Are schools injurious to health?§
The implicit curriculum and its relation to mental health

Matthijs Cornelissen

Introduction

Educational theories and policies tend to include noble and inspiring ideals regarding “all-round development" of the students. The practice lives, however, rarely up to the intent. More often than not, the content of the curriculum and the manner in which it is transacted are such, that a negative effect on the healthy development of the students is almost inevitable. Children all over the world tend to spend a considerable part of their day in schools, and there are many good reasons why this is almost universally considered a good thing. Children themselves, especially when they are very young, tend to take their time in school seriously, and accept their successes and failures at school as the yardstick for assessing how well they manage their lives in general. Schooling is, however, not an unmixed blessing. There are many aspects of school life that can hardly be considered conducive to the healthy development of either child or teacher. This chapter attends to some of these factors, and suggests the direction in which a solution might be found.

Pathogenic elements of the implicit school curriculum

It is often said that what really matters in education is what remains once you’ve forgotten all they have tried to teach you. In its absoluteness, this is no doubt an exaggeration, but it is hard to overestimate the influence of what is known as the implicit curriculum: what children learn from the educational context, from the way the explicit curriculum is transacted. The effect from the educational environment is bound to be strong, if only because it hardly differs from year to year, or from subject to subject: It exerts more or less the same influence during each and every class, each and every day, each and every year a child goes to school. Given how many hours children spend in school, and how much importance they and their parents attach to this attendance, schools are thus rather likely to play a major role in “building the character” of the students. The question is, however, whether the type of character schools build is what the individual and the society really need. To get some grip on this question, we’ll look in the first part of this chapter at what Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson (1967) called the pragmatics of communication. In other words, we’ll look at what happens to children when they attend school, not from an ideal or formal perspective, but from a pragmatic, psychological one.

The difficulties with what one could call the “standard school environment” are quite well known. They have been described with great insight over forty years ago by authors like Ivan Illich (1971) and John Holt (1964). It is also true that at least in Europe and North America, most nursery and primary schools do not follow this pattern any longer. But it is still holding out in the developing countries1, and its effects are likely to haunt humanity for many years to come. I’ll try to summarize here some of the most serious problems in as concise a form as I can. Interestingly, many of them arise out of the typical classroom layout. It is such a classic, with such widespread acceptance, that virtually every educated human being will immediately recognise Figures1and 2 as a classroom: each child behind a small desk, the desks neatly ordered in rows, the teacher in front.

Figure 1.Neatly Ordered Desks

As Figure 2 shows, the arrangement allows (almost) all students to see the teacher, and the teacher, walking a little to the left and right, can keep an eye on every child. If education had been nothing but instruction, and learning nothing but a passive absorption of pre-digested knowledge, all would have been well. This, however, is not the case.

Figure 2. Lines of Vision

Pervasive lack of trust and harmony. Problems with the standard classroom layout arise mainly from the simple fact that it is not at all natural for children to spend their days sitting quietly behind little desks. The most visible victims of this arrangement are the increasing numbers of children with attention deficit disorder (ADD) who are nowadays routinely treated with drugs, while the vast majority of them would be quite fine with a bit more physical activity (and friendly hugs). The difficulties are, however, not limited to this increasing yet still relatively small group. They affect all children, and they seem to be due primarily to the antagonism that arises almost intrinsically between on the one side the children, who are forced to do what they don’t like, and on the other side the teachers, who are responsible for imposing the system. This antagonism forms the unpleasant backdrop for several educational practices that are bound to have a negative impact on the mental health of whole generations of human beings.

