Deep Cultural Transformation: Education

In the last few blogs I talked a little bit about the need for sacred activism in a 2012 context and how that practice might lend itself to many areas of life including education, health care, technology, and environmental development. In terms of education, the chaos currently pervading our institutions all the way from K-12 to the university level is well known and documented.

No amount of top down “programs”and testing approaches are going to provide some sort of quick fix for this. As in health care and other areas, a deep cultural transformation is needed. A precursor to this is a forthright admission of failure and recognition that the way we are doing things now is unbalanced and not a path that resonates with the spirit of New Earth. And after this, there is process of discovery that needs to take place to identify more specifically what needs to change.

In this context, I ran across an excellent article called Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education written by Peter Gray, a Research Professor of Psychology at Boston College, published in his blog on the Psychology Today web site. It’s a great list of things that have not worked in our educational system. Here are the main points:

1. Denial of liberty on the basis of age.
2. Fostering of shame, on the one hand, and hubris, on the other.
3. Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance.
4. Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.
5. Linking of learning with fear, loathing, and drudgery.
6. Inhibition of critical thinking.
7. Reduction in diversity of skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking.