Word Magic

Children learn language as readily as they do, and in the ways in which they do, because there are strong constraints built into their nervous systems; such constraints powerfully affect the ways in which they initially refer to the world, categorize objects, and interact with other individuals.

(Howard Gardner: The Unschooled Mind: 7)

            We say that children must start by learning simple things and advance into more complex things. This is true, but with some explanation.  Evolving from simple to complex occurs in learning content, like moving from arithmetic to trigonometry.  Evolution of any sort only occurs within a context of inherent rules and structures and constraints.  But the really simple things are structural, bones shaping every piece of content and reappearing to mold and constrain every level of its complexity.  Education calls this appearance and reappearance a spiral curriculum.  And its principle of construction is one where, as Northrop Frye observes, "the same structural elements of a subject are repeated at progressively more complex levels." (On Education:53)  Roughly speaking, then, there is what children consciously learn and what they unconsciously absorb, and what they absorb is accomplished more easily and has greater effect because it is closer to how the intelligence is actually built and operates.  But what the child understands unconsciously must be translated into a language of consciousness.  That is what learning and education should do.   

            Again we do not receive an education, but express one.  What we receive is instruction, (in-structure) the putting of form into our intelligence.  In-struction evokes what we already know but do not know that we know until we have a form for it to be re-cognized.  From the ages of zero to five years, so much is learned and assimilated and put to immediate use.  Without question, the greatest learning occurs during these years.  And it is not mere learning of facts, one after another, much as a foreign language is often badly taught.  No, some of the greatest feats of intellectual daring and effort are made and met during these first years, such as the grasp and use of language and number, two “languages” that enable the child to understand the world.

            I distinguish two kinds of subjects to be learned.  First, are what we can call tool subjects, such as language and math, words and numbers —the languages of the human and natural sciences respectively.  The other kind of subject is a content subject, such as history, biology, sociology and chemistry.  Tool subjects are both content in themselves—we have English classes and Math classes--and tool for other subjects.  I mean they allow the other subjects to be learned, for they are the communication medium for these other subjects.  All subjects are forms of discourse.  Language itself is the one discoursing.  Most education is language education, the learning of discourses. 

            Yet, designating language and math as tool subjects is something of a misnomer, for it makes them important only to the extent that they help solve engineering problems.  I believe that language and math come out of us first, achieve outer form and return to us in the form of instruction, not because they are mere tools, the hammers and saws of knowledge construction, but because they are scepters of ruling power.  In teaching words and number we are not just teaching the means to speak and count.  That is what they are for many, but for children they are occult mysteries, and learning them has all the inner ceremony of entry into a secret society, making children initiates in the sacred rites of magical control of the world by bestowing upon them talismen of knowledge.  These are not simply subjects but runic inscriptions, wizard spells and incantations capable of transforming Nature into something human.  It is no wonder that such spiritual potencies were not discovered by men, but first brought to humanity by the gods.

            They were first brought forth from us by the holy, divine educators.  One of the great myths of every people is a story of the coming of words from the gods: whether Adam of the Judeo-Christian tradition; Thoth of ancient Egypt; Cadmus of Greece, or any other myth telling of the initial appearance of language, or its writing, among a people, such as Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs of central Mexico or Deganaweda of the North American Iroquois tribes.       

            Those who believe that articulate speech evolved from the grunts, howls, snarls and coos of early humans are speaking of language's organic beginnings, the outer evolution of an innate, spiritual power, for all things have both a spiritual and a material origin.  The spiritual origin and inner evolution of human words is the progressive Word.  The Qur’an says: “The God of Mercy hath taught the Qur’an, hath created man, hath taught him articulate speech.” (Qur’an 55:1-3)  Words are the basis of all the verbal disciplines, and the deepest forms, the meaning structures, of words are metaphors, similes, and symbols.  All these come  originally from scripture.  But they are also inherent biological constraints and resonating structures that help to define humanity and what it can do.

