Peace: Three Systems serving One System

I hope those who are following this blog are excited about the information that is bubbling to the surface as I am. (This is the second time I have used this metaphor though I don’t recall ever using it before).

The last discussion was not meant to separate the education system from the systems of religion and government. Each of these three systems has played a vital role in the continued development of humanity. As we saw last time, the education system is not selected because it was superior because it is as fragmented as the religion system and the government system. But all three participate in the transfer of information and when information is put to productive use it becomes knowledge that is transformative for the human system. It is this transformation of information into knowledge that we strive for in this blog.

It is unfortunate that some have tried to insert a wedge between these three systems. Whatever their motivation the only result is the fragmentation of the species. Each of these three systems is an expression of human thought. We did not borrow these systems from alien species.

But somewhere in the process of developing these systems the focus was transferred to the interests of subsections of the species instead of on the needs of the system. Why is it so difficult for national governments to come together to advance global development. Why do our religions remain so divided? Why does our educational curriculum not teach the oneness of the species?

The answer is related to the early development of the species. The obvious evolution of the human species points to the growth of the species from an infant stage to a mature stage, in the same way that each individual moves from infancy to maturity. Just as infants are characterized by trust and adults by distrust, in its infancy stage the human race was characterized by cohesion and trust, but now in its intellectually mature stage it is characterized by distrust.

How did this transformation take place, and to what extent were the three systems of education, religion and government involved? The answer to that question may help us in our quest for equality and peace.

Peace: Education and Instruction

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.

Peace: To Clarify a Point

There are two striking reasons why the task of renewing humanity falls first to the education system even though it suffers from the same disqualification as do religion and government. In a future blog I will discuss the fact that “education” is the solution to every human problem. But the education system also gets the nod because it is the only one of the three that is capable of surviving the type of change necessary to accomplish this task.

Let’s take a look at government. Nature appears to abhor the very idea of world government. It is intriguing that even though most animals live in groups out of which a leader always emerges, this leadership always remains local. A pride of lions is led by one lion but there is no lion in any jungle who leads the other lions in the entire jungle. There is not one example of global leadership in the entire animal kingdom. Government works best at the national level.

The current practice of religion could not survive a new paradigm in which all men are accepted as being equal regardless of their philosophy.

But the distinction between education and instruction means that the education system can take on both roles. We will always need a system that delivers specialized instruction in different areas. What we are lacking is a general approach that emphasizes the oneness of humanity so that this thinking is central in human thinking.

I cannot help but wonder what it will take to convince us all that the biggest challenge we face today is distrust and that our present systems are incapable of dealing with it.

Peace: Getting to the Heart of it.

Until now you probably gave no consideration to the meaning of the words education and instruction or to the relationship between the two. Like most people the fact you used the two interchangeably, or at a minimum believed that to instruct was to educate. In spite of this general ignorance, the ideas we are discussing here are not really novel; they simply have never been globally applied before. But now that the spotlight has been shone on them it is obvious that instruction is not education and Benson is correct in calling instruction the handmaiden of education.

Education appears to be much more complicated than we have been led to believe by the education community. The education system is actually an instruction system because instruction is what they have been delivering. However, this does not represent a failure on their part; they have been true to their mission. Allow me to explain.

On a local level the goal of instruction is to impart to the young the values that the local community has determined is important for its survival. This is why schools exist for individuals. The instruction that takes place in the schools and universities reflect the identity of the local region. It reflects that region’s level of development. The purpose of the schools is not to bring development to a region but to pass on to the members of that society the development that has already occurred in the region. Our proximity to other regions may blur that fact but it becomes clearer when we consider humanity as an entity. Schools around the world exist to pass on to the world’s inhabitants the existing state of humanity’s development. So, one could say that schools engage in instruction to maintain the education status of the race, not to change it. Strictly speaking, one cannot educate an individual; one can only educate a species. You cannot educate an individual because an individual is a product of his species not a product of his classroom. The “education” we receive in the classroom only determines where our performance ranks relative to other humans in our social group.

Instruction does not only take place among humans. We are the only species that come together in groups solely for the purpose of instruction but, as we saw in Benson’s description of education, instruction takes place in every species. The young learn from the adults around them what identifies the species. This is what is happening when a lioness teaches its young cubs how to hunt. Humans call this informal education.

