| 6. EDUCATION: HEART OF THE WSSs30 |
Education is the heart that maintains the life and development of the newly dreamed society. It is the vehicle of transmission and the means to interiorize values and principles over which this society will rest, whose supreme value is peace and the harmony of sharing. That education must be of high quality in the principles and values of the transmitted ideas, using technology as a means, an instrument to reach this goal.
"high quality education in the principles and values of the transmitted ideas, being technology is only a means, as already stated. This labor may train a generation of people energetic in the technological creation and recreation for the development of a great humanity in human beings. Education for full life, by the reinforcement of working for the development of spiritual life related to body and mind" (SJ).
"the supreme value is peace and harmony of sharing all the 'goods and services'; where each one provides what they have or want to provide, because they consider it necessary to serve others, they seek something, if they find it they take it out and make use of what is missing..."�(VS)
In order to dream we must go back again through the heart, that is, to remember, to look with new eyes at the dreams from the past, recognizing and rescuing from them what used to be and still is essential and we haven't reached yet, despite so much commitment, work, struggle and devotion since the diverse ways to exert our citizen rights and duty, in the individual and collective aspects.
From our most intimate spiritual, emotional and intellectual being we rescue the old values of love and forgiveness in their amplest meanings, since only through them will plurality and respect for cultural diversity become a reality and an intrinsic feeling to the human being's occupation. The respect for plurality and diversity carries along implicitly the respect for all human beings socially coexisting, and it is explicitly and concretely a respect for life in all its spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical potentiality, for every animal, vegetable and mineral species inhabiting the planet.
Love is the basis of forgiveness, the person who cannot love cannot forgive since this is the result of giving love, even from the distance that differences impose.
This education soaked in love must fundamentally develop the critical sense of the social being inside ourselves and stimulate in that same being the capacity to dream, to realize, to keep creating and recreating dreams. So it is necessary:
- To learn to think
- To learn to communicate and cyber-communicate
- To learn from the values regulating social processes, to act consequently as social individuals committed with the collective one.
- To learn to create for enjoyment, not for accumulation, since the socio-cultural system declares that the creations realized in life aren't directly transferable, but they belong to the community, therefore accumulating for the descendants or its selection is pointless.
- To learn to dream and articulate dreams to reality, thus enabling the search for new ways for its realization.
- To develop in educators the love for knowledge and teaching. To be craftsmen building and shaping tools for the development of thought, thus making possible its transformation into art. To be artists who, being in the projection of individual and collective thought, accomplish making the human being the most beautiful expression of and for eternity.
"It is to develop that infinite capacity to love and forgive that everybody has but doesn't put into practice. Truly forgiving is even harder than loving. That is why it is associated with God" (LGR).
Nevertheless, to accomplish this commitment, society must revise and update the paradigms of education and reassess the educator's labor.
Regarding LAC, reassessing the educator's labor implies:
- Improving and modernizing the educational facilities (particularly public education), concerning infrastructure, equipment and material used for education.
- Improving the conditions and socio economic and cultural situations of the educators (salary, employment, social security, continuous training, etc.)
- Increasing and updating the training level of the educators in the use and management of the ICTs, and in the knowledge of the informal competences of their culture. And strengthening their specific subjects of intervention in formal education.
- Making them aware and training them in understanding their role as facilitators of the access to knowledge and wisdom. Training them for the management of all the learning methods that stimulate and awaken the critical search of knowledge, thus developing the feelings of sharing, collaboration and solidarity.
As for the revision and updating of the paradigms, it is about modifying the present format based on educational characteristics now considered outdated. Just to name a few:
- unidirectional (from teacher to student),
- vertical (conceived and performed top-down),
- closed collectives (one class students, one school),
- art as a complementary resource and not as a pedagogical tool to awaken human creativity and his/her need to create beauty,
- the search for individual knowledge (each one studies for him/herself, for individual accomplishments),
- the search for formal knowledge underestimating ancestral wisdom.
In the WSSs education must be:
- multidirectional (from teacher to student, form student to parents and tutors, from student to teacher, from teacher to parents and tutors, from everyone to the community and from the community to everyone),
- horizontal (conceived bottom-up), trying to figure out when applying a syllabus or curriculum, which are the interests and concerns of the students as objects and subjects of education. And performing applied teaching, where all the theoretical aspects are exemplified and put into practice from the particular interests of the students and from their own socio cultural realities.
- from open collectives to virtual communities stimulating the collaboration (internal VCs: composed of students of one class, one school, VCs composed of teachers, mothers and fathers, etc.; external VCs: other classes and schools, international VCs: among VCs of different countries)
- art for everyone as a crucial instrument for creativity, to stimulate dreaming, utopia, for the artistic drain of every human being; in such a way that being an artist can be a real choice and not a constant sacrifice or the fate of being born in the right household, adequate in resources and possibilities for it. Art leads close to love, because it is gestated in the womb of human creativity and it expresses the search and the need for creating beauty.
- the search for sharing wisdom (sharing knowledge, developing the collaboration in the application and/or concretion of acquired wisdom and knowledge)
- assessment of ancestral wisdom, from non-formal knowledge to formal educational instances
"I dream of a society where education consists in learning to think and communicating respectfully through all means... a society in which being an educator is the most appreciated occupation, and educators are the people who love knowledge and teaching" (MZ)
"I dream that those that do not dream learn how to dream: whether some think that we do not have time to dream, or that we are too stubborn-rational (like Senaida says), or that we are already living our dreams without realizing it or that we believe that dreaming is not worth anything or that we let dreamers dream for us while we are busy with reality. Or because we confuse everything and we dream reality while we daydream, fractal spaces between cyber reality and concrete dreams" (YK)
6.1. Kinetic Education for change
Changes to the education system generate and/or induce changes to the rest of the systems, acting effectively upon governability and justice. Changes in the economic system create new social progress prospects showing a new course for the individuals, the community, the country, the region and the world. These changes are the result of a transformation at conscience levels based on the constructivist dialogue of sharing knowledge, the interest in learning to learn permanently and reciprocally.
