ABSTRACT
One of the underlying aims of this book is to challenge the current political preference for short-term pragmatism at the expense of long-term vision. Where Chapter 3 questioned the role of bureaucratic governance and management, similar questions are posed here for educators. Over the last few decades, rather than developing a sense of the deep purpose of education, universities and schools have become preoccupied by equity and impartiality. This is reflected in some dubious concepts, such as ‘academic rigour’, ‘level playing fields’ and ‘transferable skills’. All of these ideas represent a basic misunderstanding about how humans cope best with a world in flux. Similar issues emerge with terms like ‘sustainable consumption’, and ‘sustainable business’. All reflect a misunderstanding of the way organisms learn, adapt and evolve in the natural world. What is urgently needed is a discussion of the profound purpose of education. According to Handy (1998) corporations tend to forget that, ultimately, they are servants of society. If service to society is the purpose of business, what is the deep purpose of education? In my view, it should be to enable learners to become more harmoniously integrated with their habitat. This is illustrated by describing some of the many layers of intelligent adaptation that go towards enabling integration and wholeness on different levels; for example, sensory, linguistic, social, cultural, biological, ecological, or spiritual. On the one hand some students are able to cheat their teachers by buying ready-made essays online. On the other hand, their teachers may speak of ‘scholastic rigour’ yet be deceived. Previous chapters of the book have suggested that the responsible citizen of the future will need to become more like a ‘shaman’. In other words, he or she must become more imaginatively in touch with the ebb and flow of the living world. While this will mean thinking and writing in order to deepen his or her understanding of the world, ‘rigorous’
writing is more affected by codes and constraints that reflect the internal and arbitrary logic of learning and teaching.
