What is ailing our education?

I once attended a lecture on how best to give a lecture, how best to teach initiates about a new idea. The speaker said this: first give a quick intro on what you want to talk about; then elaborate, elaborate, and elaborate. Learning new concepts is a lot like forming new relationship; the student needs to encounter the concept or person in different contexts and garbs. “That needs elaboration,” said the speaker. He added, “At the end, again briefly summarize all your elaborations in a few paragraphs.” He then proceeded to illustrate what he advised. It worked! At least for me.

Since quantum education is a new kind of education that few people have any idea of, we decided to follow the advice above.

Educators talk about lots of problems with educating the kids in our schools today.  In inner city schools in many countries, a teacher’s main job is to maintain discipline, not teaching. There are problems with holding the students’ attention; additionally, hyperactivity is virtually every student’s problem.  Public schools even in affluent areas suffer from teacher qualities due to the power of teachers’ unions.  Even private schools are not entirely immune.

Lower education understandably is designed to serve mainly young people’s survival needs required by today’s environment. Amazingly today, Higher education by and large has also become job training catering to basically survival needs, only more sophisticated. As an example, in both natural and social sciences, students in post-graduate studies work as apprentices in their advisors’ research project.

And then the society’s chaotic problems infect the classrooms too: lack of parental attention, drugs, even gun-violence have infested even middle schools. 

Everybody agrees about one thing.  Education was better just a few decades ago.  What has changed?  What are the causes for the degradation? Is the economy worse?  Teachers’ unions, teacher quality?  Parental neglect?  Not enough money? College faculty spending too much time on their research projects?

Then there is the other serious problem, especially in countries with high degree of economic affluence. This is the income gap that exists between people who receive just basic grade school training and those who receive college and university’s higher education. The former can only perform routine, mechanical jobs—blue color (menial). The jobs of higher educated people are generally white color (desk-bound). The latter is paid better because they are specifically trained to enter professions—science, law, social sciences, humanities, etc.

The cost of higher education also goes up and up in affluent economies of the world. In the olden days, this cost was quite steady. The same thing can be said about the time it takes to educate for certain professions; time taken for a professional degree also goes up and up.

What keeps people increasingly at the lower education level is a simple cost-benefit analysis. Is it worth it to spend so much time and money for higher education? It is a fact, that nature of human professions goes on increasing in complexity so much that what students learn becomes useless by the time they are ready to enter a profession. If this is the case, is it worthwhile to spend so much time and money to get a job training which is not even enough to do the job?

As a character in the 1977 Oscar-winning movie Annie Hall lamented, “Everything our parents said was good is bad: sun, milk, red meat, college.”

 

Worldview

Actually, the real cause of the deterioration of education goes deeper; it is a worldview problem; worldview is what has really changed in the last five or so decades.  What is a worldview?  The worldview is the lens that people in a society wear to evaluate their experiences.  

Worldview of the teachers affect what they teach; worldview of the culture from which a school’s governing board is elected if it is public school depends on the worldview of the people who elect them.  Even the worldview of the students, young as they are, determines what they want to learn and how.  Even for private schools, though the school board can impose a certain worldview, but even so teachers’ and the students’ worldviews do matter. 

A few decades ago, the worldview was quite uniform in most societies.  It was called modernism—both mind and matter were valued.  Mind in this context means the arena of all internal experiences—self (I-thought), thoughts (of meaning), feelings (of vital energy movements), intuition (of archetypal values such as love and truth).  Matter pertains to what people experience outside of them—houses, school buildings, townships, rivers, trees, stars, and all that.  The humanities and the arts, even life and social sciences taught about various aspects of the mind, aspects of human life, mentation, and human values; science focused on matter.  Both were regarded as important.

The truce was tentative and uncomfortable from the science side to no end. Science’s success in explaining natural phenomena came from its two-pronged approach—both theoretical predictions and experimental verifications were necessary—before something was accepted as truth. Religions on the other hand made many unverified assumptions—God, heaven, and hell, moral values (for which the archetype is goodness with the duality of good and evil)—for example. Religions operated more on faith and dogma.