"It is more like an inherent consequence in the conscience changing process that has provoked social relationships based on constructivist dialogue: it is more and more clear that the real legacy from parents to their children is to share their knowledge and train them how to learn, and collectively speaking, to hand down a preserved ecosystem that fulfills their needs. The aim is to educate always and in a way that could be adapted to the environment" (DP).
"The people have learned to cure themselves. Doctors exist; however, their role is to teach, to stay with the patient, to prevent and in the last resort, to cure. It is then when education is essential! Schools will stimulate the creation of utopias and the search for their realization, although they are only experimental. All the teachings involve a minimum of training related to self-healing and prevention of disease (during the whole formal education process in the educational establishments)" (SJ).
In these WSSs knowledge is the fundamental wealth and its distribution is based on the principle of equal opportunities for every human being no matter their condition or socio-cultural situation or status31
(of the class, ethnic group, race, sex, etc.). Every human being exercises their right to access and enjoy the knowledge. The ancient knowledge of each society comprises an integral and essential part of the curriculum to be developed in the places were formal education is given and to establish the required mechanisms to transmit that knowledge32
in every community is an assumed responsibility by those who have the knowledge. For example: an electronic contest about the systematized oral tradition processes in the educational establishments with the participation of the elderly people in the communities. This will transform oral tradition into
"electoral" tradition, that is to say - oral tradition via electronic means.
By means of the ITCs many applications that allow us to rescue the ancient teachings that link us to other ways of DOING and BEING without depending on technology -and without discriminating against what is not accepted by the rational logic of the scientific knowledge- are performed.
"... Knowledge is the alpha and omega, we do not distinguish people by their color or religion or continent anymore: knowledge without those connotations is universal; freedom is the possibility everybody has to be filled with knowledge. Since their early years, men and women learn how to read and write (from the age of two), to meet each other and to communicate, to respect; there are no belief limits, universal values are developed and promoted and among these values there is to serve and help your neighbor" (VS)
"We make use of the most advanced technological devices, but along with them different activities are carried out to watch the stars, we rescue the teachings of our ancestors which make us become independent of technology. At the same time, we take care of our soul, because if a tractor and the means to produce food for the body are important, it is also important that every human being feed their soul, their spirit, not matter what they have to do to contribute to keep their lives under harmonic conditions. Because tractors would not be fitted with telescopes and a user's guide and organic fertilizers so as to see whether the harvest is ready or when it would be the best time to reap depending on the position of this or that planet, star, etc. And, by the way, you should learn that it is more feasible to win the love of a woman when Venus is visible rather than exerting any psychological, physical or emotional violence. To reconcile and meet with the moon strengthens our identity and fills us up with the energy of love (though there should be a tendency for that for our part!!)
"To know that when Mars, Saturn or Pluto are significantly active, due to their influence human beings are more sensitive to generate the coercive force, the force that will attempt to gather the elements independently regardless of their individual nature or tendencies. When Venus is shining in splendor another force that links living creatures to their intrinsic nature comes out into the open, that force is known as love... one of the most stable unions... the force that stimulates beauty and creativity" (SJ).
The relations of power are based on knowledge, therefore there is no point in discriminating socio-cultural aspects related to gender, social class, race, religion, age, geographical situation, etc. The social value is established according to the quality and quantity of knowledge and to the formal or informal learning a person has. This implies that, during the construction process of these societies, it is necessary to work and to see that the access to knowledge through the ITCs is not going to reproduce, reinforce or bring up to date existing segregations or discriminations, but rather eliminate them.
"The family approach comes back to the place it should have always been: to provide the best living conditions to the descendants, and above all, offer them the best opportunity to learn surrounded by shared values inside a shared, viable ecosystem. To transmit culture, values, to teach, to give the opportunity to learn, to give the descendants the possibility to produce riches in an autonomous way within a civilization in harmony with their planet and their universe" (DP).
Due to the quality of the educational processes that are being developed through the ITC, we are worried about the re-construction of the cultural patterns that define the diverse identities at local, national and regional levels.
"It is necessary to build areas with practices that guarantee the full development of our personal capacities; to become builders of our identity, by building us up by means of daily production practices and avoiding assimilating others' culture. Communicating is much more than only listening, reading, paying attention or copying others" (Mapa, 4.22.03).
The difficulty does not reside in the consumption or non-consumption of others' culture (apart from being inevitable, it is also enriching). The inappropriate thing is when that consumption does not have a referent so as to take into consideration the personal, local or national aspects. This involves the self-esteem a person has and the positive appreciation of the sense of belonging to a determined cultural and/or geographical place, that is to say, the communitarian self-esteem. Along the cyberspace corridors, the "who am I" and the "what am I like", the "where do I come from" and "where am I" (at individual and group levels) can be pushed into the background if the feeling of belonging and its positive assessment are not very well versed. On the other hand, culture as a group construction goes through the individualities benefiting from them. That is why we think that the development models, as never before, will have to narrow its cultural scope so as to guarantee not only viability but also its appropriation in terms of individuality and community or nation.
[30] Chapter taken from the Girasoles Synthesis
[31] The condition makes reference to the material possessions and the environment (education, drinking water, etc.), while the situation or status refers to social or economic status (income, job opportunities, etc.)
[32] This increases the socio-cultural function of senior citizens, facilitating their reintegration into society and strengthening the self-esteem of this sector of the population.
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