“When a baby learns to climb the stairs you teach him or her how to go down as well”. With this well known sentence we show that everything new that we learn may have important consequences. We are so worried when children learn to walk, ride a bike or climb a tree. Why are we not worried when the go out to work and may contribute to the elimination of our natural resources? Or the global warming?

When we educate our children we learn them how to grow up and warn them about the risks of every novelty they master. Yet we teach them in schools that money is important, fashion clothes make you popular and daddy’s big car makes him important. We teach our children how to compete with grades and numbers, how to learn to calculate and push them to learn for a carreer. We teach them to perform according rules and those rules are in which they need to perform. In fact we want the youngsters to grow up robotised in a system work, taxes and material securities.

Sir Ken Robinson in his TED show explains clearly that the current education eliminates all creativity of the children. Sugata Mitra shows us that children can indeed teach themselves. Experiments in the Netherlands with environmentals improvements in the classrooms show that aggression, psycological disorder and learning difficulties disappeared. With all this wisdom and proof  one asks himself: “why do not all schools adopt measures to improve  child education?”

There seems only one answer posible here. The schools are built and run within the confinement of material excellence, i.e. it all has to perform within a budget and address simply those issues that are important to learn how to behave in the material system.  What the consequences are of such education is of no importance what so ever as these are covered by other interests.

When we consider that the rational mind of a human being is only one fifth of its entire complexity of wisdoms we find that education on rational progress only is a way to produce unbalanced people, a threat to stability and an economic as well as social disaster. Education focused on the material complexity only makes incomplete human beings that start looking around to find themselves when reaching adult life. Often, after performing in the system for a while, they discover that the miracle and gift of life is much more than just work, sleep and work again. They start looking around to be completed through experiences that complete their existance.

A human being consists of at least five wisdoms: intelligence, emotional, spiritial, physical and (self) consciousness. The latter is the glue of everything and unique to human kind. We live our lives in one large adventure in which we get in touch with all the wisdoms through the development of our consciousness. We enhance this wisdom through developing a purposeful drive that gets us to experiences new things in life that need to be settled in our moral conscience too. In fact, as we progress in complexity along the line of material complexity, we get challenged continuously to adjust and rebuild the moral complexity of our being again. We do not just develop our ability to do by performing but also to be by feeding our identity.

Education should hence start at an early stage to address these wisdoms as a whole and allow the young child to discover in depth to be self conscious, self sufficient and open to the consequences of everything he learns by doing to his own identity and the effects on the surroundings. This we call Vital and Human Education, established in experimental stage in Holland now through the SMART USS project. Here we want the adult to remain as creative and free as a child, discovering the magic of the energetic world as well as the material world, finding and maintaining the balance between all personal wisdoms through thorough self consciousness and personal satisfaction through purposeful drive along the line of sustainable progress.