The Power To Change the World

If you are not busy changing the world, then you are busy keeping it the way it is.

            Recently I found the above quote which I think is profound.  It provides a good introduction to the topic of this post: the role of faith in education.  I said in the last post that I would discuss how we can mine the gems within us.  We need power to do this.  The first of these powers is faith.

            Education means to lead out, or to bring forth, what is present within.  Mostly “educators” try to force what they think is valuable into a mind that they consider empty.  But even the smallest child is a complete human being, as the acorn is a complete oak tree.  The powers and abilities of every individual need to unfold as the mighty oak unfolds from its tiny seed.  Leading the process of unfolding the potential human being into an actual one is the role of the teacher.  Teachers are entrusted with the opportunity to entice all those latent powers and capacities of children into the world.  If they do not trust their charges, but rather trust their teaching materials, their administrators, or other social authorities to bestow all answers, then they lead their students not into the light of self-knowledge, but rather into the dark dependencies of impotence.  They become, however well-intentioned, oppressors with velvet gloves who do not even trust themselves.  But if they trust their children’s souls, because they trust their own, then they are leaders in empowerment.  They are transmitters of faith. 

            Children go to school to learn math, science, language, art, a whole host of things.  Learning these subjects is supposed to prepare them for life in society, to get a good job, etc., and this is true so far as it goes.  The problem is that it does not go far these days, if it ever really did.  For what comes out of the child is not really science, art, language, athletic prowess, or mechanical skill.  What comes out is the child’s spirit through the forms of science, art, language, athletics, and mechanical skill.  What comes out is power, vision, feeling, intuition and destiny—what the child already knows but does not know that he knows.  Learning is tools for this self-discovery and for service, not to become some cog in a social machine.  Now the good teacher leads the child along the path of development to independence by love and nurturing, because he has faith in the child’s ability to know himself and to contribute to an ever-advancing civilization.  How do we know if we are doing well in this sacred task?  Thomas Moore asks: “Are we making little replicas of ourselves, or are we leading forth what was planted in eternity?  Are we cramming what we judge appropriate into the child, or are we loving this new stuff we glimpse in the fresh being in our charge?”  Educator, Stanwood Cobb, makes the great point that: “Education shares with religion the important task of perfecting human nature on this planet.”    

            Faith, education, and religion are always together and faith plays the same role in both.  By faith I do not mean a belief that has little evidence, but which is nevertheless supported by religious or other authority. We should put no faith in any education or religion that asks us to trust it blindly.  I mean faith as both a psychological attitude toward life and as a power of action in life.  Founder of the Anisa educational model, Daniel Jordan, wrote that: “Basically, faith refers to an attitude towards the unknown or unknowable which ultimately enables one to approach it in a way that something more of it becomes known.”  Further, he says, “faith means a loving of the unknown or unknowable--an attraction to whatever is unknown and a capacity to approach it.”  But the unknown is also all those infinite potentials within ourselves that we have not yet tapped and trained and expressed. 

            There is a sense in which one can measure the vigor of a civilization by the amount of real faith its members have.  Where there is much faith there is a corresponding lack of fear.  Where fear of the unknown, the transcendent, the spiritual, or the new predominates, an anxious, fretful, conformist and defeatist attitude reigns.  What do your schools teach their children about the unknown, to love it or to fear it?                      

            As a power of action faith is the reaching toward the future, the transcendent, and the unseen.  It fires the imagination and is the driving power behind discovery.  Faith makes reason reach beyond itself toward transcendence by risking itself in encounters with the unknown.  When human development is grounded in real faith it is energizing and invigorating, inviting souls to dare the impossible. 

            But faith must, too, be tested by experience, else it is connected not with imagination but with the imaginary, slides from yearning into a mere wish, is not a striving for new truth but is holding fast to old slogans.  With experience and testing faith becomes knowledge. There are, then, two kinds or conditions of faith. There is the faith through which one strives to grasp the unknown, the transcendent, and to mold the future.  There is, also, a faith based on experience and past events that resolve into recurring patterns allowing for prediction and valid expectations. This form of faith is tied to memory and the tried and true way of doing things.  This second form of faith has lost social power today when the tried and true is itself in upheaval and change—just look at North Africa.   

            I started this post with a quote about changing the world or keeping it as it is.  Faith is one power we need to change our world.  Lack of faith is what keeps us busy keeping it the way it is.  Let me ask you:  Do you like the world as it is?  Many will say, No!  OK, but how are you spending most of your time?  Remember: If you are not busy changing the world, then you are busy keeping it the way it is.