on education and philanthropy

the word: educate in the dictionary means: to bring out, rear. according to the dictionary meaning, the schooling is for bringing out what is latent in the learner, and the teacher helps the student to realize one’s full potential. in concept, a very benevolent process this learning is.

but is it so? is it the reason why schools are set up? is it for this reason why the parents send their children to school; the state offers free and compulsory education until age 16; why the state, and the private foundations offer scholarships to the “bright” and the needy? the answer to all these questions is: no. opposite to th word: educe:- bring out, the word: induce:- to lead, move by persuasion or influence is an appropriate description of the purpose and practice of the modern education.

let us start with the first day in the school or the kindergarten (or pre-pre school, and further yet, implanting the knowledge into the genes in the embryo in some fame hungry scientist’s lab in future for our grand children’s first day in the classroom). our first day in school was not out of our intention or need. we were sent by our parents. it was their decision. they sent us because it was compulsory, and because they were led to believe that with the better education their children will have a better socio-economic life: good paying job, good marriage and all of that. it was our parents’ well intentioned decision to send us to school. some of our parents were teachers themselves. but in that case, at home they did not teach us things that they did in school. all our parents who sent us to school did not know any thing about the education as a process and its purpose, stated or otherwise, or whether it was really in the best interest of their children. neither did the teachers know all this. no body was expected to think things and know what is what. in school, the imparting of knowledge was assigned to teachers, and in teachers’ minds it was assigned to the textbooks selected by the curricula. the school curriculum was tied to the society’s needs for jobs to sustain living, and the jobs were offered by the blue collar and white collar factories owned by the rich.

consequence of this unchecked assignment of duties was that we were already somewhere in junior high school when we began to feel that there was something wrong; or that it was leading us to where we did not want to go, we did not have to go. then, as our sphere of perception widened, we began to notice that we were being robbed of our individually experienced cognizance of our mutually interdependent existence, and replaced it with the acute sense of one up-ness in retaining verbatim every thing uttered by the teacher speaking word for word as printed in the textbook.

and despite the fact, that we had helped each other in the class work, this competition had pitted us against our intimate friends with whom we had shared the bench in the class and shared many secrets of our innocent childhood. in the early years we were not conscious of what this would do to us, but by the time we were in the final year in the high school, we did notice its first effect: our best friends and we did not get to go to the same college together. then in college, we were all too reluctant to study together with those who sat next to us. the system had succeeded in creating a sense of separation, an implanted thought that, from then on each one is all alone in this authoritative world. every thing that we retain and display, is a matter of comparison with that of our school mates, and later on, with co-workers. unbeknown to us we were being corralled in stable-like schools where the free horses are broken and transformed into work horses. our schooling was for the single purpose: create the work force for the military and militarily industrial and bureaucratic establishment. ours “(theirs) not to question: why; theirs but to do and die.”

it takes long time to transform a human being into a robot for two reasons. one is that, the parents do not love us comparatively with our siblings as teachrs at school do. this is why the boarding schools have easier time in implanting this comparative mode of existence. the students are watched in the dorms, too. the other reason is that both the trainer and the trainee share the same sense organs and the language of communication. that is why when the african slaves began to understand the language of their captors things began to become more complex.

as captives the domesticated animals and slaves were not compared to other animals and slaves. they all just worked. slaves and work animals supported their their masters through working for them without pay. the comparison was needed when the slavery was abolished in terms of the permanent ownership, and the employer had to pay for the work. so when the number of available workers exceeded the work to be performed, the comparison was added in the training to get the best worker, this ratio of workers in relation to the amount of work to be done is itself one sided. it is biased towards the owner/employer. the worker has no say in determining the nature of work, its quantity or whether it is indeed a necessary work for the benefit of all.

this freedom from slavery is a sort of negotiated settlement in which the owner still retained all the property, and cleverly subjected the freed slave to have to work for the same owner and keep him rich. when the slavery was abolished, it was the slave who was asked to leave the place he had toiled for. in this settlement the slave turned worker was not free during the work hours, and during the hours of freedom was treated worse than the work animals and the machines. the machines and captive animals had to be cared for according to their individual needs. but the freed slaves were left to make do with the arbitrarily determined pay for the work performed, which was not enough. for the food and other needs are biological, and they do not increase or decrease according to the size of the pay check. since, the animals and machines are not paid in money, they come out better than the salaried workers.