The next and perhaps strangest thing about the standard classroom layout is that it inhibits communication between the students. Even when in a more economical arrangement students are grouped in twos on every bench, communication between them is still looked at as a disturbance, and, on many occasions, as cheating. In other words, to the extent that the students are obedient and conform to the system, they will learn to consider their peers (and to some extent even themselves) primarily as a potential source of conflict and disturbance. This is a highly peculiar, antisocial attitude towards self and others, and hardly something any well-meaning educationist would like to foster, but this is the attitude that flows naturally from the basic, physical set-up. The need to communicate with others is a very deep-rooted and irrepressible part of the human character. So suppressing this need for too many hours a day, leaves children in a permanent state of inner conflict and unease, a state in which they have to be always on their guard, distrusting their own and their peers’ natural impulses. It is not hard to recognise traces of this unease in the adult population.

If a student does not accept this negative view of himself and his friends, he has very few options: the only simple way to stay loyal and close to his peers is to defy in one way or another the authority of the teacher. In other words, given the conflict that is built into the situation, the child can only remain socially connected by siding with the authority or by ganging up with the other kids against it. These are hardly attitudes the educational system can be happy to promote; and yet it does.

Competing for secondary gains: A corruption of the will. The traditional classroom set-up has another negative effect that has far-reaching consequences. The child has little to look forward to in the standard arrangement except for whatever little warmth and appreciation he or she can elicit from the teacher. The teacher, who has a large group of children to motivate, will be inclined to present this appreciation as a scarce commodity the students have to compete for. For the sake of convenience and “objectivity”, this appreciation then tends to get formalised as grades. As a result, children learn, systematically, during virtually every minute of their school-going life, to compete with their peers for the scarce and purely symbolic commodity of “top grades”, or, if they know they cannot manage this, at least for grades that are considered “sufficient”. In other words, they learn to do whatever the system demands in fierce competition with others, and in total disregard of more natural, more human sources of happiness and satisfaction.

Training incompetence. A quality that is exceedingly difficult to cultivate in the traditional classroom arrangement is individual initiative. Power, control and initiative are so completely centralised in the teacher, that even a well-meaning teacher can hardly create space for individual students to initiate their own work. Unfortunate as this is in its own right, it also has several untoward and entirely unnecessary consequences.

The most well known difficulty is that the uniform arrangement of the benches in the classroom makes it difficult for teachers to offer different assignments to students with different interests, learning styles and levels of capacity. Yet, if the teacher is incapable of providing worthwhile activities for different students at the same time, many of them will find it hard to find anything worthwhile to do. The less gifted children will learn to spend their time in an overwhelming, threatening environment, which they can neither understand nor control. The more gifted students will get bored, and as they can be rudely interrupted any time, they will find it safer to play silly games, than to do whatever they’re really interested in doing. Being stumped or playing meaningless games to pass time can hardly be habits teachers would like children to develop, yet this is exactly what the system encourages.

Interestingly even within the narrow range of behavior that is both constructive and compliant, the scope for developing useful mental capacities and mental skills is small. If a teacher leaves half the period for student responses, and if there are less than 30 students in the class—and in most countries these are completely unrealistic conditions—each student can still hardly expect to speak for more than one minute during a one-hour period. Yet, active engagement is crucial for effective learning, and for language learning, the need to speak is essential. If a language is taught only during one period a day, then a-minute-a-period means a-minute-a-day, and this is obviously not enough to acquire mastery. As a consequence, in a traditional classroom setup there is simply no realistic possibility for children to learn a language that is not already spoken—and spoken well—at home. The same difficulty mars effective learning of many other skills or mental capacities a school is supposed to teach. Especially when student–teacher ratios are high (in Indian Government schools it is often 60:1) most of the actual learning has then to take place outside school hours with the help of parents and tutors, in other words, in situations where the student–teacher ratios are much, much smaller: a development which seriously hinders the aim of socioeconomic equality which compulsory universal schooling is supposed to serve.

