- Written by: Kamran Mofid
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Honesty, candour, truthfullmess, integrity and humility in politics and politicians are central to the proper functioning of a democracy
Trust is the essence of life and leadership to build a better world for all
...and when that trust is broken, Life loses its meaning and purpose
The Loss of Humanity is the Biggest Casualty of Being Dishonest
Will the Nasty Party Ever Learn How To Be Human?
- Written by: Kamran Mofid
- Hits: 794
Photo: virtuesforlife.com
Nota bene
All said and done, one of the main objectives of this posting is to gather some of the ideas and visions that are shaping our imagination and help fashion them into what I hope to be a vaguely coherent vision – or many visions – of the kind of world we are yearning for and hopefully can and might want to live in. It’s just a beginning and is part of a big conversation, the dialogue, to which many the worldover are contributing.
Globally, the coronavirus has taken a tragic toll on all of us. It has shown us what is important, valuable and worthy. Let’s use this time to open our hearts, minds and imagination to what is possible, and start building a better world. Let this be our legacy and answer to the pandemic.
......
The ‘dismal science’ in perpetual meltdown: The Fall of the House of Cards
The Delusional Mumbo Jumbo Jargons That Is Modern Economics
“Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on one hand...', then 'but on the other...”― Harry Truman
Longing for a One-Handed Economist!!
“Don’t just teach your students how to count. Teach them what counts most.”
‘In spite of the utter failure of academic and professional economists to predict, explain or find solutions to the financial and economic crises sweeping the globalised, marketised world they have created, there is still little challenge to the narrow and one-sided way that economics is taught in our universities. In spite of the fact that economics is about complex human relationships, and is therefore bound to be the subject of debate and disagreement, there is no problem with university courses that only teach the neoclassical pro-market approach.’- Gaian Economics as quoted in Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?
Photo: The Economist
In 1936, Keynes wrote, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist.”
And now, in 2021, no economist is more prominent than Keynes himself!
Moreover, as today’s events are unfolding, you can be sure that policymakers the worldover are polishing up their economic history books and looking at them through a Keynesian lens!
Keynes: economist, patron of the arts, member of the Bloomsbury Group and architect of
the postwar international order. Planet News/Getty Images
Keynes: The Man for All Seasons- ‘The enduring legacy of John Maynard Keynes’- Alive in the long run
Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky
Keynes and the Good Life
Economics as practical wisdom
‘The British economist’s ideas remain as important today as they ever were.’
‘Keynes was a philosopher in the most profound sense. He was a towering intellect in search of the good society— human well-being—on the trail of Aristotle. Keynes today would address not only a searing health crisis and economic turmoil; he would instruct us on how the crisis lays bare the rot of our decayed public institutions, and he would bid us to pursue dazzling new solutions for our time...
‘[A] system where we can act as an organized community for common purposes and to promote social and economic justice, whilst respecting and protecting the individual—his freedom of choice, his faith, his mind and its expression, his enterprise and his property.’
‘Intimately familiar with the history of economic thought and widely read in many fields, producing a major treatise on the nature of probability alongside his famous General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and a host of penetrating essays, Keynes had a depth of culture that few economists could claim today…
…Influenced by the Cambridge philosopher GE Moore, they thought the only things that had value in themselves were love, beauty and the pursuit of knowledge.’- John Gray
‘Why economists kept getting the policies wrong’
‘After decades of market liberalism and fiscal fundamentalism, policymakers are returning to Keynes.’
This was the heading of an article By Philip Stephens in the Financial Times on 18 February 2021. Lest we forget, papers such as the Financial Times, have been nothing, but cheerleaders for neoliberalism, Thatcherism and all other horrible things that now Mr. Stephens is criticising.
To appreciate the significance and timeliness of this article in aiding a better understanding of the current economic crises, I would like to quote a couple of important and relevant passages.
