Learning to know. Learning to be. Learning to do.
Learning to live together.
These were the four pillars of education for the 21st Century presented by Jacques Delors, at
UNESCO Headquarters, Paris in April 1996 in the report to UNESCO of the International
Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century,
Learning: the treasure within.
http://www.unesco.org/delors/utopia.htm
Cosmos is a crosss curicular knowledge system
that develops these four educational strands to make a learning matrix for learning the core
skills and competencies to care for the world.
Two ways of understanding
Running through a days worth
Of sights and scents,
On the edge of sleep,
There are some intricacies of nature
Requiring no material explanations,
By which we come to understand the world,
And the need for change;
A deep nest of cancer,
Merely trying out its dumbness,
To express a pointless selfhood,
Sparks a scientific endeavour
Far greater than a quest for unicorns,
Which reminds us
That other commonplace complexities,
Just as puzzling at the time,
Simply require acceptance of beauty,
An explanation for preservation complete in itself,
With no dream of a cure,
Like the spinning sense of balance
In a skyball of streaming starlings,
Each a magnet for its neighbour,
And a street full of transfixed spectators,
Or mouthed kisses brushed,
Like pale gems on the wind.
Cancers, starlings and him and her,
Are imaginative obsessions
Of a bewildered ape,
Programmed to double take,
And invent God for completeness,
In the space it shares
With other things,
All too thin and long term
To survive a fast learner.
FIRST LEVEL MATRIX
Explanations for a material universe must be based on material causes. Mathematical analysis
of the beginnings point to our universe as one of many that have been set in motion and we
humans have become part of it by accident. Through the ages, religion has conditioned us
to believe that Earth is a gift over which we have been granted dominion by a supernatural
creator. The declines in religiosity and the old supernatural theocratic outlook on creation
have shifted attitudes towards our planet from dominion to stewardship. This has provoked
thought about the relation we bear to the universe as living parts of a vast cosmos that has
existed time out of mind, where we can be only onlookers. On our tiny planet at the edge
of a minor galaxy we are able to contemplate a hundred years of detrimental impacts of our
uses of planetary resources. We have evolved as an integral part of Earth and this has
given us the power of predicting the consequences of our actions and learning with the long
term future of the world in mind.
On Earth's surface, in everything we do from painting a house to producing children we are
integral with all its ecosystems. This view of humankind as being part of complex and
relatively fragile chemical systems, together with our evolved ability to make plans for the
future, provides the opportunity to cooperate in maintaining the ecological processes that
sustain our planetary home. We have the technical ability to change our behaviour, but that
is not enough. We need a world knowledge system that is basic to all subjects and which is
based on a reordering and amplification of the UNESCO learning principles as:
Learning to know the world (by crossing subject boundaries)
Learning to relate to the world (through material science
Learning to belong to the world ( through mind, body and spirituality)
Learning to manage the world (by bonding locally and globally)
Learning to change the world (by behaving sustainably)
Learning to communicate with the world (by understanding traditions and needs of
others)
Science has shown us that materially we are as just one of many beings sharing a common
origin. This biocentric view of humankind raises the value of Earth's mothership into the
realm of the spirit. We have a spiritual vision of our relationship to Earth because as science
finds new explanations for our material being it also increases the mystery of the unknown.
Mysteries, yet to be explained in material terms, are expressed in the great spiritual
emotions of sublimity, grandeur, and majesty. Like scientific endeavour, these emotions
have also evolved for us to know the unknown. They represent ways of knowing which,
although they have preceded the social evolution of religion, nevertheless define what is
sacred and hallowed. That is to say they are part of mental processes, of which we are
unaware, that endow objects and events with beauty, reverence, awe or respect. By
means of these notions we can communicate the innermost and most central parts of a
thing powerfully and non- scientifically. At a mudane level they prompt us to choose where
we go for holidays. At higher levels they allow us define things 'of the heart', meaning they
are cherished and out of the ordinary, like when we say 'time has stood still'. Knowing
things of the heart is the basis of motivations to care and protect. Similarly, 'soul' is a
spiritual expression for the innermost part or moral nature of a thing. A close spiritual regard
for a sacred mother earth endows the planet with qualities of mysticism or exaltation. This is
basis of desires of righteousness to take the earth into the soul and care for it, irrespective of
what it can provide for the material life of groups and individuals.
Of all the living things taking planetary sustenance, we have, through trade and its lack of
care for its sources of raw materials, become the greatest factor disturbing earth's
ecological and climatic equilibria. Because we are able to think spiritually about Earth as
Mother from which we receive nourishment, we cannot receive all these privileges without
bearing obligations to keep, to cherish, and to cooperate. In taking there must be giving
and giving allows taking. Scientifically, the degradation of the planet is plain to see. It is
obvious that human self interest has caused the current environmental crisis. This leaves an
appeal to moral precepts based on a spiritually based environmental ethic, and an
heightened awareness of inequalities of taking and giving between peoples, to move us from
the economic realm of trade to the realm of morals, and thereby increase our spiritual
stature.