the decision was made by the slave owners. or else, both the slave and the owner would have divided up things equally and in essence, would have lived and worked together. it was gandhi who had observed that “it is not in the interests of the rich to cooperate with the poor; it is in the interests of the poor to non- cooperate with the rich.” he had further stated that, it is not the money that is evil, rather it is its mis-appropriation that is evil. so when the re-appropriation of wealth began to formulate in zimbabve, and is underway in south africa, brazil and several south american countries, the u.s. and european nations, that have acquired wealth with the help of the slave labour and the sweat shops in the 3rd world, are crying fowl. the word: ‘nationalization’ threatens their status quo, which frightens them.

education is still designed to meet the demand of the factories of the rich, and during this painfully slow period of transition to the automation of the work has resulted in many more workers to perform the fewer jobs. this has given the trainers the luxury and liberty to sort out the different tendencies of the trainees, not only as menial and intellectual workers, but also as entertainers and detractors. this is all done in the same vein as those trained in the school of dramatics taking the roles of adversaries rehearsing under the critical gaze of the same director. thus those active in the counter culture still benefit from the same culture they are supposedly opposing.

from the day the the first human being was perceived to be the work animal, and captured, there arose the separation between the trainer and the trained. this then became the vocational training school. the children of the rich never go to the vocational training school. vocational trainings are for the underclass. the rich go to learn to read and write and talk philosophy, sciences. this is still the case, except that though proportionally the same, in the growing world population the number of the rich also has grown. reportedly india has one percent of its population, that is millionaires, and that means a hundred million rich indians. so, too, the chinese have their rich growing in numbers, as have other resourceful countries. these rich people send their children abroad, not to study the survival skills, but the social sciences and business, not the blue collar work skills. just take a look at the enrollment of the foreign students in the u.s. and european universities. see what their objectives and aims are. they are not going to return to their countries to mingle with the poor.

the man who killed gandhi , whom the indian authorities labeled as the fanatic hindu, may as well have been hired by an equally fanatic rich who would have felt threatened by gandhi’s perception of india of the localized rule. in the decentralization of power and the socio-economic equality the royalties cannot sustain themselves.

what were the first laws of any given land, gradually came to be known as religion. pope was the supreme authority in rome, much the same as ayate-ullas are in the shiya iran or as pat robertson and others like him strive to put the u.s. under the christian rule. england had the king as the head of the state and the church. confucianism and shinto were the religions of the state in china and japan. but then

during the middle ages when the religion/law of the invading king was different from that of the invaded populace, there arose the need to separate the local ways of life from the belief based governance of the foreign power, which still remains imperial in practice. now the ruling authorities are not called kings, but the rich. not only do the rich appoint their subordinates to govern their domain as the kings appointed their ministers, but the very word: rich (< reich in old german < rex in latin) means royal. and royal they are in their lifestyles and treatment of those who work for them. in american style governance, the heads of the executive offices and congress change, but those who put them up, the rich, remain the same.

but as mentioned before, it is the similarities of cognitive organs of the ruler and the ruled, that has made the imperial rule of law less frightening than before when the offender faced the wrath of the earthly gods and the one in heavens. when people began to see that the fear of god was but a ploy to keep the workers subdued, and that the religion-promoted god’s earthly agents were not just, there arose the need to device another ploy, the charity, the philanthropy. it does the same thing what religion does to the masses. due to the effective conditioning, the people who work for others, whether manually or mentally sitting in the think tank, are not able to think independently separating their cognitive capacities from the nature of their employment, the work that brings them the socio-economic survival. this includes even those in the service of “god”, like mother teresa, and philanthropists like bill gates and warren buffet, as they all follow a rut made deep with the notion of earning merits in this world and the hypothetical next. the school of divinity is part of the same school that also teaches the business for profit and the technology of war. after all, the two characters: god and satan are from the same book: the bible. so those who believe in the biblical story and the philosophy it espouses, cannot take just one of the two, for not only that the one does not exist without the other, but that there is no story left behind without them both.

