The Five Pillars of Education: Transcript

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Quote: “Civilization is always a race between education and catastrophe.”

H.G. Wells

            I’m very happy to be able to discuss this with you. I thought I’d start with a couple of little stories about why I’ve been so frustrated about this topic in the past. About 10 or 15 years ago when I was still teaching at Berkeley I got a call from KQED, which is a very liberal station– I forget whether this was radio or television–and they said “Would you be interested in talking to us about the about University of California and education?” I said, “Oh boy would I! Let’s get into this!” Well, they wanted me to talk about some minor detail regarding the organization of the university, while. I was interested in a much broader topic because I had discovered that we were embedded in a really serious problem — you know what I was saying before about a race between education and catastrophe? And how education wasn’t upholding its part of the race, it wasn’t winning.  So I stepped back a little bit and said  “I would like to look at the whole policy of the University itself — how does it relate to the people of California?” They said “Um, ok.” Then I said “Actually I would like to talk about the culture that we are embedded in and the impact of the mass media.” And they said “Ohhh.” I said, “You know what I’d REALLY like to talk about is Western Civilization.” (Laughter) They said, “We can’t use you.”  And I realized, that when I went 25% bigger they got 25% less interested until, you know, I reached infinity and they reached zero. So this I think is emblematic of the fact that we’ve created a culture, a thought-environment, where we get absorbed in details and we can’t step back and look at the big picture.

Another example of that sheds a different kind of light:  I was on a committee in the university hierarchy to discuss courses, programs, things like that, and  I said, “Hey I have a great idea, folks! Why don’t we have a public forum on what is the purpose of education?” Well, they turned out the lights, tip-toed out of the room, and closed the door. So, for 30 years — this is not an exaggeration; I do a lot of exaggerating but this is not one of them.  Almost everything I say is an exaggeration (that’s an exaggeration).  For thirty years everywhere I went in the university to try to create such a forum, I was met with blank stares. It was worse than “No, thank you.” It was like, nobody said anything. “Ok, pretend we didn’t hear that.”  I think the reason that my colleagues, who are good honest people, could not come to grips with this question is that unconsciously they knew they had lost the purpose of education.  And just look: you now have the University of North Dakota training people to carry out drone attacks; you have the School of the Americas, recently renamed WHINSEC, in Fort Benning, Georgia teaching torture, I think we have reached the absolute pit. This is the bottom. Education could not be more disoriented.

The purpose of education is to enhance life, not to destroy it. However we have found it convenient and strategic to use the power of education to be against life and against love, where you’re not interested in the well being of others. On the contrary.

So, I’m going to talk about these five pillars and what I’m going to do is to start each one with a quote or a story.  I’m not always going to be able to come down to a practical way of introducing this pillar into our educational system, so that’s where I’d like to have a mutual conversation with you.

 

The first pillar.

The first story is about a student of mine whose name was Mallory Moser.  Brilliant young woman, she took all my courses, and actually contributed a collage to the Metta Center which is now hanging in our office and you may have seen it as the masthead of our website. Mallory came from a very prestigious high school called Marin Academy. She had been an absolutely spectacular soccer star in Marin Academy and she kind of wasn’t the type, you know, physical type, or the mental type as it seemed to me.  So I said to her one time, “Mallory, why were you so big into soccer?” And she said, “At Marin Academy, you were either into sports or you did hard drugs. I didn’t want to do hard drugs, I went into sports.”  I was a bit shocked, as you may imagine, so we talked about that for a while.  These are privileged young people with everything going for them, and they’re falling off the edge of society.  Why?  She said, “Well, it was very simple. All they did was teach us head, head, head: packing stuff into our head until we felt like we were going to burst.  It was always, you had to have more stuff in your head to compete with the next person.  So you had to do something to contact another dimension of your being.”

