Transformation and Reformation

A new life is, in this age, stirring within all the peoples of the earth; and yet none hath discovered its cause, or perceived its motive.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 195)

           

            The next few posts will consider education within the context of some larger questions, because education never goes on in a vacuum, but is embedded within a complex of social conditions.  Education usually works to maintain and support those conditions.  Less often it works to change them.  But I want to consider another question to establish context of another sort.   The question is: What does education do when spiritual conditions change?  

            If, as the Bahá’í Writings assert, the world’s equilibrium has been upset by a new revelation from God, and if, as those same Writings claim, the purpose of Revelation is to transform the inner and outer aspects of humanity, then it seems logical to believe that any educational system established either before that great transformation commenced, or in ignorance of it, will be unable to give to students something essential for their understanding the new spiritual world they are living in.  There have been two basic responses to this upset of equilibrium, each depending upon a certain sense of what is going on.  These can be roughly formulated as the difference between reformation and transformation. 

            In a previous post (Bringing the Future into the Present) I discussed the difference between creativity and innovation.  All innovations are creations, but not all creations are innovations.  Creativity is the bringing forth of any novelty, like building a mousetrap, innovation brings forth a new development in an established process, like building a better mousetrap.  Though innovations work to advance a process, the only goal of such advance is toward the end of that process.  All material processes follow the law of diminishing returns.  That means that over time it takes more to accomplish less.  Thus innovations tend to accelerate a process towards its final end.  They function, one might say, as a new carburetor does in an old engine, where the greater efficiency of the new part upsets the greater inefficiency of the older parts, sometimes accelerating their failure.  When significant innovations are no longer possible, only new creation is left.  A transformation in perception is needed. 

            Reformation is like innovation, though it is a bit more complex, because we are dealing with social processes and not mechanical ones.  Reformation is a response to perceived spiritual or social stagnation, either to develop potentials or to fix problems.  But reformation, unlike innovation, is also often undertaken with an eye toward restoration of a golden age, to purify corruption, to return to times when things were better, at least, simpler and more manageable.  But reformation does not challenge fundamental assumptions about reality.  The movement known as the Christian Reformation under Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others of a few centuries ago, created this kind of disequilibrium within the Christian church, though it did not fundamentally alter the Christian world view.  Science did more of that.  “Back to basics” theories are an example of the return element of reformation in education, but moral education as an innovative addition to the established school curriculum is an example of its acceleration toward decline.  They are like the new carburetor.  Both work, though, to accelerate the disintegration of established education. 

            Reformation creates disequilibrium without creating a new equilibrium; rather it seeks to reestablish the old equilibrium, though with some tweaking. Oddly, it is an attempt to do the impossible: to return to the past by invoking the future only to end up reforming things as they are; rather like trying to advance one's understanding by using a circular argument.  Reformation does not grow into a new form, but grows into another example of the existing order of things.  At best it only contributes to a process which historians call cultural aging, the final stages of which are characterized by exhaustion, senility and death, for the creative drive within that tradition of experience is used up. 

            In such times we begin to see books with titles announcing the end of this or that: The End of Education, The End of History, and the like.  Real change only occurs through a thunderous orgy of violence.  Rather, the possibilities for change are set-up by this violent reaction to things as they are, as people feel imprisoned in time with the warden “tradition” anxiously guarding the walls.  Yet, such violence readies the mind for a transformation in perception.

            At that point humanity, or some portion of it, has reached the condition described by Baha’u’llah: “The civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men. Thus warneth you He Who is the All-Knowing. If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation. Meditate on this, O people, and be not of them that wander distraught in the wilderness of error. The day is approaching when its flame will devour the cities…”

            Transformation does this resetting of things on a new basis.  It looks to make things new.  Transformation starts, like all true creation, in a new state of mind.  It does not work, first, toward that new state as reformation does, or thinks that it does—a crucial point.  Transformation works toward the future only as a second movement.  I mean that transformation begins not with the present but in the future, not with knowledge, but in vision.  The transformational process starts in a new spiritual condition and works backwards to the existing present, so that it can then reverse direction and organically move toward the future. The process is this double-linking, spiritually and organically, of different worlds.  Transformation can grow into a new form because the new form is spiritually there in vision to grow into as a template of organic growth.  All transformation begins as a new creation, as something novel enough in human experience or cultural experience that it could not have been logically connected beforehand, only afterwards.  That is where Revelation comes in, because it provides not only a new vision of possibility, but of new kinds of possibility, and also infuses the soul with the energies to pursue and attain them, and a plan to get there.    

            Education seems in continual reformation in order to give what good it can from the existing set-up.  But education NEEDS transformation, in order to give what the established system in any form cannot, but which children require in this new day.  The key point is that no amount of reformation brings about a transformation, because what is needed is a vision of new kinds of possibility, not just new possibilities within an existing perceptual order.  The problem is that new kinds of possibilities can not be seen by those within the old mind set.  So they dismiss them as some kind of pipe dream.

            Northrop Frye wrote” “Every breakthrough in education is a breakthrough in vision.” (On Education:13)  But the opposite is also true, namely, every breakthrough in vision should also be a breakthrough in education. But the breakthrough is not accomplished by those working within the system.  Developing a “new education” is the work of those at the margins of the educational establishment, with the spiritual pioneers. Christopher Dawson in his book, The Crisis in Western Education, wrote: “Indeed, every advance in education has been prepared by a preliminary period in which the pioneers work outside the recognized academic circles.” (p.155-156)  I’ll explore this theme in more detail in the next posts.