just as the meritorious deeds for the masses are the advance payments for the better times in the next life, philanthropy is for the rich to soften their image of the ruthless exploiters in the eyes of their subordinates. by its very nature, being rich requires getting more in return for what one gives. and this wanting more is a learnt trait of one up-ness. with it comes the fear of being despised, which generates insecurity of survival. so the rich form the charitable foundations in their names. they want people to remember who the giver is: the bill and melinda gates foundation, the ford foundation, and so on. the recipients must feel grateful as it is part of their conditioned reaction to being at the receiving end.

now consider this giver and receiver phenomena. being raised never to ask what made one in need for help and another the biggest giver of all, very meekly the poor line up at the soup kitchen, where the rich volunteer to ladle out the soup, or hilary clinton and lady diana help mother teresa to wash the filth of calcutta. a few fleeting moments of such charitable helps improve their image created in the rich owned and controlled media. the rich know, that it is more of a business strategy that is the motivating factor for their philanthropic and charitable work. they are not really out there to help the poor.

like god and satan, the rich and poor, too, are two roles of the same royal command performance. and it all starts with the first lessons in the language via the children’s storybooks. these stories, being stories, are made up episodes of imaginary kings who were “just”; of their princes and princesses who were kind hearted, and fairies who helped them destroy the evil empires -- the kind of stories the two u.s. president regan and george bush, jr. liked so much, that they wove these notions of good and evil in their political ideologies: regan described the soviet union as “the evil empire” and bush calls iran and north korea “the axis of evil’. of course, at that tender age children are not able to understand the contradiction in terms between being a king and being kind and just. nor do the grown up royalties want to know it themselves nor do they want the poor to know it.

didn’t the biblical god punish adam and eve for having eaten the fruit of knowledge? the understanding? knowing what is what and why so, changes every thing. the judeo-christian bible is a story that is required to be believed in, without question. in the bible, it is the snake that offers knowledge to the people of adam and eve. now as we know, the snake does not speak in the human tongue. but there were some other people for whom the snake was/is a useful co-habitant in the agricultural society. it protects the crops from the rodents. the bible does not describe what kind of community the garden of eden contained, but it was authoritarian, “the father knows best”-kind.

is it possible to live in a classless society? karl marx was an english intellectual, who thought things without doing it henry thoreau tried it living by the pond in the land owned by his friend. the soviets and maoists, too, ordered others to do it excluding themselves. even gandhi’s “tolstoy farm” was a communal living for the economically non disadvantaged people like gandhi himself. so, too, gandhi’s ashrams in india were not self-sustaining. and the israreli kibutz were manned by the well to do young americans and europeans flexing their muscles, like baby birds flapping their wings while still holding on to their parents’ nests.

the sociology and economy professors’ message to the adult students is that it does not work. according to their thinking, the workers never work to their best unless someone were watching over their shoulders. of course, such thinking is only theoretical and not based upon any firsthand observations. but even if it were a factual observation, it is flawed for the simple fact, that, the residents of all such communes still followed a charismatic leader or his intriguing ideal.

the leadership itself is but a residue of the times past when people were living as the hunter-gatherers in the literary thickets in the regions of the learned minds. for, those people who still live in the jungles of borneo and amazon, have only ornamental differences not related to the practice of apartheid that haunts the urban societies. among these primitives and also those who live on the fringes of the urban societies, things are not hung up on the notion of the centralized primate whose grunts determines who is in and what is out.

just watch any 3rd world rural community away from any cities. start out with children’s play there. there is no designated playground; no team uniform, no coach, referee or scoreboard. there is no audience to cheer them or boo. it is purely a children’s play. as they are un-schooled, every thing that their schooled counterparts’ minds are made of does not manifest in their consciousness, especially this ever enlarging fear of not being noticed, being left out; not making it in the job market, in building the biggest house on the block, and most of all, making all these fears come true because of one’s own fervent struggle to get ahead of one’s peers, and knowing that they, too, cherish the same fearful thoughts about oneself.

there is a marked difference between the rearing processes between these two groups, too. after being able to walk unaided and run limberly, the primitive children are left alone to their own devices and pace of finding one’s inter-connectness.

