Education and American Life

What is the central purpose of an education in a democracy?

Well, we are working on individual development. The awareness of how this may advance now
in contemporary times is growing.

The individual is given both rights and responsibilities in a democracy. These are the most
basic parameters which help to start the idea of individual lives advancing.

As individuals, we become citizens and then we relate to life in different ways. The rate of
learning and response given varied from person to person. The level of perception and activity
also varies. The type of involvement for each person is affected by the surrounding concerns of
that persons participation.

The idea of Context contains:

1. The People around her/him,
2. The Physical events and conditions around her/him,
3. The Emotional environment surrounding the life moment,
4. The Talk and Mental Awareness/Information which reaches that person,
5. The quality of interaction with those who truly know more, care more, and can help
more.
An individual lives within this immediate context.
The initial context presented in early life forms a starting point for that persons educational path.

Education is not programming or even the delivery of one set of facts. Education has to do with
a complex relationship to the new in a persons life. How do we begin to depend on something
learned? When that something is in place, how do we acknowledge that we are in a lifetime
process of relationship with the whole of life? Thus, if we have learned one small set of
something in life, there is always something beyond this individual achievement that adds to our
ongoing learning process.

To continue a lifetime of learning, two attributes need to be present:

1. The first attribute is insight into the limits of understanding that any position defines.
When you learn a whole body of information that can be shared with others in a positive
way, the process can be like setting up a house. The nature of the house draws those
who can benefit from what you have learned. The contents offered can inform, support
the efforts of others, teach new skills, or even promote the higher thinking that people
need to learn. To take care of this house is a natural responsibility. There needs to be a
location for the information exchange. Also, the tone of the house helps to describe and
support those things which are being taught.
The roof of what you have accomplished or gained in skills/knowledge is also limit of your
ignorance. To remain always within that house in order to serve with that you have constructed,
is to limit your own possibility to learn. Many die a little at this point.

We are meant to live fully as humans. And this means to continue to interact with life at greater
levels of awareness and learning. It is like breathing. Unless you can interact with life-- receive
as well as give, breathe in and breathe out--the life withers. You hold a fixed position, still
helping others, even with the authority of knowing some good things that can help, like those
things which have been contained within the house you built. Teaching, sharing, organizing,
telling stories, writings, etc.,-- All of these can be descriptions of great things about what you
have gone through and what you can pass on to others.

In addition to that function of sharing, putting in a skylight to your own personal continued
learning will emphasize the true importance of that learning. Especially in a democratic process
such as our own, this process of how to continue in individual life by learning even as you share
and teach is sacred.

The second attribute is flexibility. To be able to know a position, and then to change it and
move it to a different way is to demonstrate first flexibility And later the divine freedom of
movement. Right relationship is a learned process. Most people learn to relate first through a
position which seems fixed. Infants remain dependent though unique and separate from birth.
Unable to change position physically at first, they must learn flexibility and movement through
shifts in perspective, in perception, in response to clues from others. Later, they come to a vast
changing point in time. Then, suddenly for most, they decide to move freely. Infants turn over,
sit up, crawl, and then walk with no one to model this change.

At any life stage, to replenish who you are as a person by learning something vital to your own
next step is to awaken again the fresh response of joy, happiness, and delight in the life
process.

In the democratic process--individual learning, giving to others, and then recognizing the need
to learn again form a set of keys to the contributing life.