You can imagine my shock when I came across this very powerful quote from Swami Vivekananda. You may know who he is: He was the foremost disciple of Sri Ramakrishna in Bengal in the 19th century. He came to this country the same year that Mahatma Gandhi went down to South Africa. You know, as though India sent out two emissaries in two directions with very similar messages. He came to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 where he was a spectacular success, spent about 10 years on and off in the States, and at one point he said: ”The trouble with you people in the West is that you educate for the head only. You do not do anything about the heart. That is only going to make you ten times more greedy —and it will be the death of you.”

That is a very powerful statement and I think it is exactly what we are experiencing right now.  Greed has gone out of control. Economies are imploding and we do not have the energy, the confidence, the wisdom to tackle the biggest problems on the planet. I think he spotted it. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw that quote and remembered Mallory. And this is how I come up with the first pillar, which is probably the most important one, which is:

For education to be meaningful, it has to educate the whole person.

So, what does a whole person consist of? There are different formulas for this which are useful, but one simple one is, we are mind, body, and spirit.

 

Second pillar:

I’ll begin with a story that’s in my book, Search for a Non-Violent Future. When I was teaching nonviolence at Berkeley, Mubarak Awad, a very good friend of mine who had been in the first intifada in Palestine had been deported by Israel in, I think ‘98, (even though I wrote to the Israeli ambassador and asked please not to do that. For some reason he disregarded my advice). Mubarak told us some wonderful stories about the first uprising, first intifada, which was more nonviolent than the second one.  And they noticed something. He’s a psychologist and he noticed that all the participants, all the Palestinian youth, the shabaab, who are usually the source of the violence. You know the young males 18 to 25. They had had serious drug problems and other serious substance abuse problems, and those problems stopped when they joined the intifada.  Just contrast the “War on Drugs” and what a total failure it is.

The second pillar is that

We have to teach for the hierarchy of needs, and not just for the lowest needs, which are the material fulfillment of food, clothing, shelter and maybe some health care.” What are those needs? Well there’s Maslow’s hierarchy you are probably familiar with. And I had a colleague who is a recovering biology professor; she went into Peace Studies and she decided to study human nature instead of burying herself in details and quickly rendered herself unfit for service at the University of San Diego. But she came up with this model that our three needs are for autonomy, bonding and meaning. There is an interesting tension between autonomy and bonding which I’m going to talk about again in a little bit, that we need to be with one another but we need to be a Self, which is independent. Autonomy, bonding, and meaning.

So, what happened to these youth in the West Bank was the minute that they had something meaningful to do, something that would engage their agency, they’d drop these habits. You know, these are seriously addictive habits, and I’ve actually had people in the peace movement tell me that going down to Central America, facing violence every day, coming back to the States…WHEW (with a sense of relief). And you find yourself sitting in Marin County sipping lattes, “What do you want to do with your life now?” “I want to go back” because that experience was addictive; literally addictive. Now I want to point out something startling about these higher needs — the need for meaning, the need for bonding, the need for respect and things like that. In our non-violence work we quickly discovered that when you open yourself up to these higher needs they have a remarkable characteristic: they are not finite resources, they are not exhaustible. The need for petroleum ties us to diminishing resources that gets us into not just the destruction of the planet in the physical, ecological sense but, in the social sense, it locks us into cycles of competition and violence. Most of the really horrific wars that are going on right now are basically about a struggle for a limited finite resource Basically, it comes from our image of ourselves as needing physical things to be gratified, to be fulfilled. But the minute you look at something like love or respect, you discover that not only are these things not exhaustible, some of them actually grow with use. So, it’s like a perpetual motion machine, kind of. You know, when I respect all of you which, as it happens, I do, I don’t diminish my own respect, I don’t lose respect, I gain in self respect (because we are all one, after all). Similarly, you know, as St. Teresa said, amor saca amor, when you love it draws love to you and you grow in love. You keep pushing to see how far things can be pushed and you find that you never reach the end. So there’s a tremendous relief from the sense of need, the paradigm of scarcity, and the competition and the violence that comes along with that.

