Let us take a closer look at the distinction Benson made between education and instruction. To really understand how significant it is for us to make this distinction in our search for world peace consider this. In "A History of Education before the Middle Ages" (1913) Frank Pierrepont Graves, called education "conscious evolution." The seed for that idea was sown by Thomas Davison in "A History of Education," (1901). Graves understood Davison to be saying that "all the development of the universe that had taken place in the stages prior to the advent of man might . . . be considered as the result of a sort of unconscious education."
In every other species, development or evolution has been a reaction to changes in the environment. Only in humans has our development also been a reaction to changes in our knowledge. These changes in our knowledge are the domain of our system of education. As we learned more about our environment we consciously changed our behavior and contributed to the evolution of our species. This is how we made the change from hunters and gatherers to agriculturists, from cave painters to computers. These were conscious stages of development that contributed to the education or the evolution of the species.
Instruction is truly the handmaiden of this education process. The human race is not defined by the collective knowledge of the world's human population. The stage of development that the species has attained determines the domain for individual learning by individual human beings. When humans believed that the earth was flat this is what human beings were taught. But no one human being knows everything that humans know as a species.
But there are also aspects of the species, e.g. biologically and physiologically, that apply to every human being. Since the human race is a system each member of the human race should exhibit the basic characteristics of a system. An educated human being would not threaten the existence of other human beings whether through war and physical violence or damage to vital human institutions, e.g. school and economic systems. Individuals who do such things may be learned but they certainly are not "educated."
Somehow we have managed to mis-educate the species and infected the species with distrust.
A systems level discussion on Organizational Leadership and World Peace written by:
© Darius A. Lecointe, Ph.D., J.D., M.A. Join in the discussion here or through dalecointe@gmail.com
4 comments:
If humans can be taught to hate as Hitler did for the Jewish holacust, then humans can be educated to trust and love each other.
It seems essential that we understand more about the role of environmental design in making good action more likely, and bad action less likely.
Presently, we have a lot of bad design – or lack of design – creating the conditions that make bad action more likely. This hinges on whether or not environments evoke separative acts based in fear (us and the other).
What’s breathtaking is that we already know how to do it – it’s been demonstrated in scores of ways. But as DAL points out, the collective knowledge of the species is not always in the present awareness of any one person or fully propagated through any one system.
It is a good thing that no human has the capacity to contain the entire catalog of human science; this forces us to work together to achieve the goals of the species. We will get to the idea of design soon enough. Check out Bela Benathy's online book "Creating the Future." He attempts to deal with the idea of design.
We've evolved a few tools that can help our disparate groups to share knowledge. Trade was one. Written language with libraries and archiving might have been the second big push. And communication technologies have taken us miles and miles forward... am loving it. The internet undermines the boundaries of both time and space especially well. Am not sure what the next emergent tool will be but am confident that we're way more than 40yrs ahead of where we'd have been had we kept moving at pre-1960s pace without non-hierarchical, trans-border mass communication.
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