Education of Yesterday = Conflict of Today

All of us are grappling with flaring conflicts everywhere, whether on climate change or territory, whether on ideology or power. It's time to take a pause to understand why we are living with so much strife.

We know, from both Science and Experience that all conflict and doubt is rooted in our minds. And our 'minds' are constantly being informed/ trained/ fertilised by education and propaganda of a particular time.

Let us look at the broad education that all of us have received over the last century.

The need to break everything into ‘parts’, to dissect, analyse and understand, is a typical predilection of the human mind. And it has been given great impetus in education models, especially in the last century of "Scientific enquiry".

For example, knowledge is distributed into ‘science’, ‘math’, ‘history’, ‘geography’ etc. ‘Math’ is further divided into trigonometry, algebra ,geometry etc.

We ‘divide’ and break into pieces everything that we see.

Nature is a whole…..but we divide it into rivers, glaciers, clouds, lakes, seas etc.

Look around us. Language is divided, religion is divided , knowledge is divided, healing is divided.

And then we get ‘stuck ‘ to the divided portion, completely in love with what we have studied, and are unable to see it as a ‘whole’.

We act like animals defending the territory that is ‘divided’. So if ‘ civilization ’ is ‘divided’ we fight over which ‘civilisation‘ model is superior and important and to be applied everywhere. If Math is divided, we insist that a particular study model is superior to the other model.If Medicine and healing is divided, we start arguing which science is superior and which is inferior.

And thus, in our attachment to what we have been taught, we lose the ability to see the connectedness of everything.

That is why every few decades , there is someone or something which comes to remind us that we are all a part of the ‘whole’.

This decade, ‘nature’ is coming back to us in it’s full glory, showing us all that we are ‘connected’ to each other via the massive climate change we are facing. . That someone’s folly is someone else’s downfall. That someone's good deed is someone else's profit.

Showing us, that the Universe we inhabit , is a whole.

Everything is connected to each other. Energy is one. You may divide it to understand it, but never forget that it is all connected and one source.

Maybe this one concept of ‘wholeness’ can reduce our conflict within ourselves and the Universe around us.

A conceptual understanding that drills into us the ‘wholeness’ of us all together is an essential concept that needs to be accepted into World governance models and World education models.

Practice and exercise of this ‘I am part of the whole’ principle on a daily basis can help us reduce all conflicts.

Let’s build this into our education models.

Can we build a list of ‘connectors’ between our ‘divided’ understanding of the "whole”.

A good exercise for us would be – connect our pet peeve to a concept that we love. So, for example, if we were to build different exercise models that encourage a child to connect two opposing phenomena, the child's imagination will expand and be able to slowly connect both the phenomena.

For example, find the connections between :

Infidelity and Faithfulness

Destruction and Creativity

Faith and Doubt

Failure and Success

White and Red

Ignorance and Knowledge

Emptiness and Busy- ness

Natural Forest and Man-made Concrete Jungle.

When we get children and adults to exercise their minds to two opposing concepts and ask them to find their connectors, we will help their minds build the skills to remain balanced in their approach.

Eventually, this will make us good citizens capable of perceiving ourselves as a part of ‘Universe’.

We are focusing too much on dissection and division to establish uniqueness or exclusivity. It's time to create models that also bring focus to collective and connected nature of all phenomena and life on this earth and universe.

Free our education models from this emphasis on Division and Dissection. These are only one set of tools . We need to learn about Connection and Wholesomeness too.