            The lead quote from Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind explains that there are biological constraints upon our very nervous systems that are necessary for language to be learned at all.  Constraints do not limit creativity, rather, they enable it.  For, though biological constraints regarding language exist, human beings have generated a vast number of languages and an infinite number of sentences and all of them have been learned and generated by children operating within the same constraints, unless we are to assume that different people can only learn different languages.  There are theories like this, but most of them are racist in overtone.

            Too, every language is a perceptual boundary that enables culture and defines a people.  These outer boundaries on perception, called cultural assumptions or a world-view, are also ways and paths of growth, metaphors for the biology from which they arose and grew to reflect.  The biological and the cultural form a double-mirror that enables collective consciousness.  Chomsky changed the study of language by dividing it into a deep structure (constraints within the structure of language itself) and surface structure, the outer expression of language competence.  While children learn vocabulary, and can be taught the rules of grammar and syntax, what they absorb from language is its deep structure—the view of the world held within the grammar and syntax of the language.  Language competence is the generation of more complex expressions of the possibilities in the deep structure, the unfolding of latent perceptions within the perceptual possibilities of the structure. 

            Children learn not language but language skills. But as they progress to higher levels of language competence, as they come to understand and master the rules, conventions and constraints of language, they gradually become absorbed into and build a symbolic world.  At that point, language changes from subject to be learned to creative power that can be used to make discoveries about the world and to transform it, for following the creative poetic process is the same as following Nature.  We discover, ultimately, that structures of physical nature and the human reality are linked in a common destiny, making discoveries in nature also into discoveries of human nature, because in the symbolic dimension of knowledge natural objects and human thoughts and emotions are metaphorically identified—the storm howling outside mirrors the storm raging within.  If we change one, we can change the other.  That is the magic of words.           

           

           

Some Myths About Myth

The earliest human consciousness to which we can go back must be conceived as a divine consciousness, a consciousness of God: in its true and specific meaning the human consciousness is a consciousness that does not have God outside it but which—though not with knowledge but with will, not by a free act of the fancy but rather by its very nature—contains within it a relation to God.

Ernst Cassirer,  The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: v. 2 Mythical Thought: 7

            Children should be bathed in myth, because the child’s mind is mythic in structure and content.  Children delight in the loose rhythm and fluid construction of myth, (or its cousins fable, legend, and fairy-tale) and are enthralled with the wild energies, quick metamorphoses, magical potions and powers, mysteries and miracles, oaths and omens, talking dragons, shape-shifters, fairies and demons, indeed the whole population of fabulous beings performing fantastical acts.  It all resembles a terrific dream, and myth is probably some halfway house of collective consciousness between dream and the waking state.  But some misguided “myths” about myth have taken root that prevent many from appreciating its role in education. 

            First, it is only a “rational” scientistic (not scientific) conceit that equates myth with something untrue.  This prejudice stems from believing myth is only an imaginary story rather than perceiving myth as an imaginative structure of human understanding.  Myths are the earliest stories of human consciousness and imaginative stories of all kinds are, even now, the child’s inner world, for imagination is a perennial power.  Some myths, like many of the Greek and Roman myths of the west, are culture stories with culture-heroes.  The really big ones, though, which tell of a time when human society was not so large a part of life, are the footprints of the gods in the sands of time. 

            As Cassirer states above, our first consciousness was a consciousness of the divine.  The divine has not to do with the past, but with the eternal which is always present.  Since the divine is eternally present its essential structures are a permanent part of our consciousness and not just some anachronistic holdover from another time, like crocodiles from the age of the dinosaur.  The big myths tell of the upset, called expansion, of human consciousness that occurs when the divine enters the human world, and generates all the terror and adulation, joy and dread, that is how we react when things start dissolving from one shape only to reappear in another, where creatures act much as quantum mechanics says the universe “down there” does.  It is the kind of wonderland Alice landed in when she chased the rabbit down the hole.  Myths tell us how children, and the child within, feel about all this.  For children of any age, the universe is stuffed with dimensions of strange and fascinating creatures they can talk to.  We have but to look at the world-wide popularity of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars to know that not only has the imagination lost none of its potency, but also it is still telling the same fascinating stories. 

