Education to minimize Individual and Social Disorders

Introduction

This note is intended to make two practical suggestions for policy makers in the field of education. Its purpose is education to minimize disorders, both individual and collective. Human psychology forms the basis for the policy suggestions in this note.

 This note is relevant to those societies with diversity of any kind. Policy makers of those societies which are  homogenous in all respects but lacking diversity in thought, status, class, gender, color, height, weight, etc. are advised to save time and read no further.

The Structure of the Human Mind

Individual disorders generally are in the areas of physical health, mental health, attention, insight, spiritual intelligence and behaviour. Collective disorders are in the areas of sociology particularly in “us” vs. “them” divisiveness leading to discriminatory behaviour such as racism, bigotry, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, casteism, classism, untouchability etc.

Freud aptly used the metaphor of an iceberg for the structure of the mind: 10% above the surface of the water representing the conscious mind and 90% below the surface representing the subconscious and unconscious.

We all start our existence as a single cell organism with the seed of our unconscious mind being determined by our genetic code. This seed grows as cells divide and the foetus grows. The unconscious mind is more or less developed with the completion of foetal growth. It is our unconscious mind that runs the survival of our body prenatally as an individual being and prepares it for independent existence outside the body of the mother.

At birth, our sensory organs start booting up and we begin to perceive and act.  The erstwhile unconscious now starts becoming conscious; subconscious mind is just an intermediate stage.

In our daily lives, we experience wakefulness when we are aware of our conscious mind, a state of dream sleep when the subconscious is active and a state of deep sleep when the only active part of the mind is the unconscious. It is the unconscious, that keeps us alive running the autonomous body functions that must work 24/7.

Everyday the life of sense perception surreptitiously develops feelings of multiplicity, limitedness, likes, dislikes and fears in the unconscious mind. These unconscious feelings manifest as natural emotions in the subconscious ready to jump into conscious implementation.

The emotions resulting from the unconscious feelings respectively are: (a) “I” vs. “you” and “us” vs. “them”, (b) helplessness while facing life, (c) habits, addictions and appetites, (d) aversions and hate, and (e) frights and phobias.

Such emotions keep us in individual and collective fight or flight. Our individual fight or flight underlies myriad physical and mental disorders, and our collective fight or flight underlies most social disorders.

To resolve our individual and collective disorders, our education must recognise two realities: (1) structure of the mind and (2) strength of the emotions. The present day educational systems worldwide recognise the conscious mind paying little attention to the unconscious and the subconscious. We must redress this anomaly.

While we educate the conscious mind to build understanding and to counter our natural emotions, our education must also cultivate them deep into our unconscious mind. Mere intellectual understanding resulting from educating the conscious is not strong enough to face the strength of emotions rooted in the mighty unconscious ready to subconsciously spring into action. 

We can talk to the conscious mind, but we cannot do so to the unconscious.  How then do we attend to the unconscious? We have seen that it is the unconscious that keep us individually and collectively in fight or flight mode that underlies our individual and collective disorders. We can attend to the continuous onslaught of the fight or flight mode by consciously eliciting its opposite effect which is deep relaxation.

How can we consciously elicit relaxation? It is a matter of simple observation that fight or flight mode makes our breath fast but shallow: the severer the experience of fight or flight, the faster and shallower the breath gets. Can we then consciously make our breath slow and deep to relax us? Try it out yourself and see. It is in fact true.

Thus, a simple physiological process of conscious deep breathing gives us the needed control over the fight or flight mode and its individual and collective ravages. The human mind has discovered various mind-body strategies for physiologically deepening the breath.

These strategies must be part of our education system in order to enhance the effectiveness of educating the conscious mind. Otherwise, education is only partially effective in terms of behaviour consistent with our teaching.

Suggestion #1: Educate to Build One Humanity

As you read this post, please remember that the author migrated from India to Canada a number of years ago to settle in the province of Ontario.

Thank you Ontario; you welcomed me. This post is for you! My life in the old country qualifies me to say that diversity can either be a boon or a curse. It enriches if people can see their common thread enabling celebration of mutual differences in its light. Otherwise, it is a curse of strong “us” vs “them” identities eternally jostling, conflicting and even rioting. We can’t close our eyes; news are full of it. Fearful of our openness and multiculturalism being hijacked to fragment us, I humbly suggest that Ontario systematically incorporate meaningful teaching of our common ground into our curricula.