Training opportunism: A corruption of the mind. In spite of what well-intentioned educationists and administrators may claim and hope for, and in spite of all the efforts individual teachers may make, the traditional education system, as a system, is still solidly syllabus-centred. Individuals and whole administrations may do their level best to introduce more activity-based learning and child-centred education, but in practice, teachers are still duty-bound to “transact the curriculum”, and they are judged on how well the students master its content. Once again, had schooling involved only a small part of a child’s life, all would have been well, but going to school is for most children a full-time job. As a result, students hardly get much of a chance to develop, for example, the all-important life-skill of making free choices in areas that really matter to them. Nor do they develop the ability to evaluate and take full responsibility for what they have chosen. (The one exception is the choice between compliance and defiance, but, as we discussed earlier, that choice has no satisfactory answer.) As they are not self-motivated to do what they are supposed to do in the class, they have to be cajoled into collaboration by a system of carrots and sticks. We saw already that in a more formal setting these tend to come in the form of grades; low grades as a deterrent, high grades as encouragement. Where the teacher has a strong and dominating personality, he or she may manage to get a class to do what he or she wants even without using grades, but the principle remains the same: the children learn to do whatever is asked from them as long as it delivers the secondary rewards they have learnt to seek for.

The habit of working for secondary gains has a deeply corrupting influence in the area of motivation and will, but when this secondary gain is based on the evaluation of one's work, the corrupting influence extends to the area of perception and judgment. When evaluation is used as motivator, there arises in the child an in itself quite erroneous perception that there is an inherent conflict between what is desirable and what is true. This is, of course not to claim that that conflict never arises naturally, but when evaluation is persistently used as the main source of motivation, it is kind of hammered into the child’s mind that there is a conflict between what is true and what is pleasant and the child is almost bound to conclude that this conflict is inherent and pervasive. When evaluation is used as motivator, the corruption that takes place has its effect on both sides of the equation: on the side of the motivation that leads to the action, and on the side of the evaluation that follows the action. In other words, there is then not only the subversion of a child’s natural eagerness to learn, but there is also a direct attack on the child’s willingness, and subsequently ability, for impartial judgment of his own actions. To say it somewhat plainly, it is hard to be honest if there is too much self-interest at stake.

This pressure in the direction of opportunism is greatly reinforced by constant evaluation. The fact that children are continuously judged on criteria that are not of their own making conveys at least two implicit messages: (a) There is a clearly defined right and a wrong way of thinking and doing things, which is implied by the fact that if this were not the case, the entire evaluation process would lose its meaning and validity; (b) What is right and what is wrong cannot be determined by the student but is decided either by the teachers or by “the system”, something rather vague and unaccountable that’s even above their teachers. It is hard to accept that blind faith in “higher-ups” and “the system” is an acceptable outcome of a sane system of education.

There is another, more subtle problem with the imposition of a fixed syllabus. Teachers often ask questions to their students. These questions, however, are only rarely genuine questions in the sense that the teacher doesn’t know the answer to his own question. Teachers are taught to ask, as much as possible, open-ended questions. Yet, even when they do so, these seemingly “open questions” are hardly ever about something that is genuinely open to a variety of different answers. Almost always, the teacher knows the “correct” answer beforehand and asks the question only to check whether the students can produce that specific answer. This can create for the students a number of difficult dilemmas, for which only a few can always find constructive answers. The nature of the dilemma depends on whether the question is about facts or opinions. The border between facts and opinions is of course fluid, and to quite an extent a matter of attitude. Some people live in a world where almost everything is definite and well defined this way or that. Others live in a much more fluid world where “it all depends”. For most children, the difference is clear—there are things that are straightforward, like maths and geography, and other areas, like values, relationships and feelings, where it is far more difficult to be sure of what is “right” and what is “wrong”.