Here I do have one experiment I can share with you. While I was teaching at Berkeley they introduced the freshman seminars and the thing about a freshman seminar is that you can teach it on any subject. So I asked myself “What do these freshman and sophomore kids, coming into Berkeley, what do they need more than anything, that the University would not give them? And so I devised a course called “Great Writing on the Meaning of Life.” I went into my chairman in the Classics department and said, “Don, I’m going to teach this course, I will involve a certain amount of Plato…” He knew me very well by that time and he said “Michael, Michael go away. Don’t tell me what you are going to do.  Just go and do it. Okay?” And that was one of the most successful courses I ever taught. It went on for 15 years.  My goal was not to tell the students what I thought the purpose of life was, though inevitably that did happen at some point in the semester. But rather, it was simply to give them permission to think about it because in this world that’s sucked up into these details, they never have permission to think about it. So, we read people who had pondered this subject deeply. We discussed together, they brought in their own experiences, they did very creative projects. One student came in — this was one that stuck in my mind most — and for her final project made a batch of cookies.  Don’t worry, it was an allegory: the dough stands for this, the sugar stands for that, we all have to work together to create…they were very good cookies. I discovered one interesting thing that may be relevant for you also, that when I first taught it as a freshman seminar, it didn’t work all that well. But when they added sophomore seminars it was much more successful. Because I think the freshman were too tentative about “What are we doing here, I have to find out where I’m going to live, etc.: I can’t afford to do anything off the margins.”

 

The third pillar.

Stephanie and I went down to Birmingham, AL, recently and spent two-and-a-half days with a man who had spent 23 years of his life in very close association with Gandhiji, Narayan Desai, whose father was Gandhi’s secretary. One of Gandhi’s major efforts in his constructive program was called Nai Talim which means “New Education.” So they started a school, they just found a building and invited the village kids — there’s always a terrific need for this in India— and they brought these kids in, there were 60 kids in the school. Instead of telling them what the subjects were going to be, he said, we discovered very soon that we had to end early in the afternoon because of those 60 kids, something like 45 of them had night blindness. You had to stop the school while there was still broad daylight for them to get back to the village because come sunset they couldn’t see a thing.   They discovered it took one cup of milk per day to cure those kids of night blindness.

So my third pillar is, Whatever we teach and however we teach it, it has to be grounded in reality. It has to be grounded first in concrete nutritional realities but then open itself up to deeper realities. And in this developing new education, or Nai Talim, one of the things Gandhi said was “If you do not till the soil you will forget who you are.” You will forget who you are.  Every one of us has to be involved in some way with what he called “bread labor, “ and the best way to do that was to have you tilling the earth and growing things that you yourself eat. An edible schoolyard is a very concrete way of instantiating this principle.

I’d add a couple of other things that if…there are two things that we should try to avoid. One is that we should avoid abstraction for its own sake. Intellectualization…what is that term that you used about me all the time? Conceptualization for its own sake. Because that leads to people sitting behind very clever machines and sending drones half way around the world to kill people that they don’t even see. I remember before there were drones there was the RAND Corporation during the nuclear era and they would sit around coldly, dispassionately calculating how many millions people would die if we used this type of approach and how many hundreds of millions would die if we used that type approach; utterly disconnected with reality. Somehow we must educate people so that that cannot happen to them.

Maybe I can share a quick story with you here in connection to what we were saying about caring as a form of love. When I was in grade school in New York…you know children can be incredibly uncaring. They have compassion, compassion is within them, but they can be incredibly uncaring.  Well, there was a girl in my class who was developmentally disabled. And I probably wouldn’t have done this on my own but you know as St. Augustine said “get people together in packs and all these barriers fall.” You know at home we have these deer that graze around on our meadow and we noticed that if one dog walks up the path the deer don’t pay any attention, but if two dogs come…SHEW…they’re gone. You know, pack psychology. So, I got together with my friends and we teased this girl, we wrote a note that was disrespectful to her. The teacher intercepted that note and I had never seen her so angry, nor did I ever see her so angry again. It was a big shock that awakened me to the caring: through her care for that girl I suddenly realized, in a very shocking way, what I had been doing. I was never capable of doing that again. So that’s one “DON’T”, we shouldn’t develop: we shouldn’t allow, abstraction to go on for its own sake.