Two points need to be noted. The first is that the education of other species is complete and stable so that what the young are instructed in today for the survival of the species is relatively the same as it has been for centuries. In America, a wolf from 500 years ago could adequately train a cub born in this century so that it could survive in the wild. The biological, physiological and cultural education or evolution of non-human species is complete and adults in non-human species instruct their young because of that fact.

An American human being from 500 years ago could not adequately train an infant born in America in this century so that it could survive here. This is because humans have changed in a way that other species have not changed. We have changed because our evolution has never been complete. Culturally we have continued to evolve. But our school curriculum makes the assumption that necessary but faulty assumption that our evolution is complete.

Distrust is not a product of poor instruction but of poor education. The current education paradigm does not educate; it only instructs because it does not focus on the needs of the race.

Peace: Understanding why our Education System has failed the species

Benson G. Clough is not a well-known name today, but more than a century ago he made statements about education that have much relevance to our current discussion. They are important enough that I reproduce all three paragraphs that come at the very beginning of his book “A Short History of Education.” Peculiarities in the text reflect the fact that he was an Englishman writing in 1904.

The History of Education is of supreme importance in its reference to the development of individual, industrial and national life. In studying this history many difficulties have arisen from a confusion between the terms Education and Instruction.

Life in all its stages is Education. One writer has gone so far as to say that the first two or three year of a child’s life are of the supremest importance, with regard to the foundation of character and the moulding of the future thought-life of the child. And those who have carefully watched the gradual, nay, almost imperceptible, growth of an infant’s power of appreciation and observation will readily understand the value from an educative point of view of the influence of externals. Like animals and plants, children assimilate themselves to their environment, and will, notwithstanding every endeavour to the contrary, reproduce in themselves the traits and faculties which they see in those about them.

Instruction comes later as a handmaid to Education, and involves the direct imparting of knowledge already accumulated from one who know to one who is at the time ignorant. Geography and History, for example, are largely questions of “instruction.” Mathematics and the allied sciences may be almost purely questions of “education.” In so far, however, as for their more rapid acquisition they involve the statement of facts previously acquired, these sciences approach the modern idea of education.

This is a powerful metaphor that sheds light on the failure of our education systems to effectively meet their goals of producing thoroughly educated humans. A handmaiden is a maid or servant working in the service of a master who holds the authority.

Theoretically, the servant works for the master but if the master does not provide any supervision or input the servant does what he/she thinks is best and the result may be nothing resembling what the master had in mind. For as long as our education systems have been in operation we have assumed they were guided by education when they have only known the acquaintance of the handmaiden of education.

The results are finally in. The handmaiden has done the best she could. Her work has not been entirely useless. We have made great achievements in science, technology, medicine and many other areas. But the ideas of a genuine handmaiden can never match the ideas of the master.

We cannot blame instruction for all our ills but being aware of the difference between education and instruction is important if we expect to solve our most pressing problems. The teachers are human. This means that they can only teach what humans know. There is no such thing as an over-achieving teacher. It is also true that students can only learn what they learn from others.

But our system of instruction is inherently fragmented because it is focused on the needs of groups of humans rather on the needs of the human race. We are not educating individuals to be humans but to serve different groups of humans. Built into that system are the seeds of inequality. The handmaiden has taken over the manor.

Peace: Can We Depend on the Education System?

Now that we have shown that the education system is best equipped to return humanity to a state of cohesion this project has just taken on a very interesting twist. I want to be certain I don’t lose anyone in the ride that is up ahead. Let us review how we got here.

This began with the second requirement of the Nobel Peace Prize – the eradication of standing armies. The only way to effectively eradicate standing armies is to get rid of the distrust that makes them necessary. We then discovered that distrust is founded in a false sense of inequality or fragmentation within the human system. This led us to conclude that our primary goal is to eradicate the prevailing sense of fragmentation that humans experience. In attempting to determine who which of our institutions is best equipped to lead this re-education effort charge we concluded that both religion and government are not qualified because they are inherently fragmented.