However, before proceeding further, I would like to share a bit of a nostalgic journey of ‘Keynes and I’ with you:
Kamran and the Keynesian Economics
Economics that Works for Stakeholders as well as Shareholders
That is the Economy for You and Me
… It was at this difficult time that I came to understand that I needed to bring spirituality, compassion, ethics and morality back into economics itself, to make this dismal science once again relevant to and concerned with the common good. It was now that I made the following discoveries:
- Living happily is “the desire of us all, but our minds are blinded to a clear vision of just what it is that makes life happy”. The root of happiness is ethical behaviour, and thus the ancient idea of moral education and cultivation, is essential to the ideal of joyfulness.
- The focus of economics should be on the benefit and the bounty that the economy produces, on how to let this bounty increase, and how to share the benefits justly among the people for the common good, removing the evils that hinder this process. Moreover, economic investigation should be accompanied by research into subjects such as anthropology, philosophy, politics and most importantly, theology, to give insight into our own mystery, as no economic theory or no economist can say who we are, where have we come from or where we are going to. Humankind must be respected as the centre of creation and not relegated by more short term economic interests.
- ‘Economic rationality’ in the shape of neo-liberal globalisation is socially and politically suicidal. Justice and democracy are sacrificed on the altar of a mythical market as forces outside society rather than creations of it. However, free markets do not exist in a vacuum. They require a set of impartiality in government, honesty, justice, and public spiritedness in business. The best safeguard against fraud, theft, and injustice in markets are the cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence, and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
The marketplace is not just an economic sphere, ‘it is a region of the human spirit’. Profound economic questions are divine in nature; in contrast to what is assumed today, they should be concerned with the world of the heart and spirit. Although self-interest is an important source of human motivation, driving the decisions we make in the marketplace every day, those decisions nevertheless have a moral, ethical and spiritual content, because each decision we make affects not only ourselves but others too. We must combine the need for economic efficiency with the need for social justice and environmental sustainability.
The greatest achievement of modern globalisation will eventually come to be seen as the opening up of possibilities to build a humane and spiritually enriched globalised world through the universalising and globalising of compassion. But for ‘others’ to become ‘us’, for the world to become intimate with itself, we have to get to know each other better than we do now. Prejudices have to disappear: we have to see that the cultural, religious and ethnic differences reflect an ultimate creative principle. For this to happen, the great cultures and religions need to enter into genuine dialogue with each other.
John Maynard Keynes predicted a moment when people in advanced economies would step back from traditional economic imperatives and feel free to concentrate on how to live wisely, agreeably and well. The purpose of the economy, according to Keynes, is to control the material basis of a civilised society, enabling its citizens to explore the higher dimensions of human existence, to discover their own full potential. In our world of prosperity for the few, we seem to have got that backwards. Lives are restricted by harsh working conditions and the common assets of a community are degraded in the pursuit of endless economic growth.
Economics once again must find its heart, soul and spirituality. Moreover, it should also reconnect itself with its original source, rooted in ethics and morality. Today’s huge controversy which surrounds much of the economic and business world is because they do not adequately and appropriately address the needs of the global collective and the powerless, marginalised and excluded. This, surely, in the interest of all, has to change. The need for an explicit acknowledgment of true global values, such as altruism, inclusion, universality, fraternity, sympathy, empathy, sharing, security, envisioning, enabling, empowering, solidarity and much more, is the essential requirement in making economics work for the common good. Economics, as practiced today. cannot claim to be for the common good. In short, a revolution in values is needed, when it demands that economics and business must both embrace material and spiritual values simultaneously.
As it can be seen, given the state of our world today, the world of progress and poverty, elaborate, difficult to comprehend, infused by so much mathematical jargon, economic models and theories, has not delivered the happiness that has been promised because of its failure to satisfy people’s spiritual needs. We have to reverse this. Do not let us carry on constructing a global society that is materially rich but spiritually poor. Let us begin to construct globalisation for the common good.’- Kamran Mofid And The Story of the GCGI: Why Love, Trust, Respect and Gratitude Trumps Economics: Together for the Common Good
Reverting back to the Financial Times article: ‘Why economists kept getting the policies wrong’
‘The other week I caught sight of a headline declaring that the IMF was warning against cuts in public spending and borrowing. The report stopped me in my tracks. After half a century or so as keeper of the sacred flame of fiscal prudence, the IMF was telling policymakers in rich industrial nations they should not fret overmuch about huge build-ups of public debt during the Covid-19 crisis. John Maynard Keynes had been disinterred, and the world turned upside down...
