Vital and Human Education
“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.
Bad money
The concept of money was invented to make the exchange of true values easier through a standardised means. Money without any collatoral is therefor nothing, it is without value, useless and if used “bad money”.
When a business asks for a loan the bank asks for a business plan. One judges the feasibility of the plans of the organization, the values it already contains in productivity and proven creativity before even considering providing the money. But what business plan lies behind the world economy? There isn’t any. Our world economy is based in the enormous amount of money that is needed to sustain the economy itself. This means that money is pumped into a system that is inflating itself without any true values at all, no collatoral nor productivity or responsibility except greed. The money that is now freely printed and put into circulation is a mortgage on our future without a credible plan at all. We are keeping in place an unsustainable global economy, not only at the expense of humanity and our planet but also future generations.
This cannot be right and it isn’t. In my previous blog I mention the reigning definition of sustainable productivity. It says that we need to cover our needs without putting a burden on future generations. But that definition is wicketly smart. It refers to productivity, refering to the limited resources of Earth. It does not refer to the financial debts that we create and that use our children as a collator. In fact we are commiting a crime against humanity by using up resources that are theirs and not even ours. We are borrowing money from our children without even asking them for permission.
A recent presentation of 95 year old Fresco suggested to put all current politicians, bankers and industrial leaders in jale. He mentioned that history will prove the crime that is committed today. And he is right. Economic criminality against humanity is tolerated and enhanced by all that manage money placing the burden on the current and future generations. But are we willing to sacrifice our luxus now and work hard to reduce the debt that we have tolerated to grow for decades? Haven’t we all voted for maintenance of what we have knowing that our way of life is unsustainable and lived at the expense of poverty around the world as well as the stability of our future?
We are so used to bad money that we have forgotten ourselves what true values are. Good money is a means, not a goal. Good money is represented by a true value that has already been created. And true value is not a speculation on our future, it is a mentality of today. Good money is created through a positive interaction between humans, taking care of our children and our elderly, in perfect harmony with our surroundings. Good money is created by servant entrepreneurship that creates value in the shape of unprecedented innovations.
If we want to reach a situation of world peace and sustainable human progress we need to distinguish between bad and good money, eliminate bad money all together from our systems and organizations and protect ourselves against it. We could even agree on laws that define good and bad money punishing those who introduce and deal with bad money, eliminating their potential power positions in the process. Bad money should be illegal. When only good money circulates no crises will happen anymore and no one can be criticised or blamed. Good money has no power play such as bad money, it has levels of responsibility.
80% of all money in the world is estimated to bad money now and the percentage is growing since it is legal and keeping up world economies in a wrong way. We have a long way to go, or a lot of crises to endure before the transformation has been taken place and good money prevails. But it is up to us all to make it happen.
Alternative definition for Sustainable Progress
The current and most widely used definition for sustainable development dates from 1987 (Brundtland) and is totally useless for sustainable progress. It says:
“sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
This statement is not sustainable itself as it cannot pinpoint individual responsibility to anyone or current generations let alone future generations. Consider for instance what the definition of needs is of today? Needs of who? The material wealthy or the poor in Africa or Asia? Your needs? My needs? Do they refer to the needs of business or political economies, luxury or primary needs? Business needs maybe?
How about the needs of future generations? How would we know what these future generations will need? They might for all we know require massive amounts of oil for medical purposes, yet we burn it all up right now. How can we take responsibility for the abilities of future generations if they are not just dependent on our left overs but also on important other variables that have nothing to do with human behavior, s.a. climat changes for instance. Do we blame the human who killed the last Dodo because he was hungry? Or do we blame ourselves for not creating responsible alternatives for nutrician before the Dodos were made extinct in the first place. How many species have to perrish before we take responsibility for the current generation?
In fact, who would control what we use, how we use it and determine if it affects future generations at all? Is this control our individual responsibility? How can we measure this? Who is to blame if we judge incorrectly and who judges? And how can I worry about compromising future generations if we already compromise current generation around our globe? In fact, this most popular definition is a open letter that allows us and anyone to do what we please without taking any responsibility. As it stands it has been insignificant since the definition appeared and introduced a green washing wisdom in industrial and government policies around the world. It may have made us a little more aware but certainly not more sustainable in development or progress, on the contrary, and not at all responsible towards future generations as we wouldn’t know how. And really, who in command cares?
In my own foundation we work on the development of workable cooperative organizations around projects that address sustainable progress of humanity itself, segmented into key issues. Interestingly we could do absolutely nothing with the definition. We found it perfectly viable to introduce some basic environment awareness in capitalist industries but totally useless when projected onto the complexity of current humanity itself.
This motivated me to come up with one of my own, just like probably hundreds of other responsible people around me over the years. My definition for sustainable progress is:
“Sustainable progress is the development that continuously improves human health, vitality, safety and dynamic progression in optimal relationship with the constantly changing environment in which we live and act.”
I found that this definition places the responsibility with each and everyone of us, as individuals as well as business and public entities, in the here and now. It became the basis of the cooperative innovative business identities that are being developped by us around real issues that concern us today, s.a. energy, quality of life, education, smart mobility, air quality and polution, food, water, etc…
The definition helps us to define our visions away from material goals and determine specific higher purposes that matter and have a positive effect on our selves, our current generations and our environment. We feel it contributes to true sustainable progress in a measurable and accountable way with the satisfaction that whatever we do in this context it will always serve also generations to come.
