A. S. Neill’s influential writings defended a similar position, and Krishnamurti’s brilliant writing on education also emphasized that our primary task is to free the minds and hearts of individuals.
Yet while culture and ideology do take root in personal consciousness and can be significantly challenged through personal healing and liberation, they reflect other levels of human reality as well—social and political levels, which we cannot adequately address one individual at a time. Progressive educators in the tradition of social “reconstruction” or social “responsibility” have recognized that culture is a collective creation. It is fashioned, not solely by private choices and personal fear and greed, but by the tacit agreements shared by large numbers of people and heavily influenced by the power of class, gender, religious, and other shared identities. A culture, or one’s perceived membership in some segment of a culture, reinforces personal prejudices, giving them a hypnotic power they would not acquire through personal experience alone. Educating for social responsibility involves naming and facing the unconscious agreements that blind us to injustice and oppression. As we have seen so many times in history, decent people can allow or even perpetrate great evil when they are under the spell of cultural trance. Spiritual practices help to awaken us from unconsciousness, but often (as we see so tragically in many religious movements) even spiritually awakened individuals are blind to the destructive power of cultural and ideological forces in their society.
A. S. Neill’s influential writings defended a similar position, and Krishnamurti’s brilliant writing on education also emphasized that our primary task is to free the minds and hearts of individuals.
Yet while culture and ideology do take root in personal consciousness and can be significantly challenged through personal healing and liberation, they reflect other levels of human reality as well—social and political levels, which we cannot adequately address one individual at a time. Progressive educators in the tradition of social “reconstruction” or social “responsibility” have recognized that culture is a collective creation. It is fashioned, not solely by private choices and personal fear and greed, but by the tacit agreements shared by large numbers of people and heavily influenced by the power of class, gender, religious, and other shared identities. A culture, or one’s perceived membership in some segment of a culture, reinforces personal prejudices, giving them a hypnotic power they would not acquire through personal experience alone. Educating for social responsibility involves naming and facing the unconscious agreements that blind us to injustice and oppression. As we have seen so many times in history, decent people can allow or even perpetrate great evil when they are under the spell of cultural trance. Spiritual practices help to awaken us from unconsciousness, but often (as we see so tragically in many religious movements) even spiritually awakened individuals are blind to the destructive power of cultural and ideological forces in their society.
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