There was a compelling reason for the truce, however. What we call modern science was formulated by the great Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century as a bunch of laws for material objects. Since then, we have discovered many more laws, but the basic framework of science—handling the movement of material objects in space and time—remained unchanged until quite recently. Most scientists of the modernism era saw the limitation of Newton’s approach and initially agreed that there was no alternative but to go along with the truce.

The truce did not last. What changed?  First, scientists in the nineteenth century “successfully” applied Newton’s approach to explain the evolution of life as documented by the fossil data following the lead of another great Charles Darwin. Thus began a confrontation with religions’ stronghold on the matter of life. In the nineteen forties, in a similar fashion, behavioral psychology applied Newton’s ideas to explain human behavior as well. Then in the following two decades scientists made such rapid progress in understanding life and mind that by the 1960’s many were claiming that everything in the world, every phenomenon can be understood on the basis of movement of matter alone. Religion is humbug. There was no more need for a truce with religion. Henceforth, science within the primacy of matter we will call materialist science as opposed to what science has been before which we will call truth-seeking science that has now gone underground. The materialist dogmatic worldview is called scientific materialism.

One more thing. The modern concept of liberal education—defined as dogma-free education that liberates people from religious dogmas—goes back to the eighteenth century to the time when democracy and capitalism were also founded. From the beginning, the separation of church and state was deemed as important, and this “secularism” became a crucial aspect of liberal education. In this way, from the get-go liberal education was dominated more by science than by religion.

You should see it now. When science declared its worldview supremacy, the conceptual lens of both lower and higher education completely changed in a very short time.  In the nineteen eighties, metaphysical values were purged from our worldview albeit everything-is-matter philosophy is not verified truth but itself is a dogma. As such, it compromised science’s avowed search for truth. Soon, value education stopped entirely in public schools and higher academia, even in many private institutions of learning—the ones labelled liberal.

And simultaneously with all this came the computer and high-tech revolution and with it, video games and information technology, social media, and cell phones. This gave materialist science considerably more power.

 

How Education Became Job Training

Mind processes meaning; meaning is a subjective experiential concept. It has ambiguity; it depends on the context—physical, emotional, and most importantly, archetypal. In fact, our highest, loftiest, noblest thoughts of meaning come from the archetypes—via the experiences that we call intuition and insight. Insights need the practice of creativity that uses the creative process of discovery of new meaning.

If, however, meaning becomes fixed and in one-to-one correspondence with objects, then the subjectivity and ambiguity is gone. What is left is called information; information can be represented as computer symbols that computers can process via an algorithmic step-by-step approach, in the same way as in rational thinking. The concept of information fits nicely with materialist science in which archetypal values have no place. With archetypes gone, it is not possible to generate new meaning except as a rehash of the old.

With the development of laptop computers and the Internet, information became part and parcel of the materialist worldview, and it began dominating not only the academia but also the media. The media came up with the slogan “medium is the message.” Media pundits decide the meaning of news and what would be the message. That attitude fitted nicely with materialist scientists deciding what nature is and is not based on the worldview of scientific materialism. Shortly, materialist science with the help of the media began building the information superhighway with information replacing meaning as what kids should learn to navigate in schools.

Information culture eliminates the pursuits of new meaning and the archetypal values from which they come. The professions were initially created with archetypal values in mind. Scientists explore truth, artists the archetype of beauty, religious clergy the archetype of goodness, lawyers and judges the archetype of justice, healers the archetype of wholeness. Most importantly, businesspeople explore the archetype of abundance and politicians the archetype of power. In this way, in the olden days, professional training was tantamount to archetypal training. Now that archetypes are banished from education, professions have become just jobs.

Face it, this is how education has become job training.  Both at school level and in higher education.  Additionally, matter is reductionistic: micro makes up macro.  Complex things are more sophisticated than simple things.  As a result, higher education purportedly dealing with the complexity of the professional world has become highly sophisticated. This also puts it out of reach of people not interested in intellectual sophistication. Another factor for the lower-higher education divide.

This is not an exhaustive list of problems with education globally, just a few that comes to the top of my mind. And that is where we are making a change. We now have a fully developed Master’s and PhD program created in collaboration with the University of Technology, Jaipur, India where we teach the way education should be imparted. We are in our 5th year of operation now and many people around the  world have benefitted from these programs. 

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