            Now it is true that myth is closer to that time and psychology in human individual and collective life we call childhood.  It is more primitive. But primitive has two meanings, as Northrop Frye would say.  First, is the psychologically primitive.  This sounds like someone to avoid, but the psychological primitive is closer to archetypal structure and process.  He encounters the divine as living presence(s), not abstract intelligence.  The metaphor here is the human body.  Archetypes are psychological constraints, the innate, but flexible, boundaries to human learning and life that Jung believed were rooted in our biology, and Frye connected with the poetic intelligence.  As structures, archetypes are like the skeleton of the human body, absolute limits to what we can attempt without breaking apart, what gives the mind shape and holds it.  By knowing them we get close to understanding how we are hard-wired: what we have come into the world ready to do.  As guides to the process of development, archetypes help define our powers and potentials, which means our understanding is capable of doing some things but not others, like the ligaments and tendons attached to the bones that both limit and release human action.  But capability can expand with training and care.  When we work within these constraints we learn quickly, almost instinctively, otherwise we struggle and get off course and often fail.  Mythical consciousness reappears during any period of intense social and psychological upheaval, like now, when reason fails because things must be renewed and not just reorganized.  Myth always kicks in whenever great new paradigms of awareness are lying just over the horizon of rational knowledge.  When it does it signals that another divine visitation has occured.       

            The other meaning of primitive is the historically primitive.  This is mostly a social and technological meaning.  It says that clans and tribal societies without our technology, poor things, have myth, but advanced people, like us, have science, and it is much better to have science.  From this view, myth is a kind of early and poor man’s science: true, but not for the reasons given.  That such comparison is made is based on dubious historical connections, mostly having to do with vulgar applications of the evolutionary principle, that whatever came before must be simpler and less developed: ergo, myth came before science it must be simpler and more childish, something the mature mind detaches itself from, like the first stage of a rocket.  Within a certain tradition of thought and experience that may be so, but myth and science are not in the same tradition of thought.  Myth is/was an imaginative art and the arts do not improve in the sort of linear fashion that science does.  The arts revolve back in a ricorso movement to the same essential questions and answer them anew.  Science does not grow out of myth anymore than humans grow from monkeys.    

            Myth and science are complementary means of understanding.  I mean that though myth and science talk about the same thing, reality, they bring it forth in complementary ways: one imaginatively, the other conceptually.  Each has its own logic: each is empirical.  There is no doubt that conceptual is a later psychological development than is imagination, both in the child and in history, and science is a later development than myth.  But, because they are complementary mental powers, both are necessary.  Thus if one develops at the expense or exclusion of the other, at the moment of its peak development it flips into the other in order to compensate for an unbalance that results in neurosis, if an individual, and cultural sterility if a civilization.  We saw this happen when a scientific sword of material facts cut through that dense thicket of imaginative—by this time it was more imaginary--correspondences that had grown around the European mind to choke the understanding.  But from the perspective of complementary innate powers and not their successive appearance on the stage of history, if myth leads to science, then science leads to myth.  This is not a one-way linear evolution, but a comprehensive rebalancing in a higher cross-fertilizing relation. 

            For example, myth presents the creation as alive, every thing in it is a presence, is part of a vast, complex order of living things that obeys the laws of magic, and human beings have a deep inner relationship with every part of it.  If one wants to call this childish, so be it.  Science sees the universe as composed of inorganic and organic substances, obeying impersonal mathematical laws, and with which we can only have observer/observed, or even, exploiter/exploited relations of alienation.  It is indifferent to us and we are interested in it only to the extent that we can get something from it.  If we want to call this mature, fine.  Yet, when alienation becomes unbearable the mind automatically goes mythic, and a good deal of modern physics is sounding more and more like ancient myth. 

            “The human consciousness,” says Cassirer, “is a consciousness that does not have God outside it,” but rather “by its very nature contains within it a relation to God.”  Myth remains a powerfully imaginative way to unfold that divine consciousness within. 

             

 

             

           

Ancient East and Modern West: Universals of Education

Have they forgotten the celebrated hadith (Holy Tradition): "Seek after knowledge, even unto China"?

(Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, p. 25)

           

            Anyone wishing to ground education in good theory has no farther to look than 500 B.C. Confucian China.  The tradition that ‘Abdu’l-Baha refers to above, for those that may not know, is from Muhammad, the Founder of Islam, who also certainly knew a thing or two about education.  In sixth-century A.D. Arabia, He took some backward, scattered, savage tribes and in less than two hundred years molded them into the greatest force for civilization that the world had seen to that time.  He did it by, in part, telling His people to get knowledge even from China.  That must have been quite a startling statement, but how else, save by His authority, would they overcome deep-seated prejudices regarding learning from other peoples.  Prejudice remains in force today.  A pernicious one goes something like this; what is most recent is most true.  Old people, old traditions, old history no longer have a place in either life or education, except as some sort of museum-piece which we can snobbishly ignore or about whom we can patronizingly exclaim: How quaint. 

            Let us not confuse knowledge, of which we have plenty, with wisdom, which is scarce in any age.  Yet, many of the essential categories within which we still do our thinking to gain our knowledge were laid down long ago.  Knowledge may come and go, one set of “facts” replacing another, but wisdom is perennial.  Noted twentieth-century philosopher Alfred Whitehead believed that most “western” philosophy was but a series of footnotes to Plato.  Baha’u’llah wrote that: “Although it is recognized that the contemporary men of learning are highly qualified in philosophy, arts and crafts, yet were anyone to observe with a discriminating eye he would readily comprehend that most of this knowledge hath been acquired from the sages of the past, for it is they who have laid the foundation of philosophy, reared its structure and reinforced its pillars.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah, p. 144)

            So, what does the wisdom of traditional China have to teach?   Plenty.  That which correctly guides the development of human nature is called, in Chinese, the Way.  What makes the Way possible is proper education, which Confucius called The Great Learning.  The Great Learning goes on when harmony between the universally human element at the bottom of one’s being (shu), and the corresponding action (chung) of learning and education is achieved.  The goal is the development of the full human (Jen) potential possible at any one time. Jen is variously translated as mankind, humanity, kindness, morality.  It is that which is intrinsic and original in the very nature of man.  It can also be translated as spirit.  The principle that there must be harmony between the human essence and its proper form of expression is restated in the Bahá’í view that truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtue.  How?

            It is a maxim of modern western education that children must be allowed to follow their natural talents, but this will only happen if, as Confucian thought says, education gives them the correct forms for these talents to find proper realization.  They must be true to their nature, and not lie to themselves, but neither can education lie to them.  In Confucian thought, an essential part of the education process, and of holding to the true and avoiding the false, is to have the correct names of things.  That means that the name given to each object should be the designation of the thing, as also shown in the story of Adam naming things in the Garden of Eden.  If an object or nature is correctly named, something essential should be revealed about it, something fundamental to the growth of that thing must be implied in the name, and lies cannot, therefore, be bred.  This was called the Rectification of Names (Cheng Ming)—words and names must correctly coordinate human potentials with actuality.  In this way Reality is formed, and reformed.  The thrust of spirit is always progress, and when there is progress new forms of realities come into mental view and these must be named and connected with previous reality so that continuity may be maintained and change be guided into progressive avenues.  All life on earth is a Book of Changes.  A new form means a reforming of the content and a new name given, as is declared in Revelations 3:12 of the Bible.

            In our world where lying is a veritable way of life, from heads of government down to the ordinary man in the street, with the proliferation of jargon, misspelled Twitter tweets, of euphemisms and misnomers, with all the double-speak and gobbledygook of news spin and political correctness, where words are used to conceal not reveal thought, we see that some modern-day rectification of names is required to do what was described by the poet T. S. Eliot in his poem Little Gidding:

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
     To purify the dialect of the tribe
     And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.