‘... Nations such as Britain might have learned that lesson from the damage inflicted by the ill-judged austerity programme imposed by David Cameron’s government after the 2008 financial crash. And yet. This was the IMF speaking — the hallowed (for some, hated) institution that, as many Brits will recall, formally read the rites over Keynesianism when in 1976 it forced James Callaghan’s Labour government to impose politically calamitous cuts in spending and borrowing...
‘...This is the organisation that in the intervening years had a few simple answers to any economic problem you care to think of: fiscal retrenchment, a smaller state and/or market liberalisation. The advice was heralded as the Washington consensus because of the IMF’s location. My first job after joining the Financial Times during the early 1980s was to learn the language of the new economic orthodoxy...
‘...Financial market deregulation, we were told, oiled the wheels of globalisation. If madcap profits and bonuses at big financial institutions prompted unease, the answer was that markets would self-correct…
‘...The abiding sin threaded through it all was that of certitude. Perfectly plausible but untested theories, whether about the money supply, fiscal balances and debt levels, or market risk, were elevated to the level of irrefutable facts. Economics, essentially a faith-based discipline, represented itself as a hard science. The real world was reduced by the 1990s to a set of complex mathematical equations that no one, least of all democratically elected politicians, dared challenge.
Thus detached from reality, economic policy swept away the postwar balance between the interests of society and markets. Arid econometrics replaced a measured understanding of political economy. It scarcely mattered that the gains of globalisation were scooped up by the super-rich, that markets became casinos and that fiscal fundamentalism was widening social divisions. Nothing counted above the equations.
And now? After Donald Trump, Brexit and Covid-19, it seems we are back at the beginning. Time to dust off Keynes’s general theory.’- Excerpts from Why economists kept getting the policies wrong
Given the significance and the timeliness of the subject, it is pertinent to reflect more on: ‘Why economists kept getting the policies wrong’.
Yes, it is true, many economists got it all very badly wrong and in the process have brought shame to being called an economist!
But, lest we forget, not all economists are guilty, not all are shameful and this, I am proud to declare, includes the current author. Let me explain!
'Today's neoclassical economist is an emperor with no clothes who has fooled us all long enough.'
Photo: transitionvoice.com
A reflection on Why economists KEEP getting the policies wrong
1- Has it got to do anything with HONESTY? See below what I mean:
The short letter below to the editor of Times (08/03/2011) speaks volumes on ‘Honesty’ and ‘ETHICS’ in Economics:
Ethics boys
Sir, Around 1991 I offered the London School of Economics a grant of £1 million to set up a Chair in Business Ethics. John Ashworth, at that time the Director of the LSE, encouraged the idea but had to write to me to say, regretfully, that the faculty had rejected the offer as it saw no correlation between ethics and economics. Quite. Lord Kalms, House of Lords
Below is how as a ‘Recovered’ economist I tried to rise to the challenges of ‘HONESTY’ in my chosen profession:
‘From 1980 onwards, for the next twenty years, I taught economics in universities, enthusiastically demonstrating how economic theories provided answers to problems of all sorts. I got quite carried away by the beauty, the sophisticated elegance, of complicated mathematical models and theories. But gradually I started to have an empty feeling.
‘I began to ask fundamental questions of myself. Why did I never talk to my students about compassion, dignity, comradeship, solidarity, happiness, spirituality – about the meaning of life? We never debated the biggest questions. Who are we? Where have we come from? Where are we going?