The workings and produce of a sacred earth are also sacred, so we are allowed to endow
them with a moral significance. In this respect, as beings steeped in spirituality we are
individually obliged to apply this behaviour, and make righteous use of all our knowledge
to help equilibrate a better social order with Earth, based on obligation and service to its
ecosystems. This is also the basis for conceiving and applying national and racial morals to
unify humankind. It then becomes a social responsibility of education to teach a sacred
understanding of the moral obligations we bear to our Earth as living parts of the vast
creation. For this to happen, an understanding of things of the spirit must be placed at the
centre of national curricula.
Non-religious people regard spirit as an educational metaphor. It is a means to express
subtle ideas, attitudes, and feelings. For the religious, it's a force, closely aligned to the
concept of heaven, and the world of angelic beings. For most people it is exemplified by
an addiction to sunsets. The internationalist teacher Krishnamurti discussing sunsets,
lamented the fact that we often miss the best part of them. We are so busy documenting and
trying to capture the sunset with a camera, we miss the best part of it as a transient
experience, where each moment offers subtle changes in colour, in the positioning of the
sun, in the silhouette of the trees and the cast shadows. He says, be still, and experience the
full spirituality of each moment the desire for time to stand still.
The difference between a material explanation and a spiritual explanation is on the one
hand to compare the satisfaction obtained by measuring angles, the position of the sun to
the horizon, making a table and plotting a graph etc, and on the other simply watching the
ever- changing colours and rapid darkening of a sky with its shifting patterns of clouds.
In personal relationships, the fact that loving seems to depend on the intraction of a small
hormone called oxytocin with brain cells, does not add to our understanding of what it is like
to be in love. The latter route to understanding sunsets and love involves registering beauty,
art, innocence, wonder, inspiration, like on another occasion you might stop to enjoy the
intricate weaving of a spider's web - a very personal understanding and something you may
or may not wish to share with others. The spiritual value of a spider in a species survival
plan is much more than the size of its population and much easier to describe.
Here is how Roger Deakin, writer, broadcaster, conservationist uses all senses to evaluate
the colours and culture of the species and ecosystems of Suffolk county's ancient commons
or greens, which he calls 'our aboriginal lands'.
"I've lived beside Mellis Common for thirty-something years and now feel quite
as attuned to its rhythms and moods as people do who live by the sea. I stand
at its tree banked shore each morning to gaze across acres of rippling grass to
streaky horizons and get the measure of the day's weather. Its sunsets, too, are
a source of inspiration and a topic of our local conversation. Somehow, the
deep under- blush of sorrel in the waves of green and purple grasses, pools of
buttercups and ox- eye daisies, reflects the crimson evening skies.
But the best way to view a common is to submerge yourself in it: to dive
beneath the surface of cocksfoot, Yorkshire fog, Timothy, and foxtail, and
discover the teeming life in the world of lesser herbs and beings beneath. You
delve about with a grass-stern in the cuckoo spit on a thistle and discover the
green frog- hopper nymph inside, a tiny moon- creature staring back at you
with pencil-point eyes. You watch a bee- fly hover before the tiny white
flower of Jack-by-the- hedge.
Thus, commons are part of the much older, more intimate, landscape of
walking, well known to every villager until quite recently. Now oases of ancient
grassland, they have always been part of a fluid, interconnected system that has
evolved organically through many centuries of people, livestock and wild
animals moving about between them Wortham Ling, Wortham Common,
Burgate Great and Little Greens, Stubbings Green and Mellis Common are all
joined by paths and tracks like the Furzeway, Stonebridge Lane, and Buggs
Road. The lovely raggle- taggle commons of the Saints around South Elmham
are also conjoined by paths and old roads that wind about so much that the
area is Suffolk's Bermuda Triangle".
"The Tragedy of the Commons" is an influential article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968. The
article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own
self-interest, can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource, even where it is clear that it is
not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen.
Central to Hardin's article is a metaphor of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the
commons, similar to Deakin's Suffolk Greens, on which they are all entitled to let their cows
graze. In Hardin's view, it is in each herder's interest to put as many cows as possible onto the
land, even if the common is damaged as a result. The herder receives all the benefits from the
additional cows, while the damage to the commons is shared by the entire group. If all herders
make this individually rational decision however, the commons is destroyed and all herders
suffer.
Hardin asks for a strict management of global common goods via increased government
involvement or/and international regulation bodies. In this he is calling for a response to
ecosystems such as oceans and forests that have spiritual as well as material values.