When the question is “factual”, in the sense that there actually is, or at least seems to be one clearly correct answer, the situation is still comparatively simple. John Holt has described with great perspicuity what happens in such situations. Those children who are considered bright by the teacher—and by themselves—make a genuine attempt at producing the right answer. They trust that even if they get it wrong, they will still be treated with respect on the basis of their standing reputation. John Holt observed that in fact, such students are often given a second chance. Those children, however, who are considered dumb by the teacher—and often by themselves—cannot trust at all that they will be treated so generously. They have, first of all, a greater chance of making a mistake, and they suspect, often correctly, that if they get it wrong, they will be derided in front of the whole class. Doing your best and then losing can be pretty frustrating, so they are tempted to avoid the risk. They tend to try this first by getting at the correct answer by stealth, and if this doesn’t work, they may give, on purpose, a wrong answer. The incorrect answer does of course guarantee defeat, but the shame of the defeat is compensated for by the satisfaction of having been in charge of the entire chain of events leading to it. Though the teacher has the apparent victory, the student knows that behind the scene, it is the student who has pulled the strings. Making such negative choices is obviously disastrous for the intellectual growth of the child, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is fairly common. Once this habit has established itself in a child, it is not hard to imagine how easily this habit can invade other areas of life and how disastrous the results can be.

When the answers do not have one factual answer, the situation gets more complex. The question that then arises is what the child should do when the answer that comes up in her own mind differs from the one the teacher expects. If the child is very clever, she can keep the two separate by giving the teacher what he expects and yet remembering and treasuring her own answer. This is however rare, and the few children who manage it tend to come from homes where they get full support from their parents to keep up their own individuality. For most children this is not the case, and so they are faced with an existential dilemma. If they stick to their own answer, they are in trouble because most teachers consider it their duty to teach, and they don’t appreciate “recalcitrant”, “stubborn”, “uncooperative” or simply “unintelligent” students. For most students, compliance is thus far more likely to lead to attractive results, and so the vast majority of them gives in, and tries to answer what the teacher wants to hear. Now this is once more far more nefarious than it may look at first sight, for what happens is somewhat similar to what happens when evaluation is used as motivator: the child learns to suppress what is true, for the sake of what is convenient. To look at it from a slightly different angle, the child is trained to be other-directed (if not plain opportunistic), and in the process gradually loses the ability to distinguish for himself what is true and false.

To summarize the argument so far, the traditional classroom arrangement virtually prohibits learning how to build constructive relationships, how to respect differences between people, how to feel at ease with oneself and others, how to recognise one’s own and others’ strengths, how to pool these for a good common cause, how to make one's own value judgements and work constructively together towards some meaningful end. One could well argue that this is a caricature, and that good teachers can manage to create an atmosphere of cooperation and common purpose even in a traditional classroom. This is no doubt true, but to the extent that this succeeds, it is an individual achievement, which is brought about in spite of the system. The factors mentioned above still play their antisocial and pathogenic role as undercurrents inherent in the system.

What are the alternatives?

Fortunately, there are effective and viable alternatives to the type of authoritarian schooling described above. For an out-dated but still interesting exposition, one could consult for example Freedom to learn for the Eighties (Rogers 1983), which contains an insightful discussion of the reasons some experiments succeeded while others failed. My own experience with the development of a radically different approach to education based on the work of Sri Aurobindo has convinced me that it is quite well possible to design and implement a system of education in which all participants—students, teachers and management—learn and grow as human beings while staying true to themselves. For some excellent third person assessments of the same project, see Raina and Sibia (1999) and Sibia (2011), and for a detailed description Huppes (2002). Comparing our own work with that of others, it looks to me, moreover, that the basic, underlying principle of such alternatives is so utterly simple, that it is almost embarrassing to mention it: The one thing needed to improve education is respect from the teachers for the students. The only additional condition is that this respect must be genuine, soul-based and applied systematically and rigorously to all aspects of the educational enterprise.

Over the years we have asked hundreds of psychologists, teachers, educationists and parents about their strongest memories from their own school-going years. Interestingly, both, their best and their most painful experiences, had almost always to do with the presence or absence of respect from the side of their teachers. In other words, the single attitude, or one should perhaps say, the single quality that can make up for the defects of “standard”, class-wise schooling seems to be a genuine, soul-based respect for the students. In an ideal world, the whole system of education should be built on such respect, but in practice it hardly is. Even if the system as a whole is not, individuals can sometimes still keep up the right spirit, but it is not made easy for them. For one single teacher, for example, it is exceedingly difficult to do good work within a school system that does not support it. From our experience it appears that the minimum grouping in which genuine educational reform can take place consists of one or more good teachers, a willing principal and a supportive management, but much depends of course on how much freedom the local laws and culture allow.

