Call to Action: Part Two
The Beginnings of a Solution
Pre-education: As I began to reflect on the problems of contemporary education, I realized that there is an important prior step. Since all of our children are exposed to an incredible number and amount of toxins(It is actually a miracle that there are any normal children out there!) the first step in our process should probably be an education of parents about how to minimize exposures to them and to their children. This is no easy matter with no perfect solutions of a completely toxic-free environment. The scientists find these toxins in the Arctic far away from civilization and glyphosate (Round-up) in the rainwater as well so we are in a perilous situation-no doubt.
There, however, things we can do- like filtering our water, hard-wiring our computers with cable rather than wi-fi, keeping our cellular phones away from our brains and eating organic foods whenever possible. Many progressive,”enlightened” people I know do not do even these simple maneuvers. They prefer to listen to the block-head scientific types who tell them our water is safe(true if you are living in Pasteurian times where the only danger was bacteria!) or that cell[phones and their EMFs are not really dangerous. Many educated people I know still believe tap-water is fine and organic doesn’t make a difference as the pesticides in the other foods are only ‘residues” and thus cannot harm us. So, we first need some education for ourselves. And we will attempt to do that-for those who are prepared to join us and commit to this adventure! There is a lot of material out there so we will have to work at sorting out what is useful and do-able.
Education: So much attention has been given to this matter and so much confusion has been generated that I don’t know where to start lol. Let us begin with one of my favourite terms these days –Epistemology (the science of knowledge) i.e. how do we get to the Truth and how do we recognize it once we get there. The current consensus zeitgeist(from Latin to German you can see that our approach represents a vast umbrella lol!) is that you get to knowledge and Truth by gathering data and logically analyzing that data. That is called Empiricism. Is that true however?! No-one bothers to question it -or at least very few do. It is an article of faith-“scientific theology” or “scientism” you could call it. Is that working? Is it creating healthy, satisfied, self-realized people -or the contrary?! They have been using this model since the 18th Century(The Age Of Enlightenment or Age of Rationality they call it), so they have had plenty of time to draw their conclusions!!I will let you answer that one lol. Just like the term “evidence-based medicine” there is no evidence for it! Yet, they continue to apply it as if it were a Law of the Universe. As the Quran, the holy book of the Muslims, states about certain people ‘They are deaf, dumb and blind” lol but they maintain their convictions nevertheless.
If you need a concrete situation to understand this hypothesis, just look at the management of the current pandemic. The people who like Antony Fauci are wedded to this Empirical scientific model have been consistently wrong! They say the virus occurred naturally while the evidence by this stage is overwhelming that this is a genetically-modified virus! They said that masks are not useful and then changed their minds(two million Asians can’t be wrong lol) and they said hydroxychloroquine is useless and dangerous and then the article in Lancet that proved their contention proved to be bogus and had to be retracted. Just saying … There is much, much more of this.
So the epistemology of the Empiricists and their double-blind, placebo-controlled multi-centered, multi-million dollar studies published in peer-reviewed journals turns out to be dysfunctional and largely useless if not outrightly dangerous. Listening to one of our “genius doctors” like Didier Raoult and Chris Martensen turns out to be far more useful in ascertaining the truth of the situation. In fact “anecdotal evidence” that the scientific community is so contemptuous of, turns out often to be more useful than those systematic, rigorous scientific studies!
But let’s get back to our children! Do we really want to produce another generation of Professor Nimbus types with huge brains and no hearts?! Because that is what our schools are doing. They train the “mind” the logic, the mathematical and verbal skills whilst ignoring the hearts and souls of our children. That is NOT what I want for my grandchildren nor is it what you want, I presume.
The kind of schooling I am proposing would train the hearts and the souls of our children. It would teach empathy and compassion and the subtle realities of our spirit. We would use techniques from all the spiritual traditions to help our children subtilize their perceptions and care about the other children and their environment including the natural environment.
At this point, I see four essential components of this education:
- the practical domain: I believe an educational process should teach students basic life skills-like how to shop for and prepare food, how to build things, how to fix basic things around the house and basic car mechanics, how to organize their paperwork and thus make our accounting and income tax reports easier for us. All of this is ignored in our current educational system which always gives the priority to theoretical abstractions like intermediate algebra over practical matters like what to do when your car won’t start lol!
- The moral, ethical component. One of my perceptive daughters who attended the Rudolf Steiner school once said: ”Daddy, there’s only one subject at Steiner schools- “art” lol I later added: ”There’s only one subject at Islamic schools-“morality /good behaviour”( more about these different school systems at a later date )Needless to say “morality/good behaviour” is a necessary component of education. But it is not sufficient. We want open-minded, open-hearted, alive children not robotic “goodie-two-shoes” types!
- The heart/psychology: This component needs to educate children in empathy, compassion and even understanding psychopathology(we all have some of that lol).Spiritual and religious people are often anti-psychology and that is unfortunately narrow-minded and limiting. Just because Freud was an atheist doesn’t mean he didn’t contribute enormously to our understanding of the human psyche( I personally use his insights profitably on a regular basis).The 20th century took some enormous strides in understanding empathy( something seriously lacking in many of the Muslim communities I have participated in) and we should learn to benefit from it. Despite all the limitations of their tradition(see the chapter ”Unpacking Buddhism” in my last book: “Understanding Life” the Buddhists have ridden the slogan of compassion to become one of the most acceptable traditions in Western society. So empathy, compassion and understanding, with their natural consequences of patience and acceptance and tolerance, are fundamental to this approach.
- The Spiritual Component: This is likely to be the most difficult to define but also absolutely vital to the development of our children. Meditation, prayer, contemplation, solitude (ever hear about that in a school lol?!)- all of these are part of it. The ultimate goal is to put ourselves in contact with what the Sufis call the “sir”-the inner secret of our Being. More on that later.
- C) The Venue: This is a biggie! I think a mortar and brick school is the wrong venue! ( even if it is adobe rather than brick lol). Now, I am not of the opinion, like some other thinkers, that our current schooling system was intentionally designed, by some clever, manipulative businessmen and government officials, just to serve the needs of industry. I would consider that to be a conspiracy theory. There are multiple layers of ignorance involved in the establishment of current schooling institutions. nancial manipulation is just one of them lol.
Nevertheless, the resemblance .in actuality, between what we now see as schools and what are now factories cannot be ignored! Not because the schools were designed by the builders of factories but because both of these institutions are dehumanizing ,overly-controlling and life-inhibiting. This has to change if we are to preserve our humanity!
So what am I proposing?! We need something more natural, more organic-something more akin to human nature. So what I would see being developed is a form of “collective home-schooling”. Remember Hilary Clinton and “it takes a village”. Regardless of what you think of her, and my opinion is no more glorious than yours lol, she was right!
And what does this look like? Let’s say there are four families working together(yes, this will require some proximity, some sense of community) ,the children will know the other children and will know their parents .So if some mothers (and fathers) need to go to work, their children will be taken care of by other parents, not by day-care professionals! . This arrangement would be on a rotating basis so that let’s say every four days one or two or three of the parents would be responsible for watching over and possibly teaching the children. Obviously, there would be lots of details and logistics to work out, but that is the basic model. It avoids the delegation of child-care and children’s education to professionals and institutions and thereby protects our children’s hearts and avoids the trauma of separations every Monday morning- to the prisons of schools and organized daycares.
Have I gotten your attention? Are you interested in this kind of project? At this point, we need to work with people who would be committed to such a project and willing to restructure their lives accordingly. If you are “in” just let me know.
”And zo ve may to begin” Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim