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How Changing Education Will Change Everything

How Changing Education Will Change Everything

“This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation.”

–Albert Einstein

 

Why Education Should Be About More than Giving Knowledge

In Webster’s dictionary, education means “the action or process of educating or of being educated [schooled/informed].” But in a world where fifty percent of what we learn in the first year of college is outdated and irrelevant by the end of the third year, what good is our schooling?

Even more important, with the escalating global crisis, can we guarantee our children’s education, even through high school? Because the current crisis is global and multi-faceted, the education system must adapt itself and prepare our youth to cope with the current state of the world.

Therefore, our challenge today is not so much to acquire knowledge as it is to acquire the social skills to help ourselves and our children overcome the abundant alienation, suspicion, and mistrust we encounter today. To prepare our children for life in the 21st century, we must first teach them what makes our reality what it is, and what they can do to change it.

This does not mean that disseminating knowledge should stop, but that these lessons should be part of a larger story that teaches students how to cope in the world they are about to enter. They should be able to leave the classroom and use this knowledge to grasp the full picture of reality and the forces that design it, and to understand how they can use it to their benefit.

 

Competitive vs. Collaborative Education: All About Me or All About We?

In nearly every country in the world, education systems are designed to prod students to aim for personal achievements. The higher the student’s grades, the higher his or her social status. In America, as in many countries in the West, this system not only measures how students perform, but how they perform in relation to others. This makes students not only want to excel, but inevitably makes them want their fellow students to fail.

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What Makes a Healthy Economy? Why, Healthy Relationships of Course!

What Makes a Healthy Economy. Why, Healthy Relationships of Course!

“Despite massive wealth creation, happiness has not risen since the 1950s in the US or Britain… No researcher questions these facts. So accelerated economic growth is not a goal for which we should make large sacrifices. In particular, we should not sacrifice the most important source of happiness, which is the quality of human relationships—at home, at work, and in the community.”

–Richard Layard, The Financial Times, March 11, 2009

 

Why Human Nature, and Not the Economy, Should be Regulated

No aspect of our lives better expresses our interconnectedness than the economy. When we are united, the economy is the first to thrive and boosts every aspect of our lives along with it. But when we are separated from each other, it is the first to collapse. Then, everything grinds to a halt along with it.

Centuries ago, when we first began to trade with each other, we began to interconnect, and globalization was born. If we knew then about the desire to receive and the desire to give, the history of humanity would be very different from the bloody march of folly it has turned out to be.

Today, it is impossible to “de-globalize” the world. We must begin to act as one united humanity, in line with nature’s principle of collaboration and self-fulfillment, or life as we know it will end. And the way to unite is to become aware of the two desires and employ both in our negotiations, especially around finances, given today’s monetary crisis.

It is not tougher regulation or buying of “toxic assets” that will help us through the present crisis. The way out is to understand that what needs to be regulated is human nature, not the economy. Our economy is only a projection of our one-track minds: receiving, receiving, and more receiving.

Today, humanity must come to realize that it is in our best interest to consider others in our plans, or else those plans will fail. Therefore, the first step in the financial bailout plan should be to share information and provide facts about the kind of world we live in, which is global and interdependent.

People should know that there are two forces running the world. The first is the desire to receive, which economists call “the profit-oriented economy,” meaning capitalism. The second force is the desire to give, which aims to increase general prosperity and well-being.

 

 

The Lazy Man’s Guide to the Dark Side of the Free Market

Simply put, in today’s financial dealings, everyone must profit or no one will profit. To be exact, the term, “everyone,” does not refer to the parties involved in a contract, but to the entire world.

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Little Known Ways Art Can Transform the World

Little Known Ways Art Can Transform the World

Calling All Trend Setters: You Can Making Giving Fab

In order to achieve the necessary shift in our perception and lifestyle, that can help us solving the global crisis, and build a sustainable future, we have to introduce a new global education system, and change the values prevalent in society. In this change, the media has a primary role.

But as important as media is to our culture, it cannot make the required shift in spirit all by itself. To complete the shift in our thinking, we must engage actors, singers, and other public idols and celebrities in the process. Their productions are displayed not only on television, but also on the Internet, in movie theatres, and on the radio, and are vital to getting the new message across.

It is hard to predict exactly how the arts will develop once we become familiar with the giving half of reality. Because we have never tried it on a large scale, we cannot tell how things will unfold once unity and giving are in vogue. The ideas below will describe possible shifts in cinema and theatre, but the rules that apply to this art form also apply to the more traditional arts such as painting and sculpturing.

 

Who Else Wants Movies that Celebrate Humanity’s Full Potential?

The visual arts are the most powerful means of influence. Up to 90 percent of the information we receive on our surroundings is visual information. For this reason, a shift in our thinking must begin with what we see, even before we change what we hear.

On the surface, the plots of most movies and plays can remain pretty much the same: a fight for a just cause, a love story, or even a tragedy. But behind each plot should be a subtext that conveys a message of unity.

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How Nature’s Example Is Perfect and Following It Will Resolve Every Crisis

How Nature's Example and Following It Will Resolve Every Crisis

Why Today Nature Is the Only Role Model for Humanity

Today humanity is gradually sinking deeper and deeper into a multi-faceted global crisis. It doesn’t seem there is antibody who has true solutions, or ideas how correct the multitude of mistakes.

The surest way to correct mistakes is to learn from those who have done things right. In this case, nature is our role model and a proven success, so she should be our teacher.

To see how we can let the desire to give into our lives, let’s look at how nature does it. We perceive the outside world by using our senses, and we believe that the picture of reality our senses provide is accurate and reliable. But is it?

How often do we walk with a friend, and the friend hears something that we miss? Well, just because we didn’t hear that sound doesn’t mean there was none. All it means is that our senses didn’t pick it up, or that we didn’t pay attention. Or maybe our friend was hallucinating!

In all three possibilities, the objective reality is the same, but our perception of it is not. In other words, we do not know what the actual reality is like, or if it even exists. All we know is what we perceive of it.

So how do we perceive? We use a process best described as “equivalence of form.” Each of our senses responds to a different type of stimulus, but all our senses work in a similar manner. When a ray of light, for instance, penetrates my pupil, the neurons in my retina create a model of the outside image. This model is then encoded and transferred to my brain, which decodes the pulses and reconstructs the image. A similar process occurs when a sound hits our eardrums or when something touches our skin.

In other words, my brain uses my senses to create a model or form equal to the outside object. But if my model is inaccurate, I will never know it and will believe that the actual object or sound is the same as the model I created in my mind.

 

Discover the Best Step to Take to Better Perceive Reality

The “equivalence of form” principle applies not only to our senses, but to our behavior, as well. Children, for example, learn by repeating behavior they see in their surroundings. We call this “imitation.” Eager to learn about the world they were born into, and having no language skills, children use imitation as a means to acquire skills such as sitting and standing, speech, and use of cutlery. When we speak, they watch how we move our lips. This is why parents are advised to speak clearly to children (but not loudly; they can hear better than we). By imitating us, children create the same forms (movements or sounds) as we do, and thus learn about the world they live in.

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The Surefire Way for You to Achieve Balance in Life

Returning to Balance With the Help of Others

Ever Wonder Why Other Species In Nature Are in Balance but Humans Aren’t?

Our reality is built by the interaction of two forces, the desire to receive and the desire to give. When there is an imbalance in between those that forces problems arise.

Our imperiled world is indeed a sad result of man’s lack of recognition of the desire to give. In contrast, the rest of nature is a magnificent display of balance between the two desires. In the diverse ecosystem that is Planet Earth, each creature has its unique role. The system is incomplete if even a single element in it is missing or deficient, be it a mineral, a plant, or an animal.

An eye-opening report submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in October, 2003 by Irene Sanders and Judith McCabe, PhD, clearly demonstrates what happens when we breach nature’s balance. “In 1991, an orca—a killer whale—was seen eating a sea otter. Orcas and otters usually coexist peacefully. So, what happened? Ecologists found that ocean perch and herring were also declining. Orcas don’t eat those fish, but seals and sea lions do. And seals and sea lions are what orcas usually eat, and their population had also declined. So deprived of their seals and sea lions, orcas started turning to the playful sea otters for dinner.

So otters have vanished because the fish, which they never ate in the first place, have vanished. Now, the ripple spreads, otters are no longer there to eat sea urchins, so the sea urchin population has exploded. But sea urchins live off seafloor kelp forests, so they’re killing off the kelp. Kelp has been home to fish that feed seagulls and eagles. Like orcas, seagulls can find other food, but bald eagles can’t and they’re in trouble.

All this began with the decline of ocean perch and herring. Why? Well, Japanese whalers have been killing off the variety of whales that eat the same microscopic organisms that feed pollock [a type of carnivorous fish]. With more fish to eat, pollock flourish. They in turn attack the perch and herring that were food for the seals and sea lions. With the decline in the population of sea lions and seals, the orcas must turn to otters.”

Thus, true health and well being are achieved only when there is harmony and balance among all the parts that make up an organism or a system. Yet, we are so unaware of the other force in life, the giving force, that we cannot achieve this balance, or even positively define what being “healthy” means.

 

What Everybody Ought to Know About Depression & How to Overcome It

The definition of health in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia truly captures our sense of bafflement: “Good health is harder to define than bad health (which can be equated with presence of disease) because it must convey a more positive concept than mere absence of disease.” But because we have no perception of the positive force in life, we cannot define a positive state of existence.

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