The other “DON’T” is that we should not allow intellectual development to separate us, to create a caste, which unfortunately is very, very common in today’s educational system where immediately we have to be subject to testing they have to be spread out on a spectrum, who won, who’s in the middle and so on.  For this reason Gandhi, for example, was constantly stressing the non-development of the intellectual life of the peasants in the villages. That they had the same intellectual capacity as all of us do. But because they have to follow the bullock all day long, seven days a week in order to make ends meet, their intellect was never developed.  Then you had these Brahmins who felt almost infinitely superior to them. So that is another thing we have to avoid in getting students grounded in reality: superiority.

 

Fourth pillar

I’m going to start with a quote from one of my favorite philosophers, probably my second favorite philosopher from the ancient world, who is Epictetus. He was a Greek philosopher functioning in Rome. He had been a slave, in fact the name means “possession”, “object”. One of the very succinct, very powerful things Epictetus said was “The beginning of all ignorance is the failure to connect particulars with their underlying principles.” Now you might remember Goethe’s Faust who is, you know, suffering from a sense of emptiness and is willing to sell his soul to the Devil in order to discover something which I translate as “the seeds and dynamic principles of reality and stop this being a shopkeeper with words”.

Today this failure, as we can see, has reached very acute levels, leading many  to a kind of death by details. You know, anytime you read about an act of violence, it will tell you the caliber of the weapon, where the bullets were ordered, what color hair the shooter had — you will be totally, totally discouraged from ever asking yourself, “What is violence? Why is it increasing? And what can we do about it?” And of course having taught at Berkeley, studied or taught, for close to half a century, I’ve watched this proliferation of subjects such that now education is now divided up into smaller and smaller silos and we are losing touch with the basic principles of what education is for. Then when troublemakers like me come around and say “What is the purpose of education?” we are completely shut out.

One way that I’ve found handy to get this across is, I would start a course by saying “We have different capacities to learn” and knowledge is one, and this whole institution has been kind of oriented around that. But there’s a deeper kind of knowing which we might call understanding. And then there is a deeper kind of knowing still which we might call wisdom. Knowledge is where you accumulate facts, you are operating on the level of information. Understanding is where you begin to detect patterns among these facts. And you can sort them out. You can say “Oh, this was an act of violence, we should be thinking about it in those terms.” And, wisdom finally is where you begin to grasp the relevance of those patterns. You can relate to them personally: What does this mean to me? How shall I use it?  Or you can ask, will this injure life?  So, in other words, information is the lowest forms of knowledge.  Notice that we have very proudly entered the “Information Age” and people don’t recognize the irony that’s inherent there.

So the fourth pillar is: Cultivate deeper modes of knowing. This is not unlike saying “Teach to the whole person” because, you know, I have the capacity to memorize facts, and I have the capacity to understand how they fit together, and the capacity to judge what the meaning of it all is. Now I’m not saying that we should not teach facts, but we should teach them in such a way that students, can grasp underlying patterns among them and ask themselves, how does this relate to my challenge as a human being that has to live right now on this planet?  I’ve noticed that we tend to polarize so much that when you talk about understanding or wisdom, people think you mean we are not going to teach facts anymore and students will be adrift in the world (without?) knowing these facts.  But what I’m saying is that we should use facts as grist for understanding and, ultimately, for wisdom.

 

The 5th column (yes an unintentional pun).

There is a story amongst the ba-mBbuti pygmies, they’re still called that I think, in the Congo about a time when the tribe migrating from one part of their region to another, and a child was accidently left behind. It was a girl child; she grew up, she survived alright in the jungle, she was an enfant sauvage; she lived on her own in the forest.  Which is ok, except that she turned into a demoness.  If anybody went near her, she would seize that person and destroy that person in some way.  She would — I don’t remember, but it was pretty nasty: she became a cannibal or something like that. It’s a not untypical boogeyman story, ‘you do not want to come across this person in a dark forest’.

