Paul Wilkinson - Philosophy of Education

Working towards a better future for our children and the biosphere.

The Future of Schools

What is the human? What do you think schooling will look like in the future? My sense is it will be very different from the current education paradigm . Due to the coronavirus lockdowns here in the UK in 2020, we saw the entire schooling infrastructure change. Buildings redundant, children doing their lessons from home on screens. This was a big change for the teachers, children and parents. My feeling is that a much bigger change to the schooling paradigm is on the horizon, and I don’t think it will be good. I would suggest, however, that our current schooling system is very damaging for the planet and what it means to be human. Imagine a change that further perpetuated the creation of an epistemic commons (centralised knowledge available) which lacked any form of awareness, sense making and dialogue. One that delivered young people a monoculture story, a loss of sovereignty the minute they stepped through those school gates.

We need to stop manufacturing the human, for we are creating a one track mind in an infinitely tracked universe. I believe that we are capable of far more than what this current schooling paradigm fosters and teaches. The values our schools perpetuate need a radical shift in awareness; we are the happiness we seek. Searching for objective experiences and the acquisition of things will only delude us further from the true nature of happiness. Change could come about if we could cultivate the human to generate from the inside out and not didactically from the outside in. We don’t know what we see, we see what we know. In the words of Blake, “I Must Create a System or be Enslaved by Another Man”. We need a shift in what we are aware of, a change in consciousness. For what we attend to shapes our reality, and that attention is cultivated by our education system. In the words of the British philosopher Owen Barfield, “I don’t think the mind is something that goes on in the brain. I think the brain was originally formed by minds, and then used the brain to produce the subject picture of the word in which we live”.

So what does the future hold? We live in a world of very large companies dominating our planet, such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Monsanto to name but a few. It would have been hard to perceive a monopoly like this 30 years ago. Is the same going to happen to our schooling system? A number of years ago, Elon Musk set up a school for the children of the staff working at space X, called Ad Astra. This is an unschooling model in which the children lead their learning via their own interests with guidance from the facilitators, and here they can develop skills with technology that they will need for the future. They do not do tests and grades. I don’t like labels, as they close the doors of perception, but I am an unschooling parent that believes in trusting the child to guide their own interests and passions. I can assure you experientially that it’s truly astonishing to witness self directed children. If you are a teacher and have never observed an unschooling/home education gathering, then I suggest you should. Stepping outside the system you are embedded in will give you the opportunity to view the human from a different architecture of thinking. I would suggest it will change your perception of the human mind.

After setting up Ad Astra, Musk helped create an online school called Synthesis, and more schools of this kind of model are now starting up. As I currently write this, these lessons are done once a week for an hour in which the students work together to solve complex problems encompassing individual skills to work towards a collective outcome. It’s a fee paying virtual learning space.

My sense is that this project and the combination of school children learning from home could be brought together to create a very different educational landscape. But what would that look like? I would suggest there are a number of ways this may play out. I imagine this would work at high school level most effectively.

Children would visit the school as normal and watch an ‘Uber teacher’ deliver a subject specific lesson to every school in the country at exactly the same time via video link. A teaching assistant would be present to deal with crowd control and questions afterwards. These ‘Uber teachers’ could deliver the lesson from home or a central location. There is a shortage of teachers (1 in 6 teachers quit after their first year) and this would certainly make this less of a concern for the government. This kind of model could also be run by a private fee paying company, an Amazon of education perhaps.

The same model as above could be applied with the children schooling on screens at home. They might then visit the school a few times a week for other activities such as sport or practical work. This could also be run by a private fee paying company in which the children visit their facilities. Many parents now work from home and many buildings remain almost empty so space is certainly available for these private companies to set up schools. This model could even work for those parents that go out to work - businesses incorporating a school room on site, similar to the Space X model.

We really need to change the way we live on the planet and I would suggest we don’t have long. It is projected that we will have very depleted oil supplies by 2060, that’s not far away. What damage does it do to keep exponentially mining from the planet on a finite plane? What kind of world do we live in when a fish in the sea is worth more dead than alive? We kill around six million animals an hour. Us humans live a very short life in comparison with the planet and we lack the capacity to do good sense making across time and scale (we went to school and are running that epistemology, dead thinking not alive). When Greta Thunberg speaks about climate change she is functioning at a higher meta cognitive capacity than the politicians. She is not paradigm mapping, but has applied a meta move to bring in more diversity to her architecture of thinking. All the great minds apply meta theory, this is not taught on the school curriculum. If it was, the children wouldn’t go!

This kind of model would help lighten the load on the challenges that the world governments will inevitably face. But in a world where the governments lack the cognitive capacity (they went to school!) to understand the power of the tech companies, this could be rolled out on scale rather fast. Just as the governments are trying to understand Bitcoin, which started in 2009.

I hope I’m wrong regarding the discussed model because this would be a bad move for the human, but in this ever more materialistic, capitalistic world we are evolving consciously to grasp in a very mechanistic, industrialist way. As Einstein is reported to have said. “The intuitive mind (right hemisphere) is the sacred gift and rational mind (left hemisphere, good at grasping) the faithful servant. Yet we follow the servant and have forgotten the gift.” The gift being the imagination and its infinite possibilities to shape a new world. In the words of Paul Éluard “There is certainly another world, but it is in this one”. The set of knowledge children didactically receive at the moment could well be taught centrally on scale across all cultures. I would suggest that’s not good.

