As our lives speed up, we witness the fabric of education deteriorating. We would do well to reverse our increasing neglect of neighborly interresponsibility and interconnectedness. In the mind's eye, we can see how interconnectedness "rebegins" and is renewed in the womb. We learn from the mother-child bond and hopefully, the co-parental bond or bridge in utero. Safe in our mother's womb we learn to face human challenges and assimilate simple lessons that lead outward into more community-fed environments.

As students and educators, our early socialization impacts both our educational readiness and scope of social interest and sense of interresponsibility. Without proper nurturing and socialization, we can easily be caught up in dysfunctional patterns that leave us strangers to ourselves and to each other. Such profound estrangement can be unintentionally compounded in crowded or rigid learning and work environments manipulated by bureaucratic authority. Layers of bureaucracy that fail to acknowledge our fundamental need for human harmony cannot help but chill the hopes of those already at risk, as well as those whose special gifts and sensitivities require a longer process of gentle unfolding.

To embrace neighborly reconnection, we must also address the continuing economic stratification and polarization intensified, in part, by years of chaotic migratory influx and population warehousing which severely impacts neighborhoods often for economic exploitation, political leveraging, and bureaucratic expedience. The unthinking displacement of local or indigenous support and survival networks with more heterogeneous bureaucratized ones tends to inbreed cultural divisions and communication difficulties.

Under various guises, including selective (often hypocritical) championing of diversity, ad hoc melting pots are created and expanded for largely political or economic purposes. Rapid assimilation of diverse cultures for purposes of political and economic exploitation is often cloaked in politically correct jargon such as equal opportunity to pursue the American dream, etc. - jargon which falls short of actual practice. Is the American dream even possible without perpetuating many of the deplorable conditions both within education and elsewhere?

When dysfunctional concentrations of chaotic diversity displace long-standing populations which are less desperate or susceptible to hierarchical manipulation, we have a situation ripe for further hierarchical control. Lack of needed critical analysis, educational vision, and true self-esteem set up a chronically captive class that exists to prop up those who seek to maintain special privileges and a higher standard of living than the rest.

The elite strata of our culture tend to maintain their own homogeneity while encouraging everyone else to just hash it out if they want a slice of any remaining pie. A split in our collective psyche must be maintained for the rich to get richer and the poor to still keep getting poorer. By skewing our educational system around this issue within and without, we guarantee that severe injustices will remain.

Non-elitist cohesive groups are desirable so that positive traditional values such as knowing your neighbor and careful parenting can be maintained against the onslaught of political and economic mish-mashing of populations that breakdown community trust and communication. We need to consider the humanitarian benefits of retaining relative homogeneity when it preserves precious human interconnectedness psyche to psyche as well between other life-forms. We must be careful when we warehouse newly mixed populations that displace existing populations that have previously lived in relative harmony. Why should certain socio-economic classes be more crowded together so that more elite classes can live further apart. Furthermore, the general burgeoning of human population is highly dysfunctional given the parenting and educational vision vacuums in the world today.

Symbolically speaking, the collective head must be turned around to face the collective tail and honor it - not bite it - or consume it. Like the image of the snake firmly but gently holding its own tail, global rehumanization requires that we roll together intelligently in unity and love. However, rolling unintelligently leads to dehumanization, and continuing blindly makes correction more difficult.

Successful transformation depends on (1) owning our personal complicity in the love deficit - both in terms of acts of omission and commission, and (2) ensuring all learning environments are love-intelligent rather than love negligent or tunnel-visioned. Less than full-spectrum love will not allow us to address parenting and educational issues adequately. The intent of this article is not to discuss full-spectrum love in detail, but rather than to point us in the direction of exploring what is still commonly unrecognized about our human interconnectedness and its importance to truly "higher"education.