‘I told them to create wealth, but I did not tell them for what reason. I told them about scarcity and competition, but not about abundance and co-operation. I told them about free trade, but not about fair trade; about GNP – Gross National Product – but not about GNH – Gross National Happiness. I told them about profit maximisation and cost minimisation, about the highest returns to the shareholders, but not about social consciousness, accountability to the community, sustainability and respect for creation and the creator. I did not tell them that, without humanity, economics is a house of cards built on shifting sands.
‘These conflicts caused me much frustration and alienation, leading to heartache and despair. I needed to rediscover myself and real-life economics. After a proud twenty-year or so academic career, I became a student all over again. I would study theology, philosophy and ethics, disciplines nobody had taught me when I was a student of economics and I did not teach my own students when I became a teacher of economics.
‘It was at this difficult time that I came to understand that I needed to bring spirituality, compassion, ethics and morality back into economics itself, to make this dismal science once again relevant to and concerned with the common good.’
I then went on to found the Globalisation for the Common Good Initiative to work towards this…’-A comment on a Financial Times editorial (November 12, 2013)
And now I would like to quote you the first paragraph of a letter I wrote to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on 27th November 2008, regarding her question at London School of Economics, when she asked: “Why did nobody notice?”
Your Majesty,
“I note, with much interest, Your Majesty’s recent visit to the London School of Economics. Given the current financial calamity, Your Majesty asked a very pertinent and important question: “Why did nobody notice?”
I firmly believe that the director of research and his colleagues present there, should have provided Your Majesty with truthful and honest answers. However, given what I have read in the press, I do not believe this was the case. Their failure to do so clearly goes a long way to prove the detachment of economists and the modern neo-liberal economics from the real world. They have turned our profession and subject into a comedy of errors, a dismal science of irrelevance.
This is very sad indeed Your Majesty. An entire profession now appears to have suffered a collapse. Trust and confidence in my profession has all but been demolished, the “dismal science” at its worst.
Many mistakes have been made. Many economists have compromised themselves and their profession by remaining silent, not criticising the extremism and the neo-liberal fundamentalism present in their profession. Lessons should be learnt, someone should be held accountable. Otherwise the same mistakes will be repeated and nobody will believe what an economist says again. In other words, Your Majesty deserves a proper and honest answer…”- Economics, Globalisation and the Common Good: A Lecture at London School of Economics
2- Has it got to do anything with modern economics never discovering and knowing who the ‘REAL’ Adam Smith was?
‘These days I am inspired by the “Real” and “True” Adam Smith, known the world over as the Father of New Economics. We should recall the wisdom of Adam Smith, who was a great moral philosopher first and foremost. In 1759, sixteen years before his famous Wealth of Nations, he published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explored the self-interested nature of man and his ability nevertheless to make moral decisions based on factors other than selfishness. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith laid the early groundwork for economic analysis, but he embedded it in a broader discussion of social justice and the role of government. Today we mainly know only of his analogy of the ‘invisible hand’ and refer to him as defending free markets; whilst ignoring his insight that the pursuit of wealth should not take precedence over social and moral obligations.
We are taught that the free market as a ‘way of life’ appealed to Adam Smith but not that he thought the morality of the market could not be a substitute for morality for society at large. He neither envisioned nor prescribed a capitalist society, but rather a ‘capitalist economy within society, a society held together by communities of non-capitalist and non-market morality’. As it has been noted, morality for Smith included neighbourly love, an obligation to practice justice, a norm of financial support for the government ‘in proportion to [one’s] revenue’, and a tendency in human nature to derive pleasure from the good fortune and happiness of other people.
He observed that lasting happiness is found in tranquillity as opposed to consumption. In their quest for more consumption, people have forgotten about the three virtues Smith observed that best provide for a tranquil lifestyle and overall social well-being: justice, beneficence (the doing of good; active goodness or kindness; charity) and prudence (provident care in the management of resources; economy; frugality).