            Such ideas are crucial for education, because the attributes of the human essence and those external forms of knowledge which draw out and bring forth that bottomless reservoir of human potential must be in harmony.  When racism is masked in history textbooks or materialist assumptions rule in science, when art is often just shock tactics to grab attention, when sloppy and uncivil speech is tolerated in public and private in the name of honesty, the human essence finds expression in distorted and skewed forms and the result is prejudice, exploitation, discrimination and frustration.  For traditional Confucian teaching all outer forms lacking harmony with the inner essence are empty, meaningless and without value—much as current schooling is for many students.  But the inner essence always transcends the outer forms and is the source of their renewal.  The great law of form is only great when the inner essence is connected with its proper form.  For example, while the study of history is mostly of forms of violence against one another, Bahá’u’lláh comments both on the results of that study of history and on our true nature: “No two men can be found who may be said to be outwardly and inwardly united. The evidences of discord and malice are apparent everywhere, though all were made for harmony and union.”  In another place He wrote: “Ye were created to show love one to another and not perversity and rancour.”  Much of our “educational” literature will need to be rewritten to achieve harmony between essence and form.

First Things First

Schools must first train the children in the principles of religion, so that the Promise and the Threat recorded in the Books of God may prevent them from the things forbidden and adorn them with the mantle of the commandments; but this in such a measure that it may not injure the children by resulting in ignorant fanaticism and bigotry.

(Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 67)

            I have suggested in recent posts that the values that we want children to acquire cannot be taught; only the knowledge of values can be taught, either intellectually as principles of conduct or as noble behaviors which I have called virtues.  In the above quote, Baha’u’llah does not say for schools to teach religion, but to train children in its principles.  When ‘Abdu’l-Baha states that “Good character must be taught” I think that He means something like good character must be exampled.  Good character can only be shown in actions which we hope children will, in turn, imitate in the best sense of that word.  But example appears as a kind of inner moving picture in which we are the actors.  Recently, brain researchers have discovered a class of neurons in the brain called mirror neurons.  These enable one person to tune into someone else.  That is, when we observe someone act the same neurons fire in sequence in our brains.  The observer’s brain function mirrors the one that the observed person went through to carry out the action.  Voila, the neuroscience of the dynamic force of example. 

            Let’s look at this polarity of Promise and Threat to see how it might work.  As with much of spiritual education, first things are not simplest or most elementary in content. Rather they are elementary and, therefore, deepest in structure.  They are the foundational archetypal powers and paradigms of existence and knowledge.  Our paradigmatic teacher is the Manifestation of God. His Message is the archetype of wisdom.  Baha’u’llah calls Wisdom “the foremost Teacher in the school of existence” which “at the beginning of the foundation of the world ascended the stair of inner meaning and when enthroned upon the pulpit of utterance, through the operation of the divine Will, proclaimed two words. The first heralded the promise of reward, while the second voiced the ominous warning of punishment. The promise gave rise to hope and the warning begat fear. Thus the basis of world order hath been firmly established upon these twin principles.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:66)

            What does all this metaphysics have to do with the practical moral training of my six or sixteen-year old?   One obvious aspect of moral training is based on fear of punishment.  Virtuous conduct can only be consistent when the fear of God is in the heart and the real threat of punishment of some sort is in place in the home or school.  Baha’u’llah states: “The fear of God hath ever been the prime factor in the education of His creatures. Well is it with them that have attained thereunto!”  The fear of God is "the fountainhead of all goodly deeds and virtues" and "the commander of the hosts of justice."  Fear of God is the inner ground of moral self-discipline.  Fear of punishment is its outer aspect. 

            But we must be careful not to overemphasize the fear of God, or equate it with fear of punishment, because by itself it encourages us to think of God as a repressive, puritanical, exacting old bully.  Such thinking leads “to ignorant fanaticism and bigotry.”  Fearing God is not like cringing before a capricious tyrant who overrules our every happy emotion, and is ready to strike mortally and at random for his own perverse entertainment.  We have many examples of these in our world—some of them rule countries.  Neither should we be bred like sheep to instantly panic upon hearing a parental bark to “get back in line.”  Examples of these, too, abound.  The fear of God should be pre-emptive not retributive of wrong-doing.  It is like what children feel when they imagine disappointing a loving parent.  Children want to please their parents, to have mom and dad be proud of them, to encourage them.  They fear loss of love.  Seeing fear as the outer support of love should be part of every child’s moral education.