School becomes divorced from love only when we who fail to grasp the larger picture (within and without). Currently, our learning environment directly or indirectly reflects the policies and posturing of the power-obsessed and predatory elements that crave overt and covert control. Those who attempt to shape our lives without our permission have not learned to let go and let the God-Us do the guiding. Education must start as an inside job that is self-rewarding not merely self-remunerating. Philanthropic or other tangible investment in educational institutions will not succeed without further addressing the need for deeper motivational integrity institution-wide. Such motivational integrity must include consistent respect for the many intangibles that foster learning. Technological interconnectivity is not an adequate substitute for psychic interconnectivity, and other related intangibles. Without higher psychic sensitivity we will misinvest in schemes and substitutes that impede rather deepen the search for "self" and "other" in harmonious relationship. Beware of those who find advantage in full-spectrum love being ignored or dumbed down. Human beings are called upon to explore intelligent love on all levels, and let lust fall away as just as poor a substitute as unnecessary or misapplied technologies.

To crack or finance a larger or more intimidating whip over educators or students reinforces a fear-based paradigm that needs a generous infusion of love-honed emotional and spiritual intelligence. Too many school districts waste human, economic and material resources when we ignore the necessary motivational qualities necessary to learning. There is no legislative substitute for self-examination and self-accountability with respect to our inherent love potential as human beings. To love is a more basic ability than reading and writing - and its absence speaks volumes, at least to those who are still love-connected. Diminished ability to love is an avoidable tragedy that no amount of "educational success" or academic sublimation can offset. We suffer from a hole in our collective soul from failing to respond to the many serious warning signs that have occurred in successive generations with cumulative effect

As parents and educators we needn't so much instill love as much as we need to refrain from killing it perinatally and throughout childhood. A human being these days is processed through a loveless boot camp of sorts, and the love short-circuiting and resulting love deficit costs society over many generations, both in terms of falling motivation and rendering later investment relatively futile.

We must strive to model and proactively nurture intangibles that constitute the essence of mutual respect, openness, and compassion. Then renewed hopefulness - buoyed in part by constructive tangible investment - will synergize the exploration of more advanced human interconnectivity that is not technology-dependent.

Decision-making without vision threatens the commitment and resolve of all concerned, with repeated failure breeding cynicism. In the meantime, an intuitive cache of untapped love logic remains to be absorbed by those willing to more boldly rethink education. Indeed the larger school of life encompasses much more than our individual and collective soul's earthly transit, and only honoring this larger school can help us effectively rejuvenate classroom Earth and bring more to life its unique blessings.

A more macro-to-micro appreciation of healthy neighborliness would create a flexibility of focus enabling the most relevant educational yogas to thrive. Coupled with tangible investment, a balanced emphasis on intangible investment related to mutual respect, full-spectrum love, and purity of motivation would true the wheel of education and provide the necessary medicine to see us through this crisis with the least damage done. With a more enlightened respect for other human beings unfolding on earth, the full-spectrum of human love opportunities will gradually dawn within educators and students alike of all ages and cultures.

Formal education will truly graduate to a new level when it gains sufficient emotional and spiritual intelligence to lead with love -no matter how unquantifiable - rather than leave it behind as a preschool or after school activity. Love and education do mix when they are of the full-spectrum kind.*

NOTE: *Full-spectrum love requires special purification and the mastery of spiritual disciplines beyond the scope of this article. Further information regarding full-spectrum love may be provided by first e-mailing the author and providing some background about yourself and your current experience of love as it is enriching your life on campus and off. Please contact me:the Tom Darling: edutrue@lycos.com

Just because intangibles are difficult to define does not mean they can be ignored. Around us our life breathes beyond our conscious awareness. And letting go is one of life's more instantaneously achievable pleasures. But it only remains pleasurable when it is yoked with responsibility. Such is the paradoxical mystery of life as a non-idle gift.

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Tom Darling

edutrue@lycos.com

These pages were updated 20 January 2006.

THE ABILITY
TO LOVE
IS A MORE
BASIC SKILL
THAN READING
AND WRITING:
ITS PRESENCE
SPEAKS VOLUMES.

Tom Darling

BLESS OUR CONTINUING EDUCATION!

San Diego