There’s a thought that bugs me every now and then. I often find myself wrestling with the idea that mankind’s recurring problems may be the result of the kind of learning that we have, even with modern civilization.
Generation after generation, huge swaths of humanity are confined to lives of poverty or violence because we’ve never banished our cyclical problems of greed, exploitation, and war. I have a vexing suspicion that one main reason why mankind has failed to eliminate these perennial problems—despite the repeated lessons of history—is because the slanted nature of our educational tradition infuses us with traits of greed, exploitation, and propensity for war.
The kind of learning and education that we have is geared toward the accumulation of knowledge in an atmosphere of competition. It has always been a race to acquire the largest amount of knowledge at the fastest possible time. As we graduate from institutions of learning, the predominant trait that gets instilled in us induces us to compete next in the accumulation of wealth, power, and fame. Society gives positive reinforcement to this competition by celebrating and honoring with accolades those who accumulate the most.
This has brought us to where we are now—a world of plenty in the hands of a few while the sea of humanity wallows in utter destitution, power accumulated at the expense of exploitation and through means of violence, and fame utilized for the limited purpose of amassing fortunes.
But what if the education we impart to succeeding generations sheds the disproportionate emphasis on intelligence and lends more (or at least equal) prominence to refining our emotions? We go about our lives thinking that we are governed by rationality, without realizing that our lives march to the stronger commands of our emotions. We even fail to comprehend that the intensity or lethargy of our intellectual pursuits is driven by the temperament of our emotions.
We largely ignore the fact that the direction and purpose of our lives—and our attainment of contentment and happiness—are dictated mainly by the maturity or immaturity of our emotions. We see “successful” people who have achieved extraordinary heights of fame, fortune, and power, but who remain afflicted with unhappiness or unending discontentment because their primal emotions were never polished and burnished. Do we see people with suitably molded emotions who are distressed with pangs of despair?
The inferior learning that we devote in molding and shaping our emotions is shown by our dismissive view of the importance of the humanities, social sciences, philosophy, literature, arts, religion, music, sports, ethics—as well as immersion experiences in communities, associations, and the environment—and our treatment of them as largely optional subjects in school. These are the fields of study that have crucial importance in forming our attitude, behavior, personality, and our overall outlook in life.
We go through life standing and hopping on one leg if we are equipped only with intellectual literacy. We have a dismembered other leg if we are ill-equipped with emotional proficiency. The first leg bestows us with material benefits, but the second leg rewards us with priceless nonmaterial blessings emanating from the many other facets of life.
Around us, we see the dysfunction of our society resulting from the narcissism of our politicians, the avarice of our business leaders, and the vanity of our role models. They are the offspring of an educational tradition that encourages unbounded selfishness and callous competition.
Recalibrating our culture of learning by giving loftier focus on our emotional gifts will bequeath to us a society that thrives and flourishes on empathy, generosity, fairness, and justice. These are the traits that make us human. These are the qualities that will restore humanity in this world.
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