Gatto said the system is not broken. It was built this way on purpose. Gatto said that dumbing children down is useful to a certain kind of class-based command economy. Gatto himself encouraged Open-Source Learning, which means learning sequences are personally designed. Everyone you encounter in life is a potential teacher. In Open Source, teaching is a function, not a profession. Everyone can learn, and everyone can teach himself [or herself] how to learn and how to teach others.
In Open Source, students are the active initiators. You either write your own script in life, or, by default, you become an actor in someone else's script. The easiest way to destroy curiosity is to sit people in chairs and threaten them with the upcoming test. Plato, the Greek aristocrat, said in The Republic and The Laws: "The ordinary population is dangerous if they learn to think."
Most children get indoctrinated into the religion of their parents. Enlightened parents, however, would educate their children about all of the world's religions in a fair and objective way and then encourage their children to choose their own spiritual paths. I grew up in a holy roller, Pentecostal church that said you had to speak in tongues in order to be saved. In college I started investigating all the different world religions. I am thankful that I questioned authority. In my life search for spiritual truth, I have gone back and forth between Christianity and Eastern philosophy. I also took some classes at two Christian seminaries, one conservative, the other, liberal. At different times in my life, I have been a fundamentalist Christian, an evangelical Christian, and a liberal Christian. I am now 71 years old. In the last 15 years, I have resonated more with yoga and Hindu philosophy, Buddhism, and other expressions of the perennial philosophy.
Mystical Christianity and 'contemplative prayer' are expressions of the perennial philosophy. However, from the perspective of a conservative or evangelical Christian, they are false teachings that are not biblical. See this article.
Children need to have spiritual training. Instead of the state compelling children to attend public schools where a study of world religions is avoided, parents should be given the right to decide how their children should be educated. Christian fundamentalists, Muslims, Advaita Vedantists, Buddhists, Libertarians, Marxists, and others should be given financial resources to find alternatives to the public schools for their children if they are not happy with the public schools. The money allocated to the public schools on a per pupil basis could be given to parents directly, without any strings attached. Some parents might want to invest in a private school; others might take an unschooling approach and choose private tutoring and home education.
Another option would be to encourage and allow parents in an elementary school district to develop their own educational philosophy and school curriculum if they vote to be decentralized. Parents could then unite with other parents in a school district to create their own school using allotted educational money they each receive from the government. There could even be several cooperative schools and groups in just one elementary school district. Parents could hire either licensed or unlicensed teachers and tutors. In this article I discuss further how there could be neighborhood control of neighborhood schools.
It could be argued that there is a deep need in each of us to be part of a tribe or intentional community. How convenient it would be if our tribe was our neighborhood. In addition to making our neighborhood, municipality, state, and nation great, we also need to make the whole world great and save the planet in the process.
Everyone should have the right to share and practice his or her spiritual beliefs, including secular humanists who believe in philosophical or scientific materialism. But here is a viewpoint that challenges traditional, mainstream, modern science: the Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science. Moreover, literature professor and student of Carl Jung, Dr. Betty Kovacs, who is the author of Merchants of Light: The Consciousness That Is Changing the World, discusses in this video the synthesis of the shaman, mystic, and scientist (click here too). Also, biologist Rupert Sheldrake's message in this video is that in every age science is based on a paradigm, but the current paradigm of scientific materialism is limited. He states that in Hindu philosophy, our consciousness is part of a greater, eternal consciousness which underlies the whole universe.
Going to college also caused me to question the Republican Party of my parents. At different times in my search for truth I have identified with the Republican Party, Libertarian Party, Green Party, Constitution Party, and with democratic socialism. For the past 15 years, I have endorsed democratic socialism, but ever since the Covid crisis started 22 months ago, I have been losing interest in socialist websites and popular socialists such as Richard D. Wolff and Howard Zinn. Almost all of the liberal capitalist and socialist websites support the official, mainstream-news, Covid narrative. The Left seems oblivious or unconcerned that the mRNA vaccines, vaccines passports, and the emerging trends in electronic surveillance, biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and robotics are creating a totalitarian society of technocracy and transhumanism that is increasingly taking away our constitutional rights.
Since I have been going to mostly conservative websites to get believable information about Sars-CoV-2 and the mRNA vaccines in the past two years, I have been reading more libertarian articles that argue against socialism from writers such as Thomas J. DiLorenzo. I am also reading more arguments against climate change and the Green New Deal since they are being promoted by global capitalist corporations that plan to profit from both. But my libertarian ideas about the education of children developed very early in my public school teaching career a long time ago.
Promoting local self-reliance and decentralization are important ways to remake the world. Farmers markets and public banking are good ways to empower the local community. Moreover, in the United States, other recommendations that I would make would be to abolish the Federal Reserve and the CIA (also click here and here).
In the last 2 years I have become more distrustful of Western allopathic medicine, which is prone to see invading germs as the cause of every sickness and disease, while mostly ignoring the role of diet, environmental toxins, lifestyle, habitual thoughts and beliefs, and electromagnetic radiation. The medical establishment makes huge profits from drugs, vaccines, medical procedures and surgeries, some of which we need. But the medical establishment will not make huge profits if people start rejecting the medical model and start getting well from a plant-based diet, mindfulness meditation, and other healthful habits.
Now I appreciate more the value of natural immunity and the terrain model of health and sickness. I have discovered that there are highly trained microbiologists who accept the terrain theory instead of the germ theory of disease (see the 4 book recommendations in the Postscript of this article). In the book Virus Mania on p. 28, it states that Louis Pasteur admitted on his deathbed, "The microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything." Here is a book review of the book The Contagion Myth: Why Viruses (including "Coronavirus") Are Not the Cause of Disease, authored by Thomas S. Cowan, MD and Sally Fallon Morell. In the Postscript of this article, I share a link to many videos and articles that counter the official COVID narrative. However, most of those videos and articles are from a germ theory perspective.
What is needed is a spiritual, nonviolent political revolution as we think globally and act locally. We need a new worldview, a spiritual renaissance, a paradigm shift that transcends lifestyle materialism and scientific materialism. Even if the world does not get better, we as individuals can always keep working on ourselves to become better persons. We can "be the peace we want to see in the world." Improving ourselves by discovering our true self or true nature is actually more important than trying to change the world.
There should be no vindictiveness in political discussions. Before we share our differences, we should paraphrase our opponents' position and convince them that we truly understand what they believe and how they feel. Then we can start sharing what we believe and how we feel.
The Republicans and Democrats have agreed to make it very difficult for third parties to be equally represented. But imagine how interesting it would be to watch a presidential, gubernatorial, mayoral, or legislative debate in which the 7 largest political parties are equally represented. It may be that some of the parties would only represent 2 or 3 percent of the voters, but at least those smaller parties could feel for the first time that they have a voice. We can learn so much more when we have an opportunity to see things from a different perspective.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
