Cosmos Café [4/30] - Free Progress Education

Dear all, first of all thank you, especially to Doug, for having given me the opportunity to express the ideas concerning the FPE paradigm. It is always inspiring to hear what others have to say about it. Reading through the discussion on the forum I feel to add some points.

I can’t give precise indications but my experience is that it is much further than what we expect and believe. Because our rationalizing mind projects fears and has always that tendency to make negative predictions into a future it has no clues about. If someone is not famous and a personality that the media talk about in most of the cases the system simply ignores us if we step out of it. Of course, sometimes it is not simple as that… but the fear factor makes everything appear so bleak. It is my experience that stepping out of fear is the first and most powerful inner action for stepping out of the system.

Yes, but they are also very skilled in projecting tons of fears on those who are willing to make the change and are not at the top.

Well, I said that it could end into a catastrophe but also underlined that we can avoid it. If there is change, first and foremost IN US, then I’m optimistic.

I hope that I made my point clear on that in the discussion.

You nailed it! That is one of my recurrent themes. Technology is great, it can help and will continue to have a role. But that alone won’t change the system. They have told us that internet and computers would lead to a revolution in education. Did it? All that hype about digitization, AI, quantum computers or sending humans to Mars as a key factor for saving the world is a symptom of our refusal to recognize that if there won’t be a change of mindset and in our belief system, there can’t be any external change. At least not a positive one. Moreover, and that is the reason for the insistence of the “soul-factor” in a FPE, is that we need also a change of the environment, the surrounding context in which we live, work, and learn so that that change is allowed to happen. If that “Something” in us is not allowed to step forward everything will remain a quantitative incremental change, never a qualitative paradigmatic one.

Fear dominates the world (even more than money). In many cases it does unconsciously and reactively (due to what I like to call our “reptile brain”). It confirms the experience many had in Germany as well. Most of the projects that failed in opening a new school did not fail because of a lack of money and even not so much because of authorities “biting back” (even though such cases exist, especially in some regions like in Bavaria). In almost all cases I heard of that was due to internal conflicts among the founding members or because of fears of some form or another. Those who instead succeeded had all two common traits. First they didn’t do it only for themselves or their children, but also for the community as a whole. Secondly they considered it an attempt to seed something in people’s mind and consciousness that could not be deleted by potential failure, they considered the attempt to do something also effective for a change, however it might end. Most of what we do depends much more from our fears, expectations and unaware assumptions than from the external conditions. The dynamics of founding new schools is no exception. As to the “good jobs”, I taught in a private school where students are prepared for the final state examination only two years before and there is no evidence that this has led them to “bad jobs”.

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You brightend things for me, with your reply re: the corporate clock that eats our poor old analogy time for breakfast lunch and dinner…AND knowing you’re writing poetry ! coincidentally the sun came out, finally! Been grey and chilly/windy most every day and …
Just thank you.

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I watched the video of the cafe (thanks @Douggins for all that you do on the techie side of things) and I think @achronon makes a potent distinction between Education and Schooling (training). As I stated, there used to be a separation between what @MarcoMasi emphasizes, can I call it “soul work” (individual well-being)? and schooling/training for the economic benefit (collective) of the community, or society, of which I came across this definition from Luke Kemp’s recent paper: " Societies are problem-solving collectives that grow in complexity in order to overcome new issues. However, the returns [benefits] from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns." Kemp is at a research institute at Cambridge studying the collapse of civilizations, which seems to be foremost on “our” minds.
Personally, I consider myself well-educated but poorly trained (not such a good worker-bee), whereas my psych-girl is highly trained (schooled - 8 years of post graduate study, a doctor) and expert in her craft, individual psychotherapy and psychological assessment. She and I clash w/r/t the dynamics of the interactions between the self (individual interior) and other (individual exterior and the collectives), i.e. society, to circle back to Wilber’s integral quadrants. I know nothing of her interior, i.e. “soul”, as her training dictates she keep that separate, i.e. hidden. Her “job” is to heal clients/patients, members of the collective, so as they might be better suited to contribute to the well-being of the external (complex) collective. That job used to fall to the purview of the local (community) pastor, etc., charged with “tending his flock”, in Christian-speak. As the collective has gotten more complex (advanced?), more secular, more successful (longer life spans and less dire conditions/poverty), and more populous … it seems the “soul” work has suffered. Repalced by what Wilber eludes to as “narcissistic Buddhism”, or an ego-centric worldview - falling right in step with toxic capitalism and the disintegration of true community.
w/r/t @Ariadne ‘s lament, “What we humans of all ages need more of is watery time, moon time, soul time…time out time, for instance, to not need to know where you are going when you go for a walk in the fields or make up a singing game, or talk to a crow or… or… or…”; and Ed’s point, I was reminded of Norman Maclean’s novella and Robert Redford’s subsequent movie A River Runs Through It. (movie is on Netflix) It is a true story about the Maclean family and the community/society in the 1930’s in western Montana, USA. It’s, imho, one of the most beautiful works of story-telling and movie making ever! From Maclean’s story, "My father [the community’s pastor] was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things–trout as well as eternal salvation–come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.’ (p. 4)
Point being, I agree with all of you. We have “lost” something even as life has become easier and longer-lived. And it is that (modernity/technology/tools/machines/AI) which has made it easier, has also made it more complex - and that just might do us in.

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