            But no relation that lasts is ever built upon fear, even the fear of God.  All relationships of growth are built upon a foundation of love, and love of God is the bedrock of our spiritual striving.   I called fear the outer support of love because 'Abdu'l-Baha said that parents should instill in their children "the love of God so that they may manifest the fear of God and have confidence in the bestowals of God."  Instilling the love of God in children can be especially the responsibility of mothers, since the Master advises that the love of God should "pervade their inmost being, commingled with their mother's milk." 

            Once these primal sources of life are flowing, then, following Baha’u’llah’s statement, a complete moral education must have a cognitive, an affective and a volitional aspect.  It is thought, feeling and will leading to action.  The cognitive aspect consists in stating clearly and in age-appropriate language the promise of reward and, when necessary, the threat of punishment in any situation of moral choice.  But, in reality, both reward and punishment are promises, though punishment should mostly be implied.  Promises of reward arouse within children feelings of hope and fear, the emotional energies driving behavior, for real punishment is gradually seen to be depriving oneself of the reward.  Actions are then trained (i.e. reinforced or corrected) by the promised rewards or the promised punishment.  The world makes moral sense.

            All three pairs—promise/threat, hope/fear, reward/punishment—must work in tandem or moral training is skewed.  If, for example, the promise and the threat are never clearly stated, then, over time, there results an underdevelopment of the intellectual faculties of understanding and imagination, for the child lives in a world of phantoms where he can never find firm ground to stand on: his understanding is blocked or thwarted for nothing is solid enough to grasp and be believed; his imagination is overrun by monsters and serpents.  Perception is clouded by anxiety, causing lack of insight—at least confidence in it—and lack of insight, in turn, leaves individuals unable to consider deeper questions such as: What is the purpose of life other than survival?

             Emotional underdevelopment, characterized by selfishness, a lack of faith and trust, a luxuriance of lies, the inability to commit to anything, occurs from too many morbid fears, resulting in insensitivity or indifference to the sufferings of others, and a general lack of sympathy, affection, or deep feelings of love.  Inappropriate or inconsistent rewards and punishments bring about a weak will with little intention to either personally advance or to help others do so, for no matter what the child does he risks being wrong for no apparent reason. Thus the threat of inevitable criticism looms large in his mind.

            But if all is rationally stated and rewards and punishments follow logically and consistently from promises, then proper expectations develop because hope is rewarded and strengthened while anxiety is dissipated in loving relations and fear is dissolved in just punishment. 

           

Unifying the Academic Curriculum

A crisis in education would at any time give rise to serious concern even if it did not reflect, as in the present instance it does, a more general crisis and instability in modern society.  For education belongs among the most elementary and necessary activities of human society, which never remains as it is but continuously renews itself through birth, through the arrival of new human beings.  These newcomers, moreover, are not finished but in a state of becoming

(Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future The Crisis in Education:185)  

            Spiritual principles are rational statements of human values, what gives them intellectual definition and a social dynamism.  Spiritual principles resonate and connect with inner conditions of the human reality.  For example, unity is a human value.  The spiritual principle of it, such as: “It beseemeth all men…to establish the unity of all mankind” is not just a statement of possibility, the goal of a program of action, but is also a truth about an inner condition poised to emerge.  Unity is not manufactured from nothing.  It is not some ideal condition to grope our way towards, and it can’t be established and maintained within a state of disunity.  Unity is its own condition, something that exists already and is brought forth from the ideal mine.  It emerges from within to create a unified social context that mirrors it. Unity is a social possibility only because it is a spiritual reality.  “Unity,” wrote the Universal House of Justice, “is a condition of the human spirit.  Education can support and enhance it, as can legislation, but they can do so only once it emerges and has established itself as a compelling force in social life.” (One Common Faith: 42)  Education can “support and enhance” unity even in the design of the curriculum.  That is, spiritual principles can organize the academic curriculum so that unity is the result of learning. 

