We live in a world bewitched by the retoric of money. What is being done in education passes as very normal, passes as virtuous almost.
Education seems designed to teach people the conventional things people need to survive: certification for jobs and future survival.
Selling ourselves for jobs is contemporary slavery, creating unhappiness as we do not feel fulfilled.
It is not possible to live castrated lives and feel healthy.
The symptoms of our sickness are the loss of solidarity, the loss of a natural concern of the individual for the common good, this is something we are born with. And the costs of having a dysfunctional society are immense.
So it is imperative that we educate a future generation that is better than us as human beings, that we teach freedom to be alive, and to yield to the wisdom of life itself.
We all have a wish to serve and a loving potential. Nobody would punish himself or herself not doing anything in a world of abundance.
We would do what we are meant to do.
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Claudio Naranjo (November 24, 1932 - Valparaiso, Chile - July, 12 - 2019, Berkeley, California, USA) is a Chilean psychiatrist who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions. He is one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls (founder of Gestalt Therapy), and a developer of the Enneagram of Personality and founder of the Seekers After Truth Institute.
Since the late 1990s he has attended many education conferences and sought to influence the transformation of the educational system in various countries out of the conviction that “nothing is more hopeful in terms of social evolution than the collective furthering of individual wisdom, compassion and freedom”. His book Changing Education to Change the World, published in Spanish in 2004, was meant to stimulate the efforts of teachers among SAT graduates who are beginning to be involved in a SAT-in- Education project, that offers the staff of schools and the students in schools of education a "supplementary curriculum" of self-knowledge, relationship-repair and spiritual culture.
In this Interview, Claudio Naranjo speaks about education, the civilization crisis, how Nature and Eros have been demonized by the institutions, and how we must delegitimize what is needed to give priority to freedom, love and human wisdom.
