Home « THE FAILURE OF EDUCATION
Extreme poverty, war, depletion of non-renewable energy resources, global warming, delinquency, terrorism, violence, all are the work of Man, not of Nature: clear evidence of a global dislocation in education which focuses on material progress and excludes human development.
There are many in the world who possess a good formal education; intelligent people who, paradoxically, tend to behave foolishly when they apply their knowledge to daily life.
Regardless of the excellence and quantity of his academic diplomas and his success in the formal aspects of his particular profession, the truth is that the educated man, like the ignorant, maintains a fragmentary mental position, behaving as if he were shipwrecked on a tiny island of knowledge that separates him from the rest of the world.
Success, in its broadest sense, implies opening oneself to a wider vision of real life that transcends the theoretical information of the classroom. No professional who guides himself strictly by what he learns in the university will be able to be successful in unusual situations (of which there is no shortage) unless difficult circumstances oblige him to submit himself to a “mental reengineering” that is more in tune with reality.
Teaching programs, logically enough, come from within the limits of what is known and accepted; but, unfortunately, the most serious problems in the world persist because they do not have a known solution within the prescribed framework, and the elite corps of intelligent men who work to solve the problems of environmental pollution, extreme poverty, hunger, crime, illiteracy, epidemic disease, unemployment, exhaustion of natural resources, war and terrorism, fail miserably in their effort to put an end to these woes because they employ common tools to confront emergency situations, as if a flight mechanic tried to repair a major breakdown using only a monkey wrench.
I think that one of our principal mistakes consists of looking for typical solutions to atypical problems, and in some cases, limiting ourselves to copying formulas that applied in other places and times.
I am convinced that despite the huge educational effort that is made worldwide, education is in crisis; and that it has been successful only with respect to the theoretical study of traditional materials of a cultural or professional nature, but not in applying this knowledge to the solution of chronic problems.
There is persistent or increasing corruption, depression, stress, and drug addiction, an absence of life-awareness, and a decline or absence of traditional values such as honor, being true to one’s word, personal merit, and respect for one’s neighbor. The true meaning of knowledge is found in the ability to apply it, not only to satisfy basic needs and personal goals, but also to build a better world.
Educational advancement generally does not stimulate the development of discretion, good judgment, ethics, and empathy with our fellow man, since intelligence is generally at the service of uncontrolled passions and emotions, and not of superior rationality.
The mind of the student is programmed from the outside by teachers who, in their turn, underwent the same learning process and mass production of duly socialized people who behave in accordance with what the society and the state expect of them, paying their taxes without protest, consuming the greatest possible quantity of goods and services and behaving in an obedient and submissive manner.
By means of this system of “passing material on” the point of comprehension is generally never reached, so it is highly probable that our minds turn into containers for autonomous information that is not subordinated to the “I”, with its own dynamic that comes from its original source.
The result: far too often each individual acts as a mere resonator of extraneous information, wrongly interpreted as his “own” in the sense of “my ideas,” “my values,” or “my feelings,” without taking into account the alienating nature of these messages, which provoke a total disconnection with the essential I or selfhood.
Formal education does not nourish the development of a higher level of social and natural consciousness, but is limited to training people who, as in the platonic allegory of the cave, can only see and appreciate the shadows that surround them and not things as they are in full daylight.
Formal knowledge has neither compass nor sextant, condemning us to wander without knowing where we are going, because we have no solid points of reference in human and natural reality, and we cannot know for certain the direction in which we will find the wellbeing and happiness that we seek, without realizing that the road is inside our own selves. In truth, the subliminal learning process that we are accustomed to fills our brains with alienating information that comes to control our behavior, pushing us into a state of drowsiness similar to the “waking dream” defined by psychologists, which refers to being between sleep and wakefulness, a twilight state of scant perception of reality, chasing dreams and fantasies that lead nowhere.
This functional disorder is not the birthright of the ignorant; on the contrary, it is a plague that affects equally the rich and the poor, the learned and the unlearned.
To be accurate, what gives value to our lives is the deep significance of knowledge and not its appearance, but formal education does not know how to grasp the essential meaning of things, which was the primordial ambition of the sages of other times. We are not taught to think; there are no courses for the development of the capacity for voluntary attention, which in practice barely exists, being replaced by attention that is captivated by external sensations and stimuli. Nor are we shown how to develop our character and will power, fundamental tools in order to be successful in life.
Finally, there is a central problem from which all the others originate: “anti-education” which shipwrecks us on islands of information disconnected from total reality. For this reason we do not succeed in solving the most burning problems, or in making the right choices to achieve a real quality of life, based on Being more than on Having.
Let us implement a kind of education that can sustain the individual as a real human being and, most assuredly, the world also will be sustained.