I am very sorry that, no one taught me these when I was a student of economics, and then, I did not tell the truth about Adam Smith to my students when I became an economics lecturer; something that I very much regret and something that am trying hard to rectify, now that I am a “Recovering and Repenting” economist for the common good. At the end of the day, it is our honesty, humility and our struggle to seek the truth that will set us free and allow us to hold our head high...’- The World would be a Better Place if Economists had Read This Book
See also:
Imaging a Better World: Moving forward with the real Adam Smith
Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Happiness
3- Has it got to do with the fact that modern economics is built upon a pack of lies?
‘The evil that men do lives after them. Global economic crisis has roots back in the 1970s, it was Milton Friedman the economist, Nobel laureate and American Treasury Secretary who convinced Reagan and Thatcher to adopt his policies of small government; deregulation of financial services; free and unfettered markets; low taxation for corporations and the wealthy and privatisation of public services.’...
The Destruction of our World and the lies of Milton Friedman
Death and Destruction on Brothers’ Road to Serfdom
4- Has it got to do with the fact that the ‘pompous’ economists think their subject is a glorified mathematical science of mumbo jumbo?
Economics Today: A Clandestine Religion Masquerading as a ‘Bastard Science’
Dismal Scientists Discover the Truth: The Prize is not Noble and Economics is not a Science
5- Has it got to do with the fact that modern economics and economists have forgotten what it means to be human.
The Destruction of our World and the lies of Milton Friedman
The Antidote to inhumanity is to know what it means to be human
The Damning Impact of a Toxic Philosophy on America: The Tragedy of Ayn Rand
6- Has it got to do with the fact that modern economists are mesmerised by perpetual growth?
The Case for Degrowth: It is urgent, necessary, and greatly needed for our survival
Economic Growth: The Index of Misery
7- Has it got to do with the fact that modern economists have detached economics from Mother Nature?
Detaching Nature from Economics is ‘Burning the Library of Life’
8- and finally, has it got to do with the fact that modern economics has corrupted education, teaching and everything else in its path?
Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?
Neoliberalism destroys human potential and devastates values-led education
Fixing What’s Wrong with Modern Economics by Fixing What’s Wrong with Modern Education
‘What They Forget to Teach You at School’
And Now The Good News
The leader of the biggest economy has ditched the Madhouse Economics of Neoliberalism,Laissez faire and all that jazz in favour of Keynesian economics to address poverty, inequality, injustice, ecological degradation and more in the US.
With the help of Keynes, Biden is planning to fight populism, and make the Democrats the party of the many and not the few.
Biden resurrects Keynes to see off populist threat
US embarks on massive stimulus programme to set economy on different path
An article by Chris Johns, The Irish Times
‘A remarkable and radical economic experiment is about to be conducted in the US…
‘Biden took to the stump this week, extolling the virtues of his $1.9 trillion plans. These come on top of $900 billion of stimulus passed by Congress in December and $3 trillion early on in the pandemic. There are hints that once the pandemic is declared over, Biden would like to indulge in even more fiscal largesse. John Maynard Keynes is back.
‘I remember then UK prime minister Jim Callaghan’s 1976 speech to the Labour Party’s annual conference when he famously buried Keynesian economics and embraced the thinking that led directly to the austerity policies and politics of the next 40 years. Biden has not just resurrected Keynes, he’s introducing a bionic version of the long dead economist.
Spend, spend, spend
‘The immediate Biden proposals include additional cheques to be written to almost every US citizen, increased pandemic-related spending, cash for local government and extended unemployment benefits. Infrastructure programmes and other economy boosting measures are waiting in the wings for later this year.
Biden is taking to heart the advice of his new treasury secretary Janet Yellen “to go large”. The Federal Reserve is on board, as is the IMF. The question naturally arises, why?