But there’s a difference.  I taught mythology for many years and I always remember what Schopenhauer said, that a myth is something that never happened but is always true.  I think this story is about alienation. When someone is cut off from the community, either because the community has scapegoated them, or for some other reason, they can survive but they become a terrific danger to themselves and everybody else. The one thing of some significance that the media will share with you these psychopathic killers that is not totally trivial, not completely irrelevant, is they were a “loner;” just like this unfortunate abandoned girl.

There’s another angle I’d like to share with you.  Perhaps you saw Amy Goodman’s recent piece on gun control; it was entitled “U.S. gun control laws: guilty by reason of insanity.” So, I was asking myself why this insanity?  We have reached a point where there are more guns than people in the United States, and with every weapon that’s added to the pool we become less secure. It almost a mathematical proportion. So why are we doing this to ourselves?  The only reason that I could think of is that each person when he or she (though it’s almost always he) decides “I’m going to get a gun”, he is thinking of himself as completely isolated from the whole. So if I have a gun, I’ll be safer. Which actually is wrong. if you have a gun you’re five times more likely to shoot someone in your family than to shoot an intruder, and 20 times more likely to have that gun stolen than either of the above. The wrongness of this on the statistical level notwithstanding, the person is thinking, I as an absolutely isolated fragment, will be enhanced, will add to my security with this weapon.  The mistake there is in that first sentence: You are not an isolated fragment, that’s where the logic of this goes so incredibly wrong.

So the 5th pillar is that if a person is to emerge from our institutions or contact with us truly educated, he or she will need a grasp of the mystery of unity in diversity. “We are apart but we are also one,” as in the marvelous quote from Martin Luther King, which I like so very much, where he said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” So far from imagining a world as a place of competition, which through the misuse of Darwin we have done, we have to realize that all this separateness, this apparent separateness that we see, is really diversity. And as the Koran says, “I made you separate people and tribes so that you could discover one another.” Some how we need our diversity to discover our unity. They things are actually complementary: diversity is more or less on the surface of life, and should be: unity resides on the heart level, which is why Gandhi taught that we need to discover “heart unity” among all our surface differences.  It was another key element of Constructive Programme.

I did some serious thinking about what’s wrong with military camaraderie. The trouble with it is that in that kind of group, or community the individual is expected to abolish him- or herself for the collective; whereas if Martin Luther King is correct (as of course it is), you can only really contribute to the group by being yourself in the deepest sense. I went through a taste of this when I became a conscientious objector: “What?  You don’t want to serve society?  “In order for me to add to society,” I said to my draft board (they totally didn’t get it but I said it anyway), “I have to possess myself. I have to be who I am. The most important part of me is not, you know, my rather small body, but my conscience. I can do you much greater service by recognizing something about the unity of life than I can by pretending I haven’t seen that for your strategic purposes.

When we were beginning Peace Studies at Berkeley, I, on a hunch, I invited a colleague of mine who was an engineer to come in and give a lecture. And for me one of the most, the biggest, breakthroughs almost of my whole intellectual career.  At first he put a lot of formulas on the board, which got my students totally terrified, but then he got to the point: why is it that biology and physics, which started out almost simultaneously, reached a point where physics has become one of the greatest intellectual achievements of humankind: beyond even Einstein we have quantum theory and string theory, incredible feats of human accomplishment on the intellectual level, while biology as a theoretical science is just sort of limping along.  ”Can we look at molecules now?” They have no theory of life at all.  (I say this with all due respect to my Dad who was a biology teacher).   My colleague asked us, “What is the reason for this?” He explained that in physics we can study the universe in a model of uniformity.  Every single proton in the universe, and there’s a lot of them out there! every single proton is exactly like every other one (except for their velocity and position which anyways we cannot talk about thanks to Heisenberg). But in biology, diversity is the essence. No individual on this planet is exactly like any other, if there were, we would freak out. You know in some tribes they would kill you if you were a twin; if you are an identical twin.  In other words, we do not have the conceptual framework to understand unity in diversity. So that is why physics has leapt ahead while biology is almost trying to still get off the starting block.

