Summary: Towards the end that education turns around its present tendency to anesthetize and alienate students from their own lives and their own communities, I'm sharing the final passage of a recent article by Svi Shapiro for Tikkun Magazine. His arguments, written from the perspective of a Jewish spiritual tradition, make clear to me that significant contributions are possible and needed from all moral/spiritual communities. (Total article,
Shapiro, Svi, Education and Moral Values: Seeking a New Bottom Line, Tikkun (3/3/2005),
is accessible here)
Shapiro counsels critical engagement and deep reform. His reforms would place students in the middle of making a caring and just world. His arguments are well worth your time. I offer his concluding section below (trusting that you will be enticed to read the full paper in order to see how he got there). I have emboldened passages for emphasis.
Between Fundamentalisms
Our world is now stretched between the poles of two fundamentalisms. The “religion” of the untrammeled free-market is rapidly turning every dimension of our lives, needs, desires, and purposes into matters of money and materialism—a world in which every aspect of our being appears as nothing but an entry on a profit and loss sheet. In response to this we witness the growth of intolerant and authoritarian faiths that offer a defense of spiritual and moral values but do so in ways that often demean and diminish non-believers and see the world through the lens of a dogmatic certainty. Neither path offers the means to address the deepening moral crisis in ways that can bring about a more loving, compassionate, and meaningful human existence.
It is in this context—of great danger yet still of extraordinary human possibility—that we must examine what it means to educate our children for the twenty-first century. We need to remind ourselves again of the distinction between schooling and education. Schooling can be made fairer and less subject to the advantages and disadvantages of race, social class, gender, immigrant status, and so on. We can distribute resources more fairly, be less culturally biased in our teaching and testing, and certainly open up more opportunities for those who have been disadvantaged to find new possibilities in their lives. Make no mistake: all of this would be a good thing for both individuals and for our society as a whole, but none of this, in itself, would bring us much closer to what it might mean to educate for the challenges of our new century.
To educate our students for tomorrow’s challenges we need something far more transformative in our thinking. We must reconceive education as a field that is not just about the learning of skills, the capacity to solve problems, or the ingesting of information. We need to think of the education we give our children as a process that addresses mind, heart, and spirit. In other words, as a process that forms us as mature individuals and as people who live in relationship with others. Do we really need more kids who know how to play the grading and testing games that schools now encourage? Do we really doubt that what we need instead are human beings who have the capacity to meet the extraordinary challenges and demands that are before us as a civilization?
We know something about the education that this transformative vision will entail. We recognize that it must engage students in terms of the totality of their beings, not in the shrunken and limited ways that our schools now demand. It means to take seriously the quest for citizens who can discern truth (or at least what is truer) from the distortions and deceit that surround us in our culture—students, in other words, who can think critically and can problematize the knowledge and meanings they are presented with in their everyday world. It means to take very seriously the goal of an education concerned with the ethical quality of our lives and our society, central to which is the quest for a global culture that ensures the dignity and well-being of each and every person. And, finally, it means an education that can affirm the spiritual dimension of our existence—one that awakens in each person the sense of beauty, wonder, and preciousness of all life on our planet and the interdependence that makes continuation of this life possible.
The task before us and our children, to transform the world of so much unnecessary suffering, hurt, indignity, and injustice is too great for any one person to address. It is clearly a task that must employ the minds and bodies of many of us if change is to come. We must teach the value of participation in the task of tikkun olam, the repair and healing of our world, without either succumbing the sense of futility that may come from minimizing what we can do or exaggerating the contributions that one individual may make. The first leads to cynicism and the second to hubris. More realistically, in our work with young people, we may emphasize the teaching of Rabbi Tarfon who asserted that “it is not your duty to complete the work, but neither are you excused from participating in it.” We must teach the young that, while we should have a realistic appreciation of the limits of what may be possible, the only justifiable purpose of education in our time is that of bettering the world we have all been given. All the rest is mere commentary.
Svi Shapiro teaches in the Program on Education and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This article is excerpted from Education Without Meaning, Lives Without Purpose: Schools and Kids in the Age of Educational Reform to be published in 2005. © 2005 Lawrence Erlbaum. All rights reserved.
(Via Tikkun Magazine.)
