ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents the eight fundamental rational education values as a framework for the establishment of rational education. Initially, the reader is introduced to the values necessary for implementing rational education, namely collective wisdom, rational living, freedom, mental health, altruism, solidarity, equality and fraternity. All values are defined, described and analyzed based on scientific, historical, philosophical and political accounts. Wisdom is the overarching rational education value and is presented as a temporary endstate towards the road to rational education and society: emphasis on the differentiation of collective and individual (ataraxia) wisdom is included to serve the specific social change framework of values included as a rational education vision in this book. Rational living is the second rational education value including Ellis’s 11 rational living principles (self-interest, social interest, self-direction, self-acceptance, tolerance of others, short-term and long-term hedonism, commitment to creative, absorbing activities and pursuits, responsible risk and experimenting, high frustration tolerance and willpower, problem-solving, scientific thinking and flexibility) as fundamental principles for positive human flourishing during education. Freedom is revisited as an emancipatory rational education value, under a social lens, differentiated from liberty which is mostly restrictive, political liberty in nature: specific differentiation between freedom and immunity is also taking place. Mental health, based on Ellis’s Rational-Emotive Behavior Theory (REBT), is briefly presented as a framework for ensuring (mental) health for all people, not only those involved in the rational education endeavor: special emphasis is offered to the core cognitive mechanisms ((ir)rational beliefs) that innately permeate human mind and, ultimately, make people (incl. parents, children, adolescents in schools) largely responsible for their (mental) health reactions. The innate force of altruism is then met including important distinctions with egotism (plus unhealthy facets of altruism and healthy egotism) joining people with a lost, but not forgotten, gem of social change and flourishing. SEF, aka solidarity, equality and fraternity, are finally proposed as the cherries on the rational education cake and as values that are sadly missing from almost all forms of older and contemporary education: based on Judith Suissa’s philosophical perspective on anarchist education, they are described as main forces of sociopolitical and financial change towards more experimenting and spontaneous forms of education. All values are presented under a social change lens supporting the hypothesis that this framework of values cannot be implemented without the last three fundamental human values, namely, solidarity, equality and fraternity. Simultaneously, the author suggests that the value of mental health is the critical regulator for the orchestration of all rational education values: it is exactly the combination of these four and the rest of values presented that differentiate rational education from libertarian or other “free” contemporary systems of education. To investigate these last two points, the author sets two questions to be answered in the next chapter: a) why rational education is in favor of emancipatory education through SEF instead of today’s, mainly individualistic, disciplinary educational systems; and b) why rational education is more positive than today’s libertarian education.