‘After 40 years of the “Washington consensus” that converted Callaghan and lectured the world in terms of fiscal orthodoxy and austerity, why are we going back to policies that were abandoned in the late 1970s? And why is Europe ignoring all this? Where are our cheques, new roads, hospitals and schools?...’-Continue to read
- Written by: Kamran Mofid
- Hits: 1365
Photo: beliefnet.com
Nota bene
All said and done, one of the main objectives of this posting is to gather some of the ideas and visions that are shaping our imagination and help fashion them into what I hope to be a vaguely coherent vision – or many visions – of the kind of world we are yearning for and hopefully can and might want to live in. It’s just a beginning and is part of a big conversation, the dialogue, to which many the worldover are contributing.
Globally, the coronavirus has taken a tragic toll on all of us. It has shown us what is important, valuable and worthy. Let’s use this time to open our hearts, minds and imagination to what is possible, and start building a better world. Let this be our legacy and answer to the pandemic.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?- T. S. Eliot
Photo: bing.com
'We become teachers for the reasons of the heart.
But many of us lose heart as time goes by.
How can we take heart, alone and together,
So we can give heart to our students and our world,
Which is what good teachers do?'-THE HEART OF A TEACHER
In the beginning were the words...They bacame languages...They became poetry...They became how we express and project love, goodness, commitment and more
Let the words sing to you, dance for you, empower you to become the person you envision yourself to be: This is the mystery of values-led, purposeful and meaningful education.
This is How Wisdom Grows- Educating Hearts and Minds
'Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
You reconcile all beings in the world.'- Lao Tzu
The Curse of ‘Modern Education’
When education becomes a meaningless ritual of nothing for nothing
Education is the making of meaning and purpose and the development of thinking individuals. It is the path to wisdom and the discovery of what it means to be human. Meaningless ritualism is the antithesis of all that matters.
Tragically, today, the so-called ‘Modern Education’, designed and implemented solely by the egoistic, narcissistic, values-less politicians- here today, gone tomorrow- has by and large, lost its moral and spiritual compass.
‘The answer is simple: When it comes to education, we have forgotten the big picture, the bigger questions of life, and have built castles on shifting sands, with no valuable and meaningful values, with too much concentration on competition and the so-called “success”.
‘We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages.
But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one's psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?...’
To continue and read more on this topic ‘is to be invited to lead kinder, richer and more authentic lives - and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish. This is homework to help us make the most of the rest of our lives.’
Photo: Successful Secrets
First, I would like to share a little, but a very relevant story with you when I attended a conference on ‘Leadership’ in Geneva in 2015 when I said the following:
…’Aristotle was clear on these matters, when he eloquently reminded us: ‘Education of the mind without education of the heart is no education at all.’ And educators ever since have been battling to ensure that education moves humanity forwards not backwards. If knowledge is power, those in the business of facilitating the acquisition of that knowledge need to be making sure that they put that power in the right hands and help those acquiring the knowledge understand their enormous responsibility to use that knowledge well. The imperative for values-led education with the pursuit of wisdom and not just knowledge on its own as its goal has never been more urgently required than it is now: To provide our students with a dynamic moral and spiritual compass, strengthening their resilience and well-being, and to nurture the development of good character, deep thinking and altruistic behaviour. The outcome of values-led education is the positive transformation of individuals and institutions - exactly what our world needs.
Now I want to share with you a little story about a simple speech I gave at a Forum at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva on the afternoon of 25th of June 2015.
This session was a public forum, open to all, including the general public, students, the youth and all other interested individuals. Present also were high level dignitaries from Geneva and senior city and university officials.
Interesting speeches on values-led education, business, trade, finance, etc were made.
Now, my little story:
After the speeches and during the Q&A session, when invited by the moderator (Prof. Christoph Stuckelberger) to make comments or ask questions, whilst I had no prior plan to ask any questions or make any comments, somehow, Christoph saw my raised hand.
I got up and allowed my heart, feelings and emotions to guide me in saying the following (as best I can remember now):
I said:
“When I look all around me, it breaks my heart to see that despite so many gifts that we have been given in this life, to be happy, to lead a good and worthwhile lives, we have abused these gifts and have created such a miserable world, the world of multiple, continuing and deepening crisis. Why?”
