Dialogues
Seven Voices
Urgency

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

New Learning

Thomas Berry •

In this late twentieth century we are somewhat confused about our human situation. We need guidance. Our immediate tendency is to seek guidance from our cultural traditions, from what might be designated as our cultural coding. Yet in this case our need seems to be for guidance that is beyond what our cultural traditions are able to give. Our cultural traditions, it seems, are themselves a major source of our difficulty. It appears necessary that we go beyond our cultural coding, to our genetic coding, to ask for guidance.

Maria Montessori •

Today, while the world is in conflict, and many plans are afoot for its future reconstruction, education is widely regarded as one of the best means for bringing this about. For, no one disputes that mankind-from the mental point of view-is far below the level that civilisation claims to have reached. I, too, believe that humanity is still far from that stage of maturity needed for the realisation of its aspirations, for the construction, that is, of a harmonious and peaceful society and the elimination of wars. Men are not yet ready to shape their own destinies; to control and direct world events, of which-instead-they become the victims.

Hannah Arendt •

The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers. In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origin and their variability notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. Whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. This is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings.

Whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition. The impact of the world's reality upon human existence is felt and received as a conditioning force. The objectivity of the world-its object- or thing-character-and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence.

Thomas Berry •

In transmitting values through the sequence of generations, we no longer have the initiation techniques whereby the vision and values of earlier generations were transmitted to succeeding generations. Yet there is an abiding need to assist succeeding generations to fulfil their proper role in the ongoing adventure of the earth process. In the human realm education must supply what instinct supplies in the prehuman realm. There is need for a program to aid the young to identify themselves in the comprehensive dimensions of space and time.

Christopher Lasch •

The university has boiled all experience down into "courses" of study&emdash;a culinary image appropriate to the underlying ideal of enlightened consumption. In its eagerness to embrace experience, the university comes to serve as a substitute for it. In doing so, however, it merely compounds its intellectual failures- notwithstanding its claim to prepare students for "life." Not only does higher education destroy the students' minds; it incapacitates them emotionally as well, rendering them incapable of confronting experience without benefit of textbooks, grades, and predigested points of view. Far from preparing students to live "authentically," the higher learning in America leaves them unable to perform the simplest task-to prepare a meal or go to a party or get into bed with a member of the opposite sex-without elaborate academic instruction. The only thing it leaves to chance is higher learning.

Maria Montessori •

Though education is recognized as one of the ways of raising mankind, it is nevertheless, still and only, thought of as an education of the mind. This it is proposed to train on the same lines as of old, without trying to draw upon any new vitalising and constructive forces. I do not doubt that philosophy and religion can bring to the task an immense contribution, but how numerous are the philosophers in this ultra-civilised world How many have there not been in the past, and how many more will there not be in the future?

Noble ideals and high standards we have always had. They form a great part of what we teach. Yet warfare and strife show no signs of abating. And if education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

Instead, we must take into account a psychic entity, a social personality, a new world force, innumerable in the totality of its membership, which is at present hidden and ignored. If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

Hannah Arendt •

The task and potential greatness of mortals lie in their ability to produce things-works and deeds and words-which would deserve to be and, at least to a degree, are at home in everlastingness, so that through them mortals could find their place in a cosmos where everything is immortal except themselves.

By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave nonperishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a "divine" nature. The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best (aristeuein, a verb for which there is no equivalent in any other language) and who "prefer immortal fame to mortal things," are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals.

Christopher Lasch •

A profound shift in our sense of time has transformed work habits, values, and the definition of success. Self-preservation has replaced self-improvement as the goal of earthly existence.

In a lawless, violent, and unpredictable society, in which the normal conditions of everyday life come to resemble those formerly confined to the underworld, men live by their wits.

They hope not so much to prosper as simply to survive, although survival itself increasingly demands a large income. In earlier times, the self-made man took pride in his judgment of character and probity; today he anxiously scans the faces of his fellows not so as to evaluate their credit but in order to gauge their susceptibility to his own blandishments.

Jacques Ellul •

Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Fifteen minutes of exercise cannot make up for eight hours of absence. The human being was made to breathe the good air of nature, but what he breathes is an obscure compound of acids and coal tars. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. The trees wilt and blanch among sterile and blind stone facades. Cats and dogs disappear little by little from the city, going the way of the horse. Only rats and men remain to populate a dead world. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields.

See him now, enclosed by the rules and architectural necessities imposed by overpopulation in a twelve-by-twelve closet opening out on an anonymous world of city streets.

Christopher Lasch •

More than anything else, it is this coexistence of hyper-rationality and a widespread revolt against rationality that justifies the characterisation of our twentieth-century way of life as a culture of narcissism. These contradictory sensibilities have a common source. Both take root in the feelings of homelessness and displacement that afflict so many men and women today, in their heightened vulnerability to pain and deprivation, and in the contradiction between the promise that they can "have it all" and the reality of their limitations.

Willard Gaylin •

...Human children need caring, not just caretaking. Our survival depends on it&endash;because of the extreme condition of helplessness at birth. Our happiness depends on it-because the lessons that we will learn in our dependency period will shape our self-esteem, our self-confidence, and our capacities for work, love, pleasure, and performance, which are contingent on a basic pride system. Finally, our ultimate fulfilment as a species depends on it&endash;because our biological directive for attachment, identification, and love is a necessary condition for the survival of a species that is dependent on community to survive. To be fully human we must exist in relation with others.

Maria Montessori •

A new figure had arisen to greet our eyes. Not just a school, or an educational method, but MAN himself: MAN whose true nature is shown in his capacity for free development, whose greatness became visible directly mental oppression ceased to bear upon him, to limit his inner work and weigh down his spirit.

Therefore I hold that any reform of education must be based on the personality of man. Man himself must become the centre of education and we must never forget that man does not develop only at the university, but begins his mental growth at birth, and pursues it with the greatest intensity during the first three years of his life. To this period, more than to any other, it is imperative to give active care. If we follow these rules, the child, instead of being a burden, shows himself to us as the greatest and most consoling of nature's wonders.

We find ourselves confronted by a being no longer to be thought of as helpless, like a receptive void waiting to be filled with our wisdom; but one whose dignity increases in the measure to which we see in him the builder of our own minds; one guided by his inward teacher, who labours indefatigably in joy and happiness&emdash;following a precise timetable&emdash;at the work of constructing that greatest marvel of the Universe, the human being.

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man, who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind.

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