This leads to another problem. The fragmentation that we find in humanity is a sign of a species that is not well-educated; the education of this species has clearly gone awry. In recent times several people, including Vartas Gregorian, the President of the Carnegie Corporation, have complained of the fragmentation in our educational curricula. If the fragmented nature of religion and religion disqualifies them from eliminated fragmentation from humanity how wise could it be to expect the education system to solve a problem that they seem to have caused? Thankfully, there is a plausible explanation and it involves the interesting twist we spoke about.

There are really two parts to education. The part we are more familiar with is what we call formal education and it really should be called Instruction. This is what goes on in classrooms around the globe. Instruction is based on the fiction that everything that should be known is known. In theory, teachers teach their students established truth. But there is another aspect of education that does not get much attention in the education community even though it may be more important. It is this part of education that we are interested in; the part that says we continue to develop and change as a species.

Everyone knows about the difference between instinct and intelligence. Animals function on instinct but humans have to use their intelligence to figure what they need to do in order to survive. This is because animals had a complete evolution. They know everything they needed to know in order to survive. This also has its limitations as we can see when the food source of certain species is threatened. They lack the ability to come up with a new food source. Humans are better off because we are less informed. Because our DNA does not tell us exactly what to do in each situation we have the privilege to figure those things out. What we should eat, how we should dress, how we should move about. Those issues are settled for non-human species. Humans can come up with a variety of options, and sometimes we can be wrong.

In this attempt to figure things out that we are attempting to complete our evolution or development. Fragmentation is one place where we got it wrong. We need to correct it. The future of the species is at stake.

Peace: Why the Education System Gets the Nod

Because of my Christian upbringing I always expected that the attainment of peace on earth would have a religious connection. You can well imagine my surprise when I realized that the solution that was bubbling to the surface makes no reference to religion. That’s not how the story was supposed to end.

In order to understand why the burden, or privilege, of re-educating the species should fall to the educational community rather than to religion or government, we need to review an aspect of standing armies and distrust that we have not emphasized to this point.

We have already established that standing armies, even though they serve a useful purpose in contemporary society as a deterrent to war and violence, are both a drain on the public purse and a reflection of the distrust that exists in the human psyche. We have not said much about the fact that distrust only exists in the presence of fragmentation. We distrust those who are different from us -- those we perceive not to be complementary to us.

There is no distrust in a wholesome system; each component of the system works cooperatively with other components of the system. Difference does not always indicate fragmentation.

Consequently, in our efforts to eradicate standing armies we can say that our goal is to abolish the perception of fragmentation that now infects the human mind. I call it a perception because, as we shall discuss further later, the human race is only one of the trillions of natural systems that make up the larger system we call the Universe. It is on the basis of this understanding that it becomes clear why it is academia that features in our proposed solution instead of religion or government.

A process that is based on the idea of equality instead of fragmentation is best served by an institution that is not fragmented. Even though world leaders and religious leaders alike speak of world peace, both religion and government are inherently fragmented. Government is the essence of life but human government is also a political system. To maintain their power political leaders have to meet the needs of the fragmented people they represent. Political peace talks always aim for compromise because those who come to the table represent their geographic blocks. Even at the level of the UN the parties are not driven by the global needs of the human race. In the presence of distrust the best they can hope for is a compromise solution.

Most religions advocate peace but there also compromise is the best they can hope for. After thousands of years in which religion has dominated our lives we still find ourselves divided along religious lines. Speaking from my Christian upbringing I know that Christianity envisions a world of peace, yet it is not a world for everyone. In the minds of most Christians, including their leaders, the peace of Christianity is restricted to those who accept the tenets of Christianity. I doubt that Christianity is alone in this perspective but the idea is a non-starter in a pluralistic world.

This is why I think it is notable that the education-based solution makes no judgment about our partisan perspective. It treats the human race as a unit of parts.

While religious and political leaders advocate for a world where the outliers are excluded only the educational/scientific community consistently works for benefits that accrue not only to those who share their views. The mathematician creates his formulas to benefit all. The medical researcher keeps searching or cures that he may never need for himself. It is obvious that education, along with the science that feeds it, is the only human institution with the credentials necessary to advocate for a world where oneness is the ruling principle.