I then said:
“When I was a young lad, our elders used to tell us that education is a path to wisdom. Education will empower you to take action in the interest of the common good. It will enable you to build a better world, a world of peace, harmony and prosperity for all.”
I then continued that our elders also used to say that:
“Educators, too, are here to make a difference: To do something meaningful and to leave a legacy that guides future generations to take action in the interest of the common good, building a better world. Educational leaders should seek to create cultures where people learn together and lead together to create real and deep sustainable change.”
I then concluded my remarks by asking:
“Then why is it that with millions and millions more “educated” people in the last few decades, the world is in such a mess, misery and continuing into a deepening crisis, etc, etc?
What we see is not a sign of wisdom, but stupidity, ignorance and arrogance, I said. Don’t you think, it is time, we all come together and think very carefully, what education is, what has gone wrong and what ought to be done?”
Wow! The reaction to my comments in the hall, the continuing conversation during the reception afterwards and the stream of emails I have received since, has been very humbling to me. I firmly believe that this is a challenge to every one of us, a challenge that we must rise to if we are serious about values-driven education.”-The Time is Now for Values-led Education to Make the World Truly Better and Great Again
And now reverting back to: ‘What They Forget to Teach You at School’
Modern Education Model and Teaching with No Heart and No Soul,
Standardised Mumbo Jumbo, is Nothing But an Emperor With No Clothes
Photo: transitionvoice.com
‘The modern world treats education with unique seriousness. Never in the history of humanity have so much thought and so many resources been devoted to the development of the minds of the next generation. In all advanced nations, until a human is 21 or so, there is little else to do other than study. In sensible households, homework has the power of a sacrament. An army of teachers and educators, colleges and pedagogical bureaucrats is set up to feed industrial quantities of the young through complex staging posts of scholastic achievement. Politicians on every side of the spectrum outstrip each other to prove their devotion to the educational cause. The central government-mandated examinations claim a power to determine the course of our whole lives; the dread they provoke can be felt in dawn terrors decades after the event. It may, in rare, tragic but telling instances, feel like there is simply nothing left to live for if the grades go wrong.
'And yet despite all this, it is very rare to find a thoughtful adult who – by middle age or earlier – does not at certain moments of crisis and difficulty look back in a somewhat puzzled and even incensed ways at their school years and wonder why, amidst all the study, the disciplines, the earnest commitments and the panic, so much managed to be passed over in silence. How come, in all those hours sitting in classrooms, did certain fundamental concepts and notions that would (it now seems) have been so important to a halfway decent life somehow slip through the net? How come there was so much time for calculus, the erosion of the upper glacial layer, the politics of the Burgundian states of the 1400s, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and trigonometric equations, and yet so little time for a range of puzzles that have rendered the passage through grown up life so tricky? Why – in short – did no one ever tell us?
Photo:TeachNorthern
'There are, at present, few places for this thought to go. The debate is overwhelmingly focused on how best to deliver an education to a child; not what he or she should be educated in. School curricula are not reverse engineered from the actual dilemmas of adult life. The subjects in the timetable, and their distribution across the week, in no way reflect what will actually go on to make life such a trial; otherwise, we would be hearing a lot more from our teachers about how to approach the dilemmas of relationships, the sorrows of our careers, the tensions of families and the terrors of mortality… To the surprise of any visiting alien, humans blithely educate themselves as if the chief requirement of adulthood were the possession of a set of technical skills, without acknowledging the fact that what mostly runs us into the sands is not any shortfall in our knowledge of matrix algebra or the French pluperfect but our inability to master what we could call the emotional dimensions of our lives: our understanding of ourselves, our capacity to deal with our lovers, children and colleagues, our degrees of self-confidence, our handle on calm and self-compassion. It is failures in these zones that, far more than anything we might pick up at the best schools and universities, ensures the repeated betrayal of humanity’s best hopes for itself.