I do believe however that this kind of model could be used for the benefit of the human and the biosphere. I’m an advocate for unschooling, home schooling, and many other self directed models of decentralised learning. This might not be possible for all parents across all backgrounds. I would like to see a radical shift in our education paradigm. I would suggest we need to have children within the community, returning to the pre industrial period with small school houses located within the heart of our streets. This would help decentralise our education system. There are many great teachers on our street that aren’t qualified teachers and that’s good. They would form the bedrock of ‘guides on the side’ for our children. Young people have few passions they are interested in, being part of a community would foster a deep sense of love and compassion for each other, not divide us. I live near a car garage. If for example a child was interested in mechanics they could work between the home, school house, and the garage. Many things are possible if you can step outside the system we are embedded in. The kind of technology I have discussed would work well if delivered on screens to small groups of children that then engage in a dialogue together regarding what they have just seen.

Within this world there are these kind of learning spaces: Steiner schools, Sudbury Valley, Montessori and Democratic schools to name but a few. Some of these schools will not take children from the mainstream schooling system after the age of twelve. Why do you think that is?

I have just scratched the surface with these words. Collectively we need a shift in consciousness. I begun with the question what is the human? People today identify themselves almost exclusively with what they are aware of, and neglect the very simple experience of being aware. In the Hindu tradition recognition means to know again. The knower and the known are different.

Is thought limited?
What is the one thing you want in life?
What is the one thing we all want in life?

A man who reviews the old so as to find out the new is qualified to teach others. Confucius

The way that can spoken of
Is not the constant way.
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name. Lao Tzu.

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An introduction to Non-Duality.

I am known as a musician and music has been one of the most important activities in my life. Creativity is like the ultimate thank you. I believe we must create within this creation. Imagination is the divine source. To quote my 8 year old son Miles, ‘Imagination is the birth of the world’. But I have lived a dialectic life and I have always been fascinated with consciousness. To borrow a phrase from Iain McGilchrist, ‘The quality of the world that comes to our attention is dependent upon the quality of attention we bring.’ When around the age of 17 I picked up a Buddhist meditation book, I became deeply interested in the great perennial Eastern traditions of the past. Over the last 30 years this has led me to explore and investigate many of these rich traditions. Alongside that I have been fascinated by philosophers and their insights. I have spent many years studying Buddhism, Advaite Vedanta, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, the Gnostic tradition, Eastern mystical Christianity, and the mystical tradition of Sufism to name but a few! Alongside that I have immersed myself in the understanding of P.D. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

I am in the process of writing a book which investigates these perennial traditions, the ‘I am’, the true self, not the separate self. That book also explores meta theory, thinking about thinking and our epistemic commons (shared knowledge and information that is open to all). Viewing any topic from a different architecture of attention. I would suggest that our collective understanding is deeply polluted and we need to change the kind of human being we are before it’s too late. When the bin is full you empty it, you reverse, you change the direction by doing the opposite action. If you keep filling that bin you’re on a path to pollution. We need a shift of awareness, for what we attended to will shape the world and our future. The conclusion of that book explores the witness (awareness) to the contents of our experiences, what do I mean? Well, I would like to share some of this Non-dual understanding with you here.

A grand piano has a sound board made of spruce wood, on top of which the strings are strung. The keys of the piano are depressed, the hammers hit the string and the sound board produces and resonates the sound. The spruce wood doesn’t mind which notes are played. It remains ever present to receive any musical experience – soft, loud, angry or sad. In this analogy, the sound board is awareness, but unlike the limitations of the piano’s construction I would suggest that awareness is timeless and dimensionless, it is not in time or space. Let’s unpack this a little more. Throughout your life one thing has remained present in all your experience, when you were a child, when you were a teenager, when you were happy, when you were sad. This presence was the simple act of being aware. The awareness of awareness, the ‘I am’, standing in awareness or in the Eastern Christian tradition the presence of God. In our busy world we give exclusive attention to our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions but very rarely do we turn round to view them from the perception of awareness. The knower and known are different. When you stand in awareness you realise that whatever you are experiencing, awareness never changes. It is unchangeless. This simple act of being aware is referred to as the direct path, unlike meditation, prayer, yoga or mantras which are referred to as the progressive path. Awareness is not something we have to attain, it’s something we are. It is the ‘I am’ that shines behind the contents of all our experience, the one that witnesses your thoughts and feelings. Let’s try something a moment. I want this to be experiential.

Close your eyes, listen to your breath. Now imagine the disappearance of all your thoughts, feelings, sensations and the presence of the body. Now what remains? Describe what you’re feeling. When I do this in person people often say the following words: peaceful, empty, still, silence, openness, absence and love. The mind veils itself of its own activity and forgets its true nature, ‘I am’. The mind I might suggest is a perception in consciousness. We live in three states: waking, dreaming and deep sleep. Let’s for a moment look at deep sleep. In deep sleep all your thoughts, the body, feelings, sensations and perceptions disappear, it is peaceful and still. Think about that for a moment. You are all alone in deep sleep. When you wake in the morning, the ‘I’ slept well. This is a place to witness awareness. It is hard to use words to describe this presence, but, I would suggest it is peaceful, timeless and absent from suffering. Not finite but infinite, dimensionless consciousness. In deep sleep all the content of your world experiences disappear and you are left with the true uncoloured self. Nothing in itself but itself. Non-duality means oneness – not two – non-separation from the mind at large. In the words of Jesus, ‘I and my father are one’. The kingdom of heaven is within us.

This has been a short introduction to the perennial Hindu tradition of , Advãita Vedanta. Pure consciousness (Brahman), the knower of all experience, the inward facing path, the pure ‘I am’. Beyond the illusory self, and multitude and diversity of things, to point towards the heart of awareness. You are what you seek, you are the Atman (the universal self not a separate self). I would suggest this understanding is our only hope for the planet and world peace. There is an inside to this world and we have lost touch with it. I thought it would be nice to share this understanding with you. I am ever more called to do so these days.

Give yourself to yourself, just by knowing how things are.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” William Blake.

Paul x

#non-duality #awareness #consciousness nondualitymusic