For a solution on a larger scale we are confronted with a peculiar problem that has to do with the initial qualifiers: the respect must be “genuine and soul-based”, but what is that? As an innocent, naive human individual, I “kind of know” what “genuine” and “soul-based” mean, but is there place for such ethereal concepts in science, and thus in public life? To answer this question we have to have a look at the very foundations of science and the role science has played, and still plays, in education.

Education and the scientific method

A highly respected professor in Educational Innovation once told me in total earnest that whatever can be researched is useless for educational practice, and that whatever really matters in education is beyond the scope of research. As he was clearly committed to the field of education, I asked him what made him stick to his job at the University. His response was that because of the research he did at the University, people believed what he said in public lectures and Government Committees, but that what he said there was not at all based on the kind of research he did. I thought this was rather shocking, and one could probably argue that his low opinion of research in education is exaggerated, but many in the field will recognise the basic problem. There can be little doubt that science has become the official knowledge system of our global civilization, and that within science, it is psychology that is responsible for the study of human nature. Psychology is thus the fundamental science on which our educational methods should be based. If psychological research is considered irrelevant by key players in the field, the question arises why this is so and what we can do about it.

I have no scientific proof for any of the negative effects of schooling on mental health that I have discussed in this chapter. This is, however, not for want of trying: the problem is that scientific proof in fields like mental health and education is extremely difficult to achieve. Issues of epistemology and methodology are complex and in the social sciences the subject of much debate, but it may still be interesting to attempt a very short overview of the main difficulties and possibilities, as these may give us a hint on how education might be taken forward more effectively. The behaviorist approach which is still responsible for the bulk of psychological research, is by choice and definition limited to external behaviour. In its early forms, it had thus very little to say about most of the invisible things that are important in education and that make human life worth living, things like consciousness, feelings, values and even meaning itself. Strangely, this did not prevent it from being used in education. Many of our modern learning theories have their origin in animal experiments in which rats, mice and pigeons are taught to produce arbitrary behavior by presenting them with the right regime of rewards and punishments.2 In such experiments the “negative reinforcement” typically consists of electrical shocks given to the animal’s feet or tail; the “positive reinforcement” consists of food-pellets; and “motivation to learn” is regulated by depriving the animal subjects of the positive stimulus beforehand, so that it can quantified as the difference between their “free feeding weight” and their actual weight. There are many reasons to object to such studies, but the most serious problem with them is that they were generalised mindlessly to learning in children. The result was a strong endorsement of educational practices which replace the natural learning of children, which consists of happy, playful attempts at making sense of their existence in the world, by learning of for the child arbitrary, meaningless facts under pressure of a reinforcement regime that consists of deprivation, punishment and secondary rewards. In other words, children are taught systematically, throughout their formative years, to do meaningless things in order to obtain “incentives” in an overall climate of deprivation. This is not a minor, innocent error. Though hard to prove or quantify, it seems likely that this has contributed considerably to the pattern of increasing alienation and obsessive production and consumption that is the hallmark of our global civilization. Later schools of behaviorism learned to deal with more subtle, not directly material things, and as such they are an improvement. The problem is that they manage this through surveys that are based on lay introspection, a source that is notoriously unreliable. All that their large-scale surveys, however sophisticated they may be, can thus contribute is an epidemiology of “representative" but superficial and unreliable lay self-perceptions. A more radical step forward was taken by social constructionism. Its qualitative methodologies allow the researcher to be choosy in the selection of his subjects, and as a direct consequence, its findings tend to be more refined and humanly meaningful than those of behaviorism, but they are still limited to what sensitive, ordinary people have always known about human nature. For education, the biggest advantage of the constructionist paradigm has been that it allowed Piaget's ideas to become mainstream. This is a positive change because Piaget asserts that learning in humans does not consist only of simple training and a passive imbibing of ready-made answers, but also of actively reconstructing one's own mental universe. A large-scale adoption of Piaget's theory of learning can be expected to rectify many of the problems mentioned in this chapter, as it forces teachers to respect the individuality of their different students. But constructionism as such does not go deep enough. The reason for this is that constructions need a foundation and constructionism does not provide for this necessity. Without a foundation, constructions collapse, and when constructionism is applied to itself, it leads to the conclusion that “anything goes” (Feyerabend, 1975, quoted in Skinner 1985). The hard sciences don't have this problem; their dual foundation of physical experiments and mathematics suffices for almost all practical purposes. Both have something inevitable about them, and it is very rare that major controversies remain unresolved in the hard sciences in the way they do in the social sciences.3 It appears to me that the main reason that mainstream psychology has not found a solid methodological and ontological foundation for itself is the fact that it has not found a methodologically sound way to study the natural core of its subject-area: consciousness. Though consciousness has become again, after a long gap, a respectable subject in academic discourse, the mainstream position is still that it is an “epiphenomenon”. In other words, consciousness is considered a causally ineffective side effect that—unexplainably— emerges from the complexity of the physical activities in the brain. This is completely incommensurate with the role consciousness plays in our human existence. Psychologically, we are our consciousness: without it we would not exist, or at least, we would not know that we exist. Without consciousness, nothing, absolutely nothing would matter. And science, science would not exist at all.

