ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides an essential commentary on the sociopolitical and philosophical reasons why rational education values and practices are really not established in the contemporary schools followed by a permanent call for Rational Schools in the 21st century. Numerous examples are offered through this chapter on the reasons why the Rational School (RS) is still not established including current socio-political management of the coronavirus pandemic and other current socio-political phenomena. The author locates the main problem of non-rational education that dominates today’s world at a deeper political or ideological level, and not so much of a “psychological” problem, as many states claim applying diagnostic systems to categorize people in case they object to obviously ineffective state policies. The problem in this case, that is also illustrated in the education realm, is that people do not differentiate between the state as a system of values and the state as a system of political organization. Which makes things complex by promoting the idea that the liberal state, and the hierarchical dogmatic relations it entails, is “the only” practical framework available and thus the state is a “necessary” evil and if it did not exist people should invent it or back into it in some way because otherwise they should fall into immunity, anarchy and chaos. The author’s hypothesis is that politicians and the general audience probably say that because they lack ongoing and systematic education in SEF (solidarity-equality-fraternity) and other rational education values and practices because their “formal” education was mostly academic, the least social-emotional (depending on the country) and yet social or communal at all. On the contrary, the RS students explicitly learn to differentiate between liberalism and a free state and stay away from the notions of neutrality, apathy, agnosticism and inertia that neo-liberalism enormously promotes as an “objective” stance of life. Actually, liberal neutrality remains probably one of the main reasons why we still have not managed to create a largely solidary, equal and fraternal society and why most of the rulers of the world still love aggressive, or passive-aggressive, capitalism (and, consequently, have not established a SEF-based rational education but instead educational systems which serve the purposes of the market, not people’s needs). The chapter closes with an emphasis on the role of the inherently optimistic rational education that promotes communal conscience in a fuller and more holistic, universal way transforming education in a force of collective engagement, participatory democracy, self-governing, decentralized communities and commitment to social values and practices proposed as a framework in this book. This mission of rational education, the author believes, is already non-dogmatically striving to correct current socio-political and financial illnesses and simultaneously promotes collective wisdom and social happiness for a rational society.
