Education for Life

Preparing Children to Meet Today's Challenges

J. Donald Walters

• Publisher: Crystal Clarity Publishers
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781565895164
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Here is a constructive alternative to modern education. The author stresses spiritual values and helping children grow toward full maturity learning not only facts, but also innovative principles for better living. This book is the basis for the Living Wisdom schools and the Education for LifeFoundation, which trains teachers, parents and educators. Encouraging parents and educators to see children through their soul qualities, this unique system promises to be a much needed breath of fresh air.

CHAPTER 1

Success Is Achieving
What One REALLY Wants

Have you a growing child? If not, suppose you had one: What would you like him or her to become? A doctor? lawyer? scientist? business executive? or, if a girl who hopes for marriage instead of a career, the wife of one of these?

Most people want their children to have certain basic advantages: prosperity, a good job, the respect of their fellow human beings. Too often, unfortunately, their ambitions stop there. They are centered in materialistic, not in spiritual, values.

Systems of education are directed largely by what parents want for their children. Because most parents want material advantages for them, the modern system of education was developed primarily with this goal in mind. Little attention, if any, has been paid to helping students to become successful human beings.

How far might the present philosophy of education be carried?

I once read about a Mafia capo who was kissed worshipfully on the back of his hand by a poor peasant woman in Sicily—not, it seems, for any favor he had done her, and certainly not in admiration for his character. Why, then, would she demonstrate such adulation? One can only assume it was because his thefts and murders had brought him great material power. And what mattered the sick conscience which must have been his own constant companion? That, apparently, in the woman’s eyes, was his problem. To her, anyway, and probably to many others, the man deserved admiration because he had achieved worldly power.

We’ve all heard of, and perhaps also met, wealthy people of dubious character who were more or less excused their “eccentricities” solely on account of their wealth.

But do riches really constitute success? Surely not, and especially not if, in the process, the admiration they attract is mingled with general dislike. What is it, to succeed at the cost of one’s own happiness and peace of mind, and at the cost of other people’s sincere respect and good will?

Success means much more than money and power. Of what good are millions of dollars, if their attainment deprives one of all that makes life truly worth living? Many people have learned this lesson too late in life to have any time left to improve matters. Why then—they may have wondered belatedly—were they encouraged in the first place so to distort their values?

For, of course, they were encouraged. Everything they ever learned at home, in school, and from their peers persuaded them that success lies in things tangible, not in seemingly insubstantial, more spiritual gains.

It comes down to what people really want from life. Doesn’t the object of this desire lie beyond such tangible acquisitions as money, prestige, and power? They want these for the inner satisfaction, the happiness, they expect to gain through them. It is self-evident, then, that what people really want from life is not the mere symbols of happiness, but happiness itself.

Why, then, don’t our schools teach students not only how to be successful materially, but successful also as people? I’m not saying that dusty facts such as the dates of trade embargoes and ententes may not serve a useful purpose also. But why don’t our schools teach, in addition to those facts, skills more clearly focused on human needs and interests, such as how to get along well with others, and, even more importantly, how to get along with oneself? how to live healthfully? how to concentrate? how to develop one’s latent abilities? how to be a good employee, or a good boss? how to find a suitable mate? how to have a harmonious home life? how to acquire balance in one’s life?

Few mathematics teachers try to show their stu dents how the principles of mathematics might help them in the exercise of everyday logic, and of common sense.

Few English teachers try to instill in their students a respect for grammar as a gateway to clear thinking.

Few science teachers bother to show their students how they might apply what they learn in the classroom to creative problem-solving in daily life.

Facts—give them facts! that is the cry. Cram as much data as possible into their perspiring heads in the hope that, if the student has any common sense left in him by the time he graduates, he’ll know what to do with that mountain of information he’s been forced to ingest during his undergraduate years.

This tendency to confuse knowledge with wisdom becomes a habit for the rest of most people’s lives. Seldom has there been a more fact-gathering society than ours is today. And seldom has simple, down-to-earth wisdom been held in lower esteem. One’s most casual utterances must be backed by a wealth of statistics, and supported by as many quotations as possible from the words and opinions of others, for one’s own utterances to receive even a hearing.