The one major civilization that has given consciousness the central position it deserves, right from the beginning of recorded history, is the Indian civilization. Transpersonal psychology has recognised this, and with help from the various Indian traditions it has expanded the scope of psychology considerably, but it somehow misses the depth and solidity of its original sources. One of the reasons for this defect is that it has too often utilized the findings of Indian yoga and Buddhist meditation, but not the underlying culture and the rigor of its psychological inquiry. In the next and last section, we'll have a quick look at what the Indian tradition can contribute in these areas.

The contribution from Indian psychology

As a collective enterprise, science has not yet made full use of everything humanity has to offer. The global civilization is as yet global only in its reach, but not in its origin. Science, as the main knowledge system on which our civilization is built, makes extensive use of the Euro-American cultural tradition, but it has, till now, almost completely ignored what other cultures have to offer in terms of knowledge generation. The “mindfulness" practices of (Hatha) yoga and meditation, for example, are increasingly used for stress relief and therapy, but the underlying knowledge system is ignored. We have not bothered to find out how the Indian tradition arrived at the detailed knowledge that gave rise to these clearly effective techniques. This is remarkable, because these techniques are based on something that our global civilization desperately needs and yet clearly lacks: a rigorous and effective methodology to study consciousness. The Indian civilization has specialised in this area for thousands of years, and it has developed in this domain a detailed mastery which is in many ways comparable to our modern mastery in the domain of electricity and electromagnetism. Yoga is in its culture of origin not only a fitness programme that delivers physical beauty and mental relaxation. Neither is it only a soteriological endeavour aimed at individual liberation. Yoga, and especially jnanayoga, is also a method to arrive at valid knowledge, knowledge about ourselves and knowledge about how we are related to the universe and to that which is beyond the universe. As the basic principles of yoga are rooted in experience and have been systematised with admirable mental rigour and coherence, yoga deserves to be looked at as a science—and because it is effective also as a technology—of consciousness. Though this is not the place to give an exposition of the various Indian knowledge systems, there are two aspects of their possible use in psychology and education I'd like to highlight.