Darío Salas Sommer
Academy of Sciences Raen
Russian Federation
There are many in the world who possess a good formal education; intelligent people who, paradoxically, tend to behave foolishly when they apply their knowledge to daily life.
Regardless of the excellence and quantity of his academic diplomas and his success in the formal aspects of his particular profession, the truth is that the educated man, like the ignorant, maintains a fragmentary mental position, behaving as if he were shipwrecked on a tiny island of knowledge that separates him from the rest of the world.
Success, in its broadest sense, implies opening oneself to a wider vision of real life that transcends the theoretical information of the classroom. No professional who guides himself strictly by what he learns in the university will be able to be successful in unusual situations (of which there is no shortage) unless difficult circumstances oblige him to submit himself to a “mental reengineering” that is more in tune with reality.
Teaching programs, logically enough, come from within the limits of what is known and accepted; but, unfortunately, the most serious problems in the world persist because they do not have a known solution within the prescribed framework, and the elite corps of intelligent men who work to solve the problems of environmental pollution, extreme poverty, hunger, crime, illiteracy, epidemic disease, unemployment, exhaustion of natural resources, war and terrorism, fail miserably in their effort to put an end to these woes because they employ common tools to confront emergency situations, as if a flight mechanic tried to repair a major breakdown using only a monkey wrench.
I think that one of our principal mistakes consists of looking for typical solutions to atypical problems, and in some cases, limiting ourselves to copying formulas that applied in other places and times.
I am convinced that despite the huge educational effort that is made worldwide, education is in crisis; and that it has been successful only with respect to the theoretical study of traditional materials of a cultural or professional nature, but not in applying this knowledge to the solution of chronic problems.
There is persistent or increasing corruption, depression, stress, and drug addiction, an absence of life-awareness, and a decline or absence of traditional values such as honor, being true to one’s word, personal merit, and respect for one’s neighbor. The true meaning of knowledge is found in the ability to apply it, not only to satisfy basic needs and personal goals, but also to build a better world.
Educational advancement generally does not stimulate the development of discretion, good judgment, ethics, and empathy with our fellow man, since intelligence is generally at the service of uncontrolled passions and emotions, and not of superior rationality.
The mind of the student is programmed from the outside by teachers who, in their turn, underwent the same learning process and mass production of duly socialized people who behave in accordance with what the society and the state expect of them, paying their taxes without protest, consuming the greatest possible quantity of goods and services and behaving in an obedient and submissive manner.
By means of this system of “passing material on” the point of comprehension is generally never reached, so it is highly probable that our minds turn into containers for autonomous information that is not subordinated to the “I”, with its own dynamic that comes from its original source.
The result: far too often each individual acts as a mere resonator of extraneous information, wrongly interpreted as his “own” in the sense of “my ideas,” “my values,” or “my feelings,” without taking into account the alienating nature of these messages, which provoke a total disconnection with the essential I or selfhood.
Formal education does not nourish the development of a higher level of social and natural consciousness, but is limited to training people who, as in the platonic allegory of the cave, can only see and appreciate the shadows that surround them and not things as they are in full daylight.
Formal knowledge has neither compass nor sextant, condemning us to wander without knowing where we are going, because we have no solid points of reference in human and natural reality, and we cannot know for certain the direction in which we will find the wellbeing and happiness that we seek, without realizing that the road is inside our own selves. In truth, the subliminal learning process that we are accustomed to fills our brains with alienating information that comes to control our behavior, pushing us into a state of drowsiness similar to the “waking dream” defined by psychologists, which refers to being between sleep and wakefulness, a twilight state of scant perception of reality, chasing dreams and fantasies that lead nowhere.
This functional disorder is not the birthright of the ignorant; on the contrary, it is a plague that affects equally the rich and the poor, the learned and the unlearned.
To be accurate, what gives value to our lives is the deep significance of knowledge and not its appearance, but formal education does not know how to grasp the essential meaning of things, which was the primordial ambition of the sages of other times. We are not taught to think; there are no courses for the development of the capacity for voluntary attention, which in practice barely exists, being replaced by attention that is captivated by external sensations and stimuli. Nor are we shown how to develop our character and will power, fundamental tools in order to be successful in life.
Finally, there is a central problem from which all the others originate: “anti-education” which shipwrecks us on islands of information disconnected from total reality. For this reason we do not succeed in solving the most burning problems, or in making the right choices to achieve a real quality of life, based on Being more than on Having.
Let us implement a kind of education that can sustain the individual as a real human being and, most assuredly, the world also will be sustained.
Darío Salas Sommer
Academy of Sciences Raen
Russian Federation
March 10th, 2010 at 3:13 Residential Garage Doors…
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