ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author presents specific rational education practices per rational education value presented in Chapter 2 linking individual purposes (e.g., individual happiness) with societal purposes (e.g., rational political education, dissemination of Solidarity-Equality-Fraternity, SEF) of rational education. The author starts with mental health which is defined to be the regulator of human mind and emotion and a key value to achieve individual and communal wellbeing: the ABCDEFG model of Albert Ellis is explicitly presented as a tool and the cornerstone of how people and children in the RS can achieve and maintain mental health through mobile mental health units. Then, the author analytically presents rational education practices following Ellis’s rational living principle to help children cultivate mutual self-interest with social interest, self-direction, self-acceptance, other-acceptance and tolerance of others, balance between short-term and long-term hedonism, commitment to creative, absorbing activities and pursuits, responsible risk-taking and experimenting, high frustration tolerance and willpower, various problem solving skills and scientific thinking and flexibility. This section is additionally complemented by a set of non-exhaustive but indicative and representative school resources and materials that can accompany any type of curriculum, course, lesson, lecture, exercise, drill or lab and be taught according to the Ellis’s 11 rational living principles to ensure the fundamental purposes of education (character building, rational thinking and knowledge). The author then indicates practices for the rest of the rational education values, namely, Freedom, Altruism, Solidarity, Equality and Fraternity (which all give community flavor to the values of mental health and rational living). In terms of freedom practices, the author proposes teachings of how students in the RS can exert freedom through understanding and acting on specific differentiations between freedom and liberty, freedom and immunity, morality and moralism, conditional and unconditional freedom while they learn how to move from dogmatic (r)evolution to non-dogmatic change. The altruism practices section highlights the importance of mutual aid actions while students learn to understand how to transit from mutual self-interest to the common good, communality (vs. charity) and unconditional altruism. Special treatment in terms of practices is provided to the three principles of SEF (solidarity, equality, fraternity) given that, without them, any type of wisdom (individual or collective), rational living, mental health, freedom, and altruism are stale or, at least, individual only. Thus, specific actions of SEF are presented including, for example, political education, systematic communal projects of mutual aid, direct actions of SEF and regular teach-ins. The chapter closes with a brief but comprehensive account on the role of coordinators (teachers) and parents in the REC and the RS as active agents of leading students through the above rational education practices.