            Indeed, only spiritual principles can do this. I said in the last post that foundations and goals must harmonize, where goals are transformed foundations.  Absent spiritual principles to organize the curriculum, spiritual transformation cannot occur in present secular education, even when "moral education" classes are thrown in the mix.  We don't expect peach trees from acorns. Yet isn’t that what we somewhat foolishly expect when “moral education” is a special class, an ornament to the real curriculum? 

            Because spiritual principles are generators of both new consciousness and of new behaviors, spiritual education cannot consist solely of learning spiritual principles as merely part of the intellectual content of learning, any more than the principles of physics can be taught and understood in isolation from interaction with the physical world, or vocabulary taught independently from language use.  Applying spiritual principles to the organization of the academic curriculum will transform intellectual knowledge.  As I see it, a curriculum founded upon spiritual principles would reorganize academic subjects to give learning new purpose within the two interpenetrating contexts discussed in an earlier post, the inner context of self-transformation and the outer purpose of social transformation via service to humanity. 

            In today's integrating world, the master spiritual principle of all education must be, intellectually, the consciousness of the oneness of humankind and socially humanity is one family.  If the oneness of humankind were to be the guiding ideal and purpose of education, this alone would reconstruct the curriculum and go a long way toward reducing the unreality of most current moral education, for the academic curriculum would be built upon those qualities that come from the spiritual dimension of human nature.  This dimension, the Bahá’í Writings say, “can be understood, in practical terms, as the source of qualities that transcend narrow self-interest.  Such qualities include love, compassion, forbearance, trustworthiness, courage, humility, co-operation and willingness to sacrifice for the common good -- qualities of an enlightened citizenry, able to construct a unified world civilization.” (Baha'i International Community, 1993 Apr 01, Sustainable Development Human Spirit)  

            Using the oneness of humankind and related spiritual principles to organize the learning experience will be to change subjects so that they will be taught in ways that complement each other, as the inner values and outer virtues themselves do, creating a nurturing intellectual environment that will generate spiritual knowledge, will unify human understanding, promote moral aspiration, and mature the intelligence.  In this new curriculum the various religions may be taught as the fruits of the teachings of a succession of Spiritual Luminaries who have brought the same energy and principles of moral and spiritual life from the sacred dimension.  In this view, each religion is a stage in the unfoldment of one eternal religion, thus quenching the fires of religious prejudice.  The different cultural traditions can be presented as great collective human responses to the teachings of these Figures showing, in the variety of their civilizations, the essential unity of all human civilization.  Arts, or the symbolic dimension organizing and encoding perceptions of reality, will ennoble and unify human vision, not just reflect current, fragmented vision.  Natural science teaching can be structured around the necessity of preserving the natural world, because it is our common home, of perceiving its exquisite beauty and understanding its structure as an analog of human beings.  Social science can be built upon the idea of world citizenship, with all the rights, duties and responsibilities that the word citizen implies.  History may be taught so that students see civilization-building as an ever-advancing process to which all peoples have made important contributions.  Vocational training should emphasize the value of service to the common good, and physical education is an excellent arena in which to nurture cooperation, teamwork, and unity by working toward group goals and including everyone irrespective of ability, and to instill a sense of sportsmanship by applauding all noble effort regardless of winning or losing.

            In this way, organic, integrated, spiritual principles unify the curriculum of academic subjects, both within each subject and across subjects, making a single, ever-expanding body of knowledge capable of holding infinite diversity.  Simultaneously, learning becomes a shaping power behind the integration and development of the individual person and global society because the cognitive, affective and volitional aspects of the human being are perceived as essential faculties of the human spirit which is the same everywhere and every time. Academic subjects themselves "support and enhance" the unity now emerging from the ideal mine of the human reality.  They magnetize the supreme talisman and draw forth the gems of human qualities.  The result of this education is the enlightened and virtuous human being and the ever-advancing civilization embracing all humanity.                       

            Where can one find such a curriculum?  Of course there is none so far in any advanced stage.  But I would recommend study of the curriculum developed by International Educational Initiatives.  It has been successfully applied in schools in Japan, Russia and the United States.