This was the dominant theme of the Edgar Faure report 'Learning to Be: The World
of Education Today and Tomorrow', published by UNESCO in 1972. Its
recommendations are still very relevant, for in the twenty-first century everyone will
need to exercise greater independence and judgement, combined with a stronger
sense of personal responsibility for the attainment of common goals. The report
stresses a further imperative: none of the talents which are hidden like buried
treasure in every person must be left untapped. Among these talents are
memory, reasoning power, imagination, physical ability, aesthetic sense, the
aptitude to communicate with others and the natural charisma of leadership, all of
which again goes to prove the need for greater self- knowledge.
The report asserted a fundamental principle: education should contribute to every
person's complete development - mind and body, intelligence, sensitivity,
aesthetic appreciation and spirituality. All people should receive in their childhood
and youth an education that equips them to develop their own independent, critical
way of thinking and judgement, so that they can make up their own minds on the
best courses of action in the different circumstances in their lives.
In this respect,
it embraces a basic assumption. The aim of development is the complete
fulfilment of man, in all the richness of his personality, the complexity of his forms
of expression and his various commitments - as individual, member of a family
and of a community, citizen and producer, inventor of techniques and creative
dreamer'.
This human development, which begins at birth and continues all through a person's
life, is a dialectic process which is based both on self-knowledge and on
relationships with other people. It also presupposes successful personal
experience. As a means of personality training, education should be a highly
individualized process, and at the same time an interactive social experience.
In its Preamble, the report
Learning to Be expressed the fear of dehumanization of
the world associated with technical progress, and one of its main messages was
that education should enable each person to be able to solve his own problems,
make his own decisions and shoulder his own responsibilities. Since then, all
progress in different societies, particularly the staggering increase in media
power, has intensified those fears and made the imperative that they underpin,
even more legitimate. This dehumanization is likely to increase in the twenty- first
century. Rather than educating children for a given society, the challenge will be
to ensure that everyone always has the personal resources and intellectual tools
needed to understand the world and behave as a fair- minded, responsible
human being. More than ever before, the essential task of education seems to be
to make sure that all people enjoy the freedom of thought, judgement, feeling and
imagination, to develop their talents and keep control of as much of their lives as
they can.
This is not simply a cry for individualism. Recent experience has shown, that what
could appear merely as a personal defence mechanism against an alienating
system or a system perceived to be hostile, also offered the best opportunity for
making social progress. Personality differences, independence and personal
initiative, or even a task for upsetting the established order, are the best
guarantees of creativity and innovation. The rejection of imported high-tech
models, the harnessing of traditional implied forms of knowledge and
empowerment are effective factors in endogenous development. New methods
have evolved from experiments at local community level. Their effectiveness in
reducing violence or combating various social problems is widely recognized.
In a highly unstable world where one of the main driving forces seems to be
economic and social innovation, imagination and creativity must undoubtedly be
accorded a special place. As the clearest expressions of human freedom, they
may be threatened by the establishment of a certain degree of uniformity in
individual behaviour. The twenty-first century will need a varied range of talents
and personalities even more than exceptionally gifted individuals, who are
equally essential in any society. Both children and young persons should be
offered every opportunity for aesthetic, artistic, scientific, cultural and social
discovery and experimentation, which will complete the attractive presentation of
the achievements of previous generations or their contemporaries in these fields.
At school, art and poetry should take a much more important place than they are
given in many countries, by an education that has become more utilitarian than
cultural. Concern with developing the imagination and creativity should also
restore the value of oral culture and knowledge drawn from children's or adults'
experiences.
The idea that everything has a rational explanation is among the most fundamental
in all of science, and has been one of the most influential in the history of culture.
Understanding how study of the Earth’s history and humanity’s origin has
contributed to this idea’s acceptance is fundamental to clarify how modern
technological society has come to be the way it is.
Understanding prevailing notions about how the world works is fundamental to
knowing how our own society works, and, by extension, how other societies
worked in the past.
The idea that everything has a rational explanation has become so much a part
of modern life that most of us take it for granted. Earth scientists helped establish
this notion by demonstrating that our planet’s operation and evolution can be
rationally explained in terms of everyday physics and chemistry, and by
successfully predicting phenomena ranging from the weather and climate, to
earthquakes and landslides, to the location of mineral deposits. This kind of
material knowledge offers power to improve our livelihoods and control people
for production.
However, for many people, technological achievement has failed to satisfy and
they feel isolated in their lives which are full of prosperity and material
abundance. Art then becomes a human touchstone. For example, the sculptor
Barbara Hepworth stated that one great work of art had vitality which was not a
physical attribute of that work but a spiritual power. In this case, works of art
with any themes can have spiritual power.
The word spirit, from the old Latin
spiritus, which translates to breath, embodies a
variety of meanings in modern culture; a 'ghost', a 'soul', a 'feeling', a 'movement',
a 'drink'. Its meaning shifts with perspective. It can be narrowly defined as the
"animating . . . principle" (OED) of a person in the philosophical sense,
broadened to include the essence of an age or work or artist, and finally, it can
recall the animation of all afterlife in a more expansive sense.
Closely related to inspiration, which translates literally as the drawing in of breath,
spirit is that which brings life- that which creates. For the study of art media, this
essence of creation is central. The term spirit refers to that which is intangible
and yet central to an understanding of a person or thing. The elusive nature of the
term makes any definition or explanation feel incomplete, but generally speaking,
it is the "immaterial" in the life of person- the 'soul' or 'consciousness'. And with
that starting point, the definition plants itself deeply into the core of human
understanding. Spirit is one of those abstract terms that can often only be
understood by what it is not; the unconscious not the conscious, the immaterial
not the material, the soul not the body, the immortal not the mortal. It is the
fingerprint that remains with a work of art or an experience, when the moment of its
creation is long gone.
A full account of human spirituality must also take into account that we are just one
among many species having a common origin on planet Earth. Biodiversity’s
cultural importance is that it offers us spiritually based explanations for the
connection between humans and the rest of creation, aesthetically, morally and
religiously.
We understand the world by being oneself, by being one among many life forms, by
adopting spiritual values for the connection between humans and the rest of
creation, and by making or viewing art to explore the enjoyment of natural beauty
to become one with nature.