A painting by Fraser, James Baillie, 1783-1856.View of the mountains; a man pointing to the far
distance as others sit around a fire.Wellcome Library
'When we turn over the thought of what we should have learnt, it typically feels far too late, and far too hopeless. Despite our vigour at innovation in so many areas of the economy, a lethargy can fall over education. It is meekly assumed that it may simply be impossible to teach ourselves the sort of emotional skills whose absence we pay such a heavy price for. As the heirs of a misplaced Romantic philosophy, we assume that we should be guided in the emotional realm by our untutored feelings, that one couldn’t possibly instruct anyone in love or wisdom, fulfilment or kindness, that these have to be the occasional and sporadic fruits of time, not concepts that can be harvested systematically from the start. The collective cost of this resignation is vast. It means that every new generation must collide afresh with problems that are, in theory, already worked out in the minds of their aged predecessors. Every young person is compelled once again to discover, in midnight sobs, what is already theoretically very well known about ending relationships, finding a career or dealing with damaged but well-meaning parents. We set ourselves up on our individual islands, and force ourselves – with needless pain – to reinvent the wheel and rediscover fire. The education system is, in this sense at least, the purveyor of a willed myopia. The focus on those glaciers and the laws of motion become unwitting excuses not to learn the laws of kindness or the principles of family diplomacy. The struggles at court in early modern Europe blind us to the need to make time to learn the history of our own anger and the mastery of the sources of despair…’-What They Forget to Teach You at School
World Science Festival: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN
BBC: What Makes Us Human with Jeremy Vine
Cortona Week in Todi, 22-29 June 2019 – Being Human in a Technological World
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Learn more and buy this book HERE
Learn more and buy this book HERE
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A selection of related readings from our archives:
A Journey of Re-imagining Education
Planting the Seeds of Values-led Education
Photo: inspiringnewbeginnings.com
Yes, it is true: “Education is what makes us fully human”
Brexit, Trump and the failure of our universities to pursue wisdom
Britain today and the Bankruptcy of Ideas, Vision and Values-less Education
Socio-economic justice and education
Detaching Nature from Economics is ‘Burning the Library of Life’
The Time is Now to Explore the Benefits of Nature-Based Education in Our Teaching Models
By Forgetting Mother Nature- We have Now Ended Up with This unenviable World
The Time is Now to Explore the Benefits of Nature-Based Education in Our Teaching Models
Nature the Best Teacher: Re-Connecting the World’s Children with Nature
On the 250th Birthday of William Wordsworth Let Nature be our Wisest Teacher
Poetry is the Education that Nourishes the Heart and Nurtures the Soul
Why We All (Children and Grown Ups) Need Emotional Literacy, Now More than Ever
Our Emotional Inheritance and the need for Emotional Education
A Path to a Spiritual Education for the Common Good: Education for a Just and Sustainable World
Towards an Education Worth Believing In
What if Universities Taught KINDNESS?
Why Happiness Should be Taught at Our Universities
Nature the Best Teacher: Re-Connecting the World’s Children with Nature
A Sure Path to build a Better World: How nature helps us feel good and do good
Finding sanctuary in poetry during lockdown
Reflecting on Life: My Childhood in Iran where the love of poetry was instilled in me
Poetry is the Education that Nourishes the Heart and Nurtures the Soul
The beauty of living simply: the forgotten wisdom of William Morris
Simpler life and simpler times: A Journey in Life
Stop the Seeds of Destruction: Toward teaching economics of the real world
Calling all academic economists: What are you teaching your students?
Small is Beautiful: The Wisdom of E.F. Schumacher
My letter to the editor of FT on the teaching of economics
My Economics and Business Educators’ Oath: My Promise to My Students
- My Poem of the month (March): Look with joy on what is past and Look with hope on what is yet to come
- A Joy Forever: John Keats' poetry lives on 200 years after his death
- Detaching Nature from Economics is ‘Burning the Library of Life’
- The Curse of Neoliberalism and Covid: The Tsunami of Self-harm and Suicide in children and young people
- Can President Biden Restore Hope, Narrow the Division Among Opposing Groups and Build a Better America?