It’s not entirely clear how, practically, to go about this. But I do feel very, very strongly that this is a need of our new paradigm education: to see to it that students have a grasp of the mystery of how unity and diversity are complementary. I know that one thing Gandhi suggested was, in his new educational system every student would be exposed to a reverential study of all the world’s religions: a reverential study. Not just the way we used to teach it in Religious Studies (and I know, I chaired the program at Berkeley until my colleagues realized where I was coming from): “Oh look at these interesting phenomena. How quaint!” But more “What were our fellow human beings trying to get at with these models and these practices?” That in itself involves a kind of unity in diversity because you see the unity of aspiration throughout the human family expressed so very differently in different cultures.

Now to come close to the end with somebody that I started with, Swami Vivekananda.  When he visited this country he went to Harvard where he was hosted by a Classics professor at Harvard (which partly I am very proud of). But this Classics professor, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Swamiji, said,”Swamiji, the trouble, there is so much violence in the world because of these different religions.  What we need is one religion for all of humanity”, and Swami Vivekananda said (I paraphrase), “Yuck, that is the worst idea I ever heard of. What we really need is one religion for every individual on the planet.”  Every single person has his or her initially unique way of approaching the Real. As you get closer to the Real, of course, that uniqueness is merged into unity — the unity of the Real itself; but you will never get there if you try to bypass the individuality.

I wanted to close with just a word about, well two things really, I want to characterize, succinctly, what is wrong with the old story and how the new story has to be different and then talk, again just briefly, about the regenerative capacity of education when it is done right.

I think that in the old story, or the old paradigm, basically human beings are treated as a means to an end.  ‘We want you to grow up to be big, good citizens, to function successfully in a corporation, so that you can make money for the state of California’ or whatever.   If you go even to that highly prestigious campus, that great research university next door [UC, Berkeley], they will tell you, implicitly or explicitly, this is what we are educating you for.  Every time an administrator goes to argue with the state or the general public about why you should give us back our budget,  this is the reason, and often the sole reason given: because we make money for the state of California. That’s the Old Story.

The New Story comes from philosophers like Kant and Mahatma Gandhi who said that human beings should never be a means to an end. There was another Greek philosopher, my 3rd favorite, who said Anthropos ton mentron pantōn — “The human being, “man,” is the measure of all things; (and he goes on) of things that exist that they exist, of things that do not exist that they do not exist.”  So the new paradigm is going to have to be Kantian in that the student who comes in has to be regarded as a priceless resource to be developed, never as a means to an end.

We have at the Metta Center developed a project called “Roadmap” that you can see on our website. It is becoming very successful.  In it we’ve divided the problems of the world into six wedges and top dead center is what we call New Story Creation, and research, education, and the media are the three modes of developing and propagating the new story.

So we should close with a brief look at the power of education when it’s done right. Stephanie and I both had experiences recently of going into prisons and doing teaching there. In the program that I was part of,  in San Quentin, I was told that the rate of recidivism of men in that program — men serving 16 years to life, so they had killed one or more people — the rate of their recommitting crimes after they got out of prison was 2%. The national average is 76%. The saving of 74% recidivism, just because someone gave them the benefit of assuming that they have the capacity to learn.   It was a tremendously re-humanizing thing for them. To take this to an extreme degree, I don’t know if any of you have seen the film “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana.”  In India they have brought meditation into prisons (it’s been duplicated here in this country, too), and again it’s had a tremendous restorative effect on the prisoners.  And after all is said and done, meditation was called in ancient India, brahmavidya, which means ‘the supreme education’.  Why?  Because if you think about it, meditation fulfills all our five ‘pillars’ to an outstanding degree.  We may not be able to teach meditation on a large scale in our public institutions (though teachers are experimenting with just that, more and more successfully), but we can certainly learn from it and redesign an education from the ground up to educate the whole person with a sense of meaning and purpose.