 Canada is in support of the principles outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Is our education in accord with Articles 1, 2 and 26.2 of the UDHR? Canada is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Is our education in accord with Article 29 of this convention? (See addendum for the text of the articles)

The question of our common ground has been challenging great minds of all cultures. Search for it around the globe concluded long ago that an eternal, invisible and therefore unknowable and inexplicable spirit is the common ground of our infinitely diverse universe.
This spiritual wisdom is the foundation of world religion. However, a vast majority of us remain unaware of it, because it is veiled by our faith based doctrinal facades. Faith tends to replace the inexplicable common ground with explicable alternatives without clearly acknowledging the unseen spirit. This expediency explains how the one underlying spirit is seen by faith as multiple culture specific divine beings inescapably eclipsing the spirit and resulting in fragmented humanity.
Science is reason based. In its infancy, it rejected the spiritual wisdom also. Being reason and not faith based, science alienates religious faith. Following its characteristic empirical, verifiable, and objective approach, science too concludes that all matter exists because of an eternal, invisible, unknowable and inexplicable truth of infinite potential it calls energy. Historical alienation between science and religion results in minimizing the scientific wisdom of the underlying oneness of matter as a meaningless triviality.
Because of our persistent inability to see our common ground, human development remains inconsistent with our ancient spiritual wisdom as well as that of modern science.
All wisdom, spiritual and scientific, being a subject of rigour and reason is educational in nature.

Education is meant to examine hidden underlying truths without surrendering integrity to particular points of view. It is time now that the Academy live up to its true calling in the field of humanities and establish the truth of the inexplicable spirit-energy as our unifying common ground.

It must be noted that we cannot study our unseen common ground in itself; we can only study how it interfaces with our existence. It must also be noted that the resulting visualization of our underlying oneness is not an imposition of uniformity of religious practice or expression but an acknowledgement of the core spirituality of our own religions. All human values are included in this visualization and it is no threat to Canada’s multiculturalism; we have our religious institutions for specific cultural preservation.
Education in the unifying truth of spirit-energy at all stages of development can dispel the darkness of division. It can establish the importance of critical reason, promote all-inclusive identities, and integrate increasingly diverse Ontarians into a harmonious and coherent Ontario putting it in a position of Canada and world-wide leadership in the field of education in humanities as it already is in other fields.

ADDENDUM

Article 1 of UDHR:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Article 2 of UDHR:
“Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.”

Article 26.2 of UDHR:

“Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

Article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child:
“Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:
(a) The development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential;

(b) The development of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and for the principles enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations;

(c) The development of respect for the child's parents, his or her own cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country in which the child is living, the country from which he or she may originate, and for civilisations different from his or her own;

(d) The preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin; \(e) The development of respect for the natural environment.”

Suggestion #2: Developing a Culture of Health

This idea is about wellness or healthy living. According to a recent national study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “The prevalence of stress in primary care is high; 60% to 80% of visits may have a stress-related component” [1, references at the end]. Your findings may be no different.

Stress is a behavioural problem. It results from our lack of proper acknowledgement of our unseen common ground leading to interconnected feelings of mutual distrust and fear, insatiable appetites and repulsions. These feelings inescapably lead to a sense of helplessness.

Discriminatory behaviour such as racism, bigotry, sexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, casteism, classism, untouchability etc. proceed from mutual mistrust and fear [2]. They should have no place in life, but they are there until we can build a culture of one humanity variously expressing our one unseen common ground. The same is true of our greed, appetites, and addictions, our feelings of aversion and hatred and our sense of helplessness when things don’t go our way.

How is stress related with our health? Stress causes sympathetic (fast) stimulation of autonomous body and mind activity along with the release of cortisol in our body. It is excess cortisol that causes stress. It kills us with physical and mental disease. With the accompanying loss of the thinking capacity, it robs us of our learning ability and our very humanity because it is our faculty of thought that distinguishes us from other forms of life. Love and compassion reside in the deepest folds of human faculty of thought.

According to a 2012 report [3] of the American Academy of Pediatrics, toxic levels of stress, in addition to physical and mental disorders, can cause a host of social and economic problems. The report notes that prenatal exposure of the foetus to maternal stress can lead to persistent developmental disorders.
Can we eliminate stress? Not until we eliminate ignorance of our one humanity through our unseen common ground.

Must then we suffer the ravages of stress until we succeed in this enormous educational endeavour? No, not if we learn to be stress resilient. There are many strategies of doing so. A common thread running through all of them is regular elicitation of relaxation response [4].

My favourite strategy of eliciting relaxation response is deep diaphragmatic breathing. We all breathe 24/7 but we breathe without awareness. Deep breathing is deliberate. All it needs is attention. We can easily learn it. We can also easily practice it any time when we are not totally immersed in other pursuits of life.

How can the culture of deep diaphragmatic breathing amount to a culture of health? Deep breathing like other strategies of elicitation of relaxation response causes parasympathetic (slow) stimulation of autonomous body and mind activity with the release of DHEAS in our body neutralising the effects of stress [5], [6].

“Calm down. Take a deep breath”, who in the world hasn’t heard this admonition?
Develop the culture of deep diaphragmatic breathing. It will amount to a culture of health. It doesn’t break the bank, nor bankrupt the treasury. It is revolutionary. And it reconnects us with our humanity.

REFERENCES
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1392494
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/opinion/sunday/sick-of-racism-literally.html?emc=edit_th_20171112&nl=todaysheadlines&nld=23743059
[3] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/129/1/e232
[4] Benson, Herbert and Klipper, Marian Z. "The Relaxation Response". New York: Harper, 2000
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system#Parasympathetic_division
[6] https://www.stress.org/take-a-deep-breath/