What's Wrong with Education?

             Education is in deep trouble, as many already know.  But education's trouble is part of the same trouble afflicting society everywhere.  What is wrong?  I think that, by and large, we have lost both our sacred foundations and our spiritual goals.  Hence we have little idea of the moral and intellectual powers that flow from the former that enable us to achieve the latter.  We have become so secularized in our thinking, so material in our aims and purposes, and so self-concerned in our living that everything else goes to rot.    

            But these outward troubles are the external consequences of a more profound malaise, the end result of inner changes in the sense of purpose of traditional human life, a darkening of vision and a felt loss of cultural continuity and community with nothing to replace these. Over the past few hundred years there has occurred in the inner life of humanity, starting with the people of the west, a displacement of a transcendent or spiritual understanding of human life by a militant this-world materialism.  This displacement has been responsible for the alienation and moral drift that characterize contemporary existence in the industrialized world and increasingly everywhere, for the material world is nothing solid to stand upon. Recently a Facebook friend sent a post quoting Einstein as saying: "Relativity applies to physics, not ethics." 

            People feel that from family to neighborhood to nation, the moral fabric of their lives and their sense of belonging to community and participating in a shared civic life is unraveling.  Yet they fail to see, or don’t wish to acknowledge, that this feeling of alienation is rooted in their own wrong values about human existence. This erosion of a sense of inner meaning is one of the chief anxieties of our time.  The poet, T.S Eliot, in his poem, Burnt Norton, characterized the daily lives of such people as: 

Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration 

            

           In spite of all this, it remains true that children get educated.  But, from a spiritual perspective, given our current mode of thought and life humanity has strayed so far from its essential nature that the child in learning what he is taught is actually miseducated; for though he may know a great deal, he has no moral grounding in anything higher than himself or society.  Without the spirit he becomes soul-sick.  The psychologist, Maslow, put it this way: “Without the transcendent and the transpersonal, we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or else hopeless and apathetic.” 

          Progressive educator, Stanwood Cobb, raises questions and answers that are worth pondering for education: “The place of the spiritual in education—has it any place?  Should it have any place?  If Spirit is a reality, it is the unchanging, eternally creative force behind all phenomenal existence.  Which, then, is more worthy of study—material existence as created from the plane of Spirit, or the Spiritual Creative Force upon which all phenomena depend for their existence?  Thoughts an Education and Life p.9