Our educations systems claim to teach us how to think, but all they do is teach us what to think. From preschool through a doctorate, we are graded upon our ability to conform to a certain, established view of reality (based mostly on greed and dominance), and we are rewarded when we prove our conformity to these fear-based motives. All along we are discouraged from questioning the established sense of reality. In fact, we are penalized if we do so.

Way back in the fourth century BC, Chuang Tzu, a Chinese philosopher and teacher noted that: "Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education." Our educational systems are the foundations of our future. What they have created is a collective social insanity that is condoned and reinforced by a historical form of pragmatic egomania. And it's getting worse with every generation.

We have been educationally and socially brainwashed into an overly-competitive society that only intensifies our fears and anxieties while de-emphasizing all humanitarian curriculum. We have made our schools as competitive and impersonal as the most ruthless business environment. Little wonder that violence has invaded the "hallowed halls of learning." It's not that we've taken God out of our schools. It's that we've downplayed the importance of humanities in our curriculums.

The very function of our educational institutions is to bolster, not deflate or balance, the egotistical tendencies of the human disposition. Our lopsided educational systems cram our brains with worldly domination, which prevents the truths of our souls from seeping through all the convoluted logic and statistics.

Ironically, in our efforts to maintain separation of church and state, we have deprived our young of the very disciplines that could form a better society. Some form of ethics or humanitarian philosophywithout religious dogma-should be as basic to our educational system as "one and one equals two."

(An excerpt from A Higher Good.)

Learn more about this author, Ron Kruger.
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