter of ‘soul-growth’, so to speak. Free progress education is about allowing the soul to shine by revealing its true aspiration of action in the manifestation. Conventional education, instead, veils or even entirely blocks this light, replacing its true purpose with an artificial external goal.

That’s the reason why preconceived curricula with deadlines and precise roadmaps intended to fit all, inside a structure that treats everyone as if we are all the same (behind a mask of false democratic values), can’t work. An education that puts us into a strictly artificial age-structured classroom environment where the system tells you what to do, as well as when and how to do it, is a deeply unnatural and unhealthy way of learning. A research system that is obsessed with impact factors and is dominated by a ‘publish or perish dictatorship,’ loses touch with our true nature. It refuses to recognize our inner being, the potential of our inner individual source, and sacrifices it on the altar of a collective machinery. This hampers and suppresses a natural inner evolution that must conform the inner to the outer, leading to results like this one: link.

According to a free progress education view, instead, we are embodied souls who have an intrinsic and natural tendency and necessity to evolve by a self-expression in the manifestation. Here, each one of us proceeds along our own highly personalized way, according to what we really are, from the inside out and not vice-versa as is done nowadays. That’s the real Latin meaning of education, ‘educere’, which tells us to ‘draw something out’ of the soul, not to put something in it. It is about the soul stepping forward, not about the person who must be pressed backward to conform to external conditions. That’s why only a soul-centered and soul-growth education that allows for self-expression and the self-unfoldment of that soul-being can work. If our mindset changes and allows for an educational paradigm that is sufficiently flexible, having the plasticity to adapt to each individual needs, it can succeed in creating a different humanity that is capable of more creativity, originality, and critical thinking, and, as a side effect, more empathy, compassion, and tolerance.

An education focusing on work and money is the exact opposite of that. It starves the soul and tries to impose outside conditions on an inner psychic world. It prioritizes the interest of the corporations, the big industry, and the financial world while sacrificing individual potential. This exaggerated emphasis on purely intellectual skills is toxic. That’s why children should, first of all, play, as modern psychology is now rediscovering, because that is what contributes to healthy growth, as well as to the development of intellectual capacities. Forcing children to engage in intellectual exercises too early and to an excessive extent means repressing their real souls, their true inner beings, and consequently making them aggressive or depressive – or, in the worst case, causing them to develop mental illnesses. Grades and tests have the function of forcing children to learn precisely those skills necessary to make money in the present economic and financial world. However, this systematically suffocates the soul’s evolution and needs. Ultimately, the soul craves for self-expression. However, it can’t achieve this because it isn’t allowed to do so, as it must serve that collective machinery. Meanwhile, children fundamentally love to learn and seek knowledge. Why? Because it is an intrinsic property of everyone’s soul, the inner being; it is part of human nature. In a certain sense, nothing can be taught, as learning is an active process that leads to a self-directed acquisition and cannot be imposed. Learning reveals itself as a ‘dis-covery’ of something which was already present in us. The role of the so-called ‘teacher’ should be only to help us reveal what was already innate.

Therefore, free progress education is about the freedom of the soul to progress through a soul-centered, soul-growth education in which the role of the teacher is not to teach at all but to assist, coach, and help in this process of growth. The teacher’s role is also to create the outer, down-to-earth infrastructural and administrative conditions that allow this process to take place freely, without hindrances, so that children, teenagers, students, and adults alike can express the potential they all have inside.

In brief: there won’t be any new reform, regulation, or technological means that will lead education to a real renewal if the inner individual human dimension isn't acknowledged, nurtured, and grown. It is all about the free progress of the soul which guides itself through a ‘soul formation’ and ‘soul evolution’. In a post-material future, the unifying principle will be the evolving ‘soul factor’ of the human being. This will be key.

1. I have been inspired by two factors. First and foremost, my personal experience as a student, teacher, and researcher. Secondly, by the philosophy and the pedagogical approach of Integral Education, see here or here.