Submitted by joshua on Tue, 2006-08-01 04:44.
Policy & Operational Implications
Michael,
This principle is not only well stated but beautifully stated too.
Recently I have been pondering about humanity's dangerous state of hubris being at least partly caused by an inability to grasp the span of time it took evolutionary forces to arrive at the diverse state of symbiotic balance we know as life on spaceship earth.
I wonder if we would be better able to appreciate and respect this balance and come to see ourselves as stewards as opposed to consumers of spaceship earth if we **really learned** how much time and trial and error (currently estimated at 3,600,000,000 years of natural selection)it took to generate and integrate all the complex systems so seamlessly. As part of this seamless system 'Modern' humans evolved some 30,000 years ago -- just eight one thousandnths of one percent of the evolutionary time scale. Its like we were born yesterday.
Within last 100 years, a relative nano second of our short existence, humans are aggressively stretching the limits of our life support systems to the breaking point. We are doing so with a level of ignorance that gives rise to little or no precautionary respect of how seamlessly interwoven complex systems react. Perhaps our own ignorance is both the ultimate crisis we face and the one we have the greatest capacity to address.
We have the largest brain of any mammal relative to our body mass ( dolphins I've learned are the next closest to humans re the brain size body mass ratio) and this brain has the most advanced built in capability to transcend its own genetic programing through learned behaviors. Our brain-like technology extensions, especially in the area of information and communication technology, greatly amplify this capability at both the level of individual and group. So given the dangerously stretched state we're in its obvious humans have a lot to learn and are fortunately equipped to do so quickly.
It seems to me that we will only really learn what we need to know through teaching our young the responsibilities and ethics of stewardship. The relationship between teaching and learning are inseparable. Perhaps not unlike concave and convex which only coexist.
That said, how can education not be an essential component of the spiritual domain? How can we honor anything without first learning to honor it?
One could easily place the words "learn to" in front of every verb that appearts at the begining of each sentence in the spiritual domain principle and P & O implications. It begins to reveal an interesting set of pedagogical priorities or objectives.
Please continue thinking about the need to include education as a priority P & O implication whenever it is an essential pre-condition to appropriate action. Or maybe its even worthwhile considering another domain-- perhaps "The domain of learning" with its own premise, principle and P & O implications!