When American psychologists came to the conclusion that introspection did not produce reliable knowledge, they did not discover anything new: the Indian tradition had known this since times immemorial. The difference is that while American psychology simply gave up on it and shifted its attention to the study of outer behaviour, the Indian tradition put a tremendous collective effort into figuring out the cause of the unreliability. Its conclusion was that the root cause for the low quality of ordinary psychological knowledge is that our consciousness is too much entangled in the workings of our mind. As a result we are obsessed with the defence of our existence as one small creature in a large and dangerous world, we have vested interests, and so we cannot judge freely. Mainstream science has accepted this idea in the study of physical nature as the need for objectivity, for “a view from nowhere”, to use the charming phrase coined by Nagel (1980).Science has not pursued this same principle with sufficient persistence for subjective, inner enquiry, probably because the methods for doing so were never developed with sufficient rigour within the Euro-American tradition. For the physical sciences it is sufficient to draw back from one's first impressions and habitual thoughts, and adopt a more disciplined style of thinking. For psychology one has to draw back further, one has to stand back completely from one's own thinking, feeling and sensing, and watch all these inner movements from an entirely pure, uninvolved consciousness. The ancient Indian rishis found—and anyone with sufficient mental discipline can confirm this—that humans can actually do this. We can withdraw our consciousness from its preoccupation with self-assertion and self-defence, and we can withdraw it from its normal involvement in thoughts, feelings and even sensations. They also found, perhaps surprisingly, that our consciousness does not diminish in the process—it actually increases in clarity and intensity. In other words, they found that it is possible, though not necessarily easy, to fix one's consciousness in a position from where it can observe the workings of one's mind with complete impartiality. If one does so, it becomes possible to achieve levels of precision and detail that go far beyond those that can be reached in more ordinary states of consciousness. It may be noted in this context that science does not only progresses through experiments. It also progresses by refining its instruments, and in psychology the main instrument is human nature. Indian approaches to psychology offer thus the possibility of using yoga as a method to perfect our own inner nature as a kind of psychological observatory, as an inner “instrument of knowledge" (antahkarana) (Cornelissen, 2006, 2007, 2011). It is this that could give constructionism a solid foundation in terms of method.

The second point is related to the first, and it is, that once we acknowledge and begin to use the possibilities of yoga as knowledge system, we'll discover that our human nature is far more complex—and far more beautiful—than mainstream psychology has been able to fathom with its present set of methods. The ability to change, relocate and explore one's own consciousness at will, opens the possibility of exploring one's inner nature in a manner that is entirely beyond the scope of naïve introspection and spontaneous experience. It makes it possible to study with perfect mental rectitude and full academic rigour domains of human experience that mainstream science has been forced to relegate to the domain of institutionalised religion and personal belief. The secrets of our inner drives and motives, the origin and operations of intuition and other forms of direct knowledge, the original source of our sense of identity, all these can actually be studied in a systematic, rigorous manner. Issues like the soul, which till now were shunned by science as utterly beyond its ambit, can finally be "naturalised". The impact that such a development could have, not only on our individual lives but also on the society as a whole can hardly be fathomed. As for education, it could finally become, what it should have been all along, the development of our nature as a trustworthy and effective instrument for the soul to express itself in the world.4 It would not only increase our understanding of what life in this exceedingly complex and mysterious universe is actually about, but it would also increase the overall level of harmony in our global society, for the deeper one studies one's own consciousness, the more it becomes clear that we are ultimately all one. For in the end, there is only one consciousness, in which we all, each in his or her own different and limited ways, participate. 

Conclusion

I hope to have shown in a perhaps unscientific but nevertheless convincing manner that there are quite a number of entirely unnecessary, yet still amazingly common practices in mainstream education that deserve to be described as deleterious to mental health, both at the individual and the collective level. Though cause and effect are difficult to assess in the social domain, there seems to be a direct link between those practices and some of the most serious ills that beset our global civilization. Eugene Taylor (1999, pp. 289–296) argues in Shadow Culture, his insightful book on the relation between spirituality and science in American history, that we can expect to see a growing influence of Indian ideas on the developing global civilization, and especially a major shift in its basic epistemological assumptions, away from materialism and in the direction of Indian spirituality. If Taylor is right, and science does indeed move in this direction, then it may finally be able to help us develop the genuine, soul-based respect that our children need.

References:

Endnotes