EDUCATION, NO. 2, LINKED IN

EDUCATION No.2, LINKEDIN

Let us find out what great people have said about education:                  A gentleman can see a question from all sides without bias; the ordinary (small) man is biased, and can see a question only from one side.”           Analects,Confucius                                            

“Conventional education makes independent thinking extremely difficult. Our whole upbringing and education have made us afraid to be different…The function of a teacher is not just to give you a lot of knowledge, but to show you the whole of life, the beauty of it, the ugliness of it, the delight, the joy, the fear.” Education and the Significance of Life, “

                                                                                  Jiddu Krishnamurti,                         The best book I have ever read about education. And No. two is: Pierre Weil: ”The Art of Living in Peace, Unesco Publishing. ISBN: 92-3-103804-4

        “ Most children in school fail…They fail because they are bored, afraid and confused…We could well afford to throw out most of what we teach in school, because the children throw out almost all of it anyway…Instead we should try to turn out people who love learning. “          How Children Fail, by John Holt        

                 “Almost all of what a child learns at school after the age of ten is totally irrelevant to his/her needs in later life. “                                      Edward De Bono, --has three Univ. degrees.

“It became frighteningly clear to me that schools in this country (England) and, I assume, also in the entire Western World, avoid touching upon all pressing problems.”  Gregory Bateson: people say he is Freud and Darwin in one person.                                                                                                         

“We believe that almost any child can thoroughly understand anything...We believe that at a very early age the child should learn that everything one learns in school can be expressed in the language of beauty.”    Marilyn Wilhelm--- arguably the best teacher and principal on this planet, and a very nice friend of mine.

“The true test of a school is the character that emerges from it.” Frederick Mayer

“True learning induces in the mind service of humankind”. Adi Granth, Sikhism

               “True knowledge is knowledge of God”,                                Al-Ghazali, + 1111

‘” The accumulation of knowledge is not a sufficient end in itself. What matters are the conclusions drawn from the knowledge.”                               Alfred Wallace

                                              ‘The Great Being says’:” Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can alone cause it to reveal its treasures and enable humankind to benefit therefrom.”   Baha’u’llah, Bahai+ 1892

            In traditional cultures, the teacher used to be a healer and a leader. Healing what? The “wounds” of mother and father, sister and brother…the wounds of society= human beings.

“In one word, the only possibility to make man sensible and reasonable, is to make him aesthetic,”   Friedrich Schiller, Germany.  Aesthetic means “to love beauty in “everything”.                                                   

           We all have been to school, but have you ever asked yourself the question what the Greek word schole (Latin scola, Greek skole)  means? Let me repeat!

                                                                                                                                                  Schole means leisure time! But the leisure time I use to relax and to prepare for my future studies, for all-around knowledge. Indeed, for hectic “modern” people it will sound strange that the origin of the word school, for many associated with fear, anxiety, boredom and senselessness, means “leisure”, doing “nothing”.The classical Greek ideal combined education and philosophy and they were regarded as one. Philosophers and educators were seeking the eternal truth and not profit. Incredibly wise and intelligent! Isn’t this true?                                              

Leisure and silence are one or should be one.

“Silence alone can praise a thing that is beyond all praise,” India. Silent and to “listen” have the same letters. Can we listen? No wonder that the Chinese characters for intelligent also have the ear, apart from the sun, the moon, the heart and the power of now. Please, take away from the word heart the first and last letter and you will have ear, the first and so important sense-organ in mother’s womb, which is so full of compassion according to the Arabic language.                                                                                                                                                            No wonder that school-officials of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have decided to give their students (and teachers?) more spare-time to relax and to find themselves.

Ear : Avestic ushi- both ears. ! In mother’s womb, the first sense organ to develop is the ear and not the eye, and it is the ear that dies last. Why? Because the ear (spelling: ear- h eart) is closely related to the heart, to compassion, to the centre of being, to the Divine.

Much in life depends on the merit of my ability to listen: listen and silent have the same letters. “Listen, so that your soul can live.” Old Testament. Only a humble person can listen. Correct? 

Chinese: The “ear” has four characters and one is the heart (ear, mind, mouth); “the ear is the way” (Upanishades, India); “close your eyes and listen, ” the Koran;   “ausculta”- listen! (Latin) -the major rule of the Benedictine order.

 Meaning of life in Madagascar: gomesese- suffix- listen-2x-se-se!                                             Japanese Zen meditation for one week (Sesshin) has five characters: 3x the ear, the heart and the hand).                                                                                                                                                        The sub-title of “The Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Liberation through listening”.                              Sma- the Sufi dance- listen. ================================================================

Question: How to prepare the young generation for the future? Is it correct? Well, yes and know, because if we teachers, lecturers and professors want to prepare the students for the future, we ourselves have to be prepared for the future; and, secondly, there is no future at all, as our ancestors from China, India, etc. knew, because there is only the eternal present, the NOW!!! Hindi, for example, has one word for yesterday and tomorrow, kal, and one word for now, aj. And the Arabic language, I have learned, does not strictly differentiate between past, present and future.

How many of us live in the present and not in the past? The best and most fascinating answer to this question I have found in the following words:

“Because the present is always a period of painful change, every generation views the world in the past, ..the Romans were obsessed with the world of Greece, the Greeks with the tribalists who preceded them…The Renaissance man lived in the Middle Ages, mentally and imaginatively. The 19th-century man lived in the Renaissance. We live in the nineteenth century. The image that we have of ourselves collectively in the Western World is from that period.”  The Global Village, Marshall Mc. Luhan, 1911- 1980, Canadian philosopher.

We human beings are terribly afraid of change, because of fear of the unknown, and there is only one major change in our lives. Can you guess which one?

When I ask people, they tell me: fear, anger, divorce, disease etc. Sorry, no!- there is only one change of importance for all of us, rich and poor, beautiful and not so beautiful, kind and not so kind, and that is the change from life to death;  getting older, having more pain, more diseases, losing friends who die or who have become more complicated, because of their loneliness, pain and big egos. Correct?

Thus: How can we grown-ups (teachers etc.) change, and is it possible that, deep down within, we do not want to change?

Let me give you an example, please: Long ago I created a peace circle in Salzburg, my home town. Every month we met and talked of what we had tried to achieve. But after one year I realized that the teachers present loved talking about peace and values in our circle, but hardly mentioned this topic after some time when they were in the classroom.. Why? The answer is: Walk the talk! Some of them had (subconsciously) refused to “set an example” to be a responsible and loving human being. It was and is very difficult indeed, and I can understand them. Why so difficult? Confucius once said so beautifully, if I remember correctly, that he had never seen a human being who loved values as much as food. Food and TV as compensation for the hardness of life in the USA and practically everywhere now on this planet. 

Can you imagine that many US citizens of sixty-five and beyond have watched TV for nine years, in 2009, if it is true what I have read? Is this possible? How do such people think and feel? How do they educate their children, how do they love their wives, their husbands and grandchildren? So much brainwashing and “negative” influence. Questions, questions, questions!  

             I am reminded of the German philosopher Heidegger who said: “He who asks questions is spiritual.” (German: Die Frage ist die Froemmigkeit des Denkens). German philosopher, 1889 – 1976.