Because our society equates education and wisdom itself with mere knowledge, and because we see this accumulation of knowledge as the be-all and end-all of education, we fail to recognize life for the opportunity, the very adventure, that it is: the opportunity to develop ourselves to our full potential as human beings; and the adventure of discovering hitherto unknown facets of our own selves.

CHAPTER 2

Education Should Be Experiential, Not Merely Theoretical

You’ve heard that familiar, but time-dishonored, rationalization: “The end justifies the means.” Everyone knows that this saying has been offered by “true believers” in multitudes of causes as justification for their violent deeds. A bad tree, however, as Jesus Christ pointed out, produces bad fruit. Evil means lead to evil ends.

And yet—suppose we restate that saying another way, thus: “The end tests the validity of the means”? To this statement, no one could object. For only by the actual outcome of a course of action can we verify whether the action was valid or not.

Human deeds justify, or condemn, themselves by their consequences. A man may campaign for peace, yet parade about so angrily in his “peace demonstrations” that all he accomplishes in the end is the disruption of everybody’s peace, including his own. A nation may see no harm in destroying its forests to get wood, but the consequences of the act will demonstrate that great harm was done to the ecology. In this case, the end—obtaining wood for fireplaces and for the construction of houses—clearly did not justify the means used. On the other side, if Fulton was ridiculed for building a ship made of metal, the fact that it floated once it was launched was all the justification he needed for his invention.

A course of action is justified if its results are consistently good. It is in the consequences of a theory, simi larly, that the theory itself can be justified.

We see here a basic weakness of modern education: It is theoretical, primarily. It places all too little emphasis on practicality. Far from trying to justify any means in terms of their actual results, educators seem to view any concern with the practical effects of a theory as a kind of betrayal of the true, scholarly spirit.

I am reminded of the case of a man of only grade school education, but of wide experience in mining engineering, who, late in his life, decided to get a formal education. After great effort he succeeded in persuading the authorities of a university to accept him on the strength of his years of practical experience in the field. A few months later, however, he dropped his studies.

“What have you done?” demanded the dean. “It was so important to you to get an education, and we, too, went to great lengths to get you admitted.”

“An education!” the man snorted. “There isn’t one of these pedagogues who isn’t teaching what I myself learned better in the field. Many of them learned everything they know from me! What can they teach me?”

It is no accident, surely, that many of the world’s greatest men and women—scientists, thinkers, teachers, molders of public opinion—either never finished their formal education or did poorly in school. Einstein’s teachers marked him for a failure in life. Edison could only manage three months of formal schooling, at the end of which his teacher sent him home with a note saying he was “unteachable”—in fact, “addled.” Goethe found little worth assimilating during his formal schooling. In fact, he later claimed not to have found a single university course that could hold his interest.

What is the difference between great human beings and the pedagogues who explain their lives and discoveries to others? It is this, quite simply: True greatness focuses on reality, but the explainers get their knowledge and belief systems from books about reality. The way-showers of humanity have specific ends in mind—the truth about something, usually—and are committed to achieving those ends by the means most practical for attaining them. They are impatient with attitudes that seem to imply that the means are an end in themselves; that method is more important than results, and that no conclusion is ever final and should always, therefore, be considered tentative. For the pedagogue, on the other hand, theories hold such a fascination that the very intricacy of reasoning in their formulation often replaces the need for arriving at any firm conclusion.

However full a student’s head is crammed with book learning, his understanding of things, and of life in general, after twelve or sixteen years of education, is completely unrelated to actual experience. Still less is it the product of self-understanding.

Were we, on the other hand, to define education primarily in terms of what life has to teach us, we would soon find reality directing our theories, instead of theories molding our perceptions. But students are seduced into championing hare-brained, and even dangerous, beliefs, all because their teachers are too “objective” to mind if a theory offends against normal hu man sensibilities and the most rudimentary common sense, as long as it is presented in an attractive wrapping of intellectual reasoning.

Take the teachings of Jean Paul Sartre on the subject of meaninglessness. Sartre was a nihilist. Because he developed his theories brilliantly, they are offered at universities as standard intellectual fare. “The ego is flattered,” Paramhansa Yogananda wrote, “that it can grasp such complexity.”

A recent survey of professors found that the majority preferred wordy, intellectually intricate and abstruse articles on subjects in their own fields over articles that made the same points, but in a style that was simple and easy to read.

The people conducting the survey then took articles that had been written simply and clearly, and restated them in convoluted terms, replacing short words with long ones wherever possible, and clear statements with others that were muddy or contrived. They offered these altered articles to the same professors, along with the original versions, and asked for a comparative evaluation. Most of those learned pedagogues, never guessing that they were in essence reading the same article to which not a thought had been added, and from which none had been deleted, declared they preferred the more complex version. When asked why, they replied that the more intellectual-sounding version showed better research, deeper thought, and greater insight.

It can be astonishing, the extent to which theories learned during the formative years can direct a person’s later perceptions of reality. Any error learned early distorts the very way one reasons. False premises lead to false conclusions no matter how clever the line of reasoning. Theories imposed on reality are allowed to pose as substitutes for the reality itself.

We see this tendency in psychologists who insist, in defiance of their own direct experience, that the mind of a newborn baby is a blank slate on which environment will write the impressions that will form his personality. Nothing in objective reality supports this theory. Parents know how very different, from birth, each child is from all the others. Never mind. Theory says it should be so: Therefore, it is so.

We see the same tendency in Freud, who adopted virtually as his mission the attempt to explain all human motivation in terms of the sex drive. (I can imagine physicists trying to fit Freud’s theory to their attempts to discover the laws inherent in quantum mechanics!)

Educated people, far more so than those who have been raised in the “school of hard knocks”—that is to say, of common sense—are notoriously prone to prefer theory over reality.

For education to prepare children for meeting life realistically, it should encourage them to learn from life itself, and to view with skepticism a body of fixed knowledge that has been passed on unquestioned from one generation to the next.

Education must above all be experiential, and not merely theoretical. The student should be taught, among other things, to observe the outcome of any course of action, and not to depend blindly on the claims of others as to what that outcome is supposed to be, and therefore will be.

In this simple emphasis on direct experience, not only as regards the investigations of science, but even more so as it applies to the humanities, lie the seeds of a new and revolutionary system of education that I have named here Education for Life.

CHAPTER 3

Reason Must Be Balanced by Feeling

Galileo one day observed the swinging of the great candelabra in the cathedral of Pisa. His reflections on that movement led to his discovery of the law of pendular motion.

Newton one day observed the fall of an apple. It was this observation (according to Voltaire) that led to Newton’s discovery of the law of gravity.

All science is discovery. And the glory of the scientific method is that, shunning a priori assumptions, it insists on observing and learning from things as they are. The true scientist tries never to impose his expectations on objective reality.

That everyone has expectations, and that these expectations do sometimes impose themselves, unsuspected, on even the work of scientists, should go without saying. Einstein and Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, both great physicists, were in disagreement on some obscure point of science. Einstein settled the matter by declaring that it was, after all, “only a matter of taste.”

Scientists are human. We should not be dismayed if sometimes we even find them out there in the pit of competition, slugging away with the best.

What is dismaying is the widespread assumption that, if one can only train oneself to adopt a completely scientific outlook, he will rise altogether above human feeling, and that, in his cold objectivity, he will achieve superior understanding—as though, in that unfeeling state, he could become some kind of intellectual superman. According to this view, human nature is an obstacle, not an aid, to understanding.

It is no accident that so many fictional glimpses into the future portray a world stripped of such “superficial nonsense” as beauty, kindness, happiness, and—probably the first of all to go—humor. Science fiction, a prime example of this genre of literature, can be depressingly sterile. The earth hundreds of years from now is envisioned as a place without trees (at least, none are mentioned), without grass and streams and singing birds; a place where science has finally collared Nature and ...