of course, in a capitalist mode of exchange of services via the money as the token of exchange the idea of profit rules supreme, which is, the owner and the worker try to outdo each other in getting more and giving less in return. so unless watched over the shoulder, the work would slack off. but no body watches the fair wage for an honest day’s work. that would not be the case in a work that is performed and paid for on equal basis or need basis. even in the capitalist business ventures, where the business is family owned and operated, where the workers and operators are blood relatives, there is no one person getting paid more than the rest, for all the capital goes for the collective welfare of the entire family. this does not happen in the corporate culture where the managers and controlling shareholders are from the different countries and cultures. and in the u.s. there is still the dark stain of the slavery forming an ill will towards each other. there is the distrust in the workers and the unwillingness in the white bureaucrats to see eye to eye with the former slaves as it generates a sense of loss of power, and in absence of that, the initial sense of having done a gross injustice to the fellow humans.

in a cooperatively coexisting society there is no fear of being left out. hence no body experiences the need to invent a personal expertise. hence there is no leadership needed, whether it be a cheerleading or conducting an orchestra. all the non western musicians can and do play together without the man with a stick make believedly telling them how to play the piece that is all written down and rehearsed tiresomely. only exception in the western music is the philadelphia philharmonics. the group does not have a conducter, and the group as a whole decides what to play and how.

the 3rd world music is unwritten and played unrehearsed. though it is classical, it is never played the same. crudely put, the expressive flow of the emotions, whether of laughter of joy or musical sounds pour out in a controlled order like water coming out of a fountain in a mechanically timed manner, in the western ways. in the primitive and non western expressions it is like waters flowing in the river, now smooth, now cascading from precipice. even though the river usually flows within the banks, its flow is never the same. and “one cannot dip one’s foot in the same river twice.”

the flow of life is like that. in it nothing repeats. the primitives know it, and even monkeys know it. so what is promoted to be the less intelligent living in fact requires more of unrepeatable learning all the time. unlike the factory, and factory-like routine professions that include even the medial practices, there is nothing routine about the life of the untamed. trees do not put out the second fruit in on the same spot of the same branch. the cheetah does not always outrun and catch his prey. and farmers do not harvest the same amount of the yield every harvest time.

philanthropy does for the rich what makeup kit does for the society woman. both try to improve their image in other people’s eyes. both know that what they are projecting as images are not what they really are. what women standing in front of the mirror see frightens them. so they try to hide what they see. likewise. what the rich see of their images reflected in people’s eyes scares them. these are not likeable reflections. but as the make up kit does not make woman a really beautiful nor make her feel beautiful, neither does a charitable donation make the rich a charitable person. such tries are poor struggles to pull wool over the seeing eyes, others’ and their own. for just as a made up beauty is said to be only skin deep, a contrived charity is only the screen deep, the television screen, that is.

remove the publicity from the charitable acts, and see how many rich there are left who still give anonymously. and if they still do, whether they still want to remain rich. the separation of classes is not a biological necessity. in fact, nothing that is born of the thought out reaction to the thought out future needs and fears is a biological need. this includes the parents’ acting in the best interests of their children in the unknown future, providing for their education and leaving for them the inheritance. if you have any doubts about things not working in the children’s best interests, just look at the lives of the children of the royalties of the past and present. further yet, the total disregard for the ecocentrically biological needs for the motion has become so obvious in the growing obesity in the industrialized rich nations that their governments have had to make a campaign for reducing the fat. bt far the message has not reached to the food industry and no body is talking about people’s eating habits.

it is also an interesting a fact, that, there are more middle class well to do young people jogging, mountain biking and joining the exercise regimes straining their motion starved bodies. it is not their biology that objects to work, it is their fear of being identified with the poor lest it would also bring the dreaded lack of the basic necessities of life that this division of classes has created.

just as the commercial: “headache? take anacin” has promoted that peel as a remedy for headache; charity is promoted as a cure for poverty. but as the peel only numbs the pain of headache, and is not the cure as it does not address the cause for headache, so, too, the philanthropy only treats the symptom of poverty, and not the cause, which is the socio-economic inequality created by the fear of the what if, the unknown envisioned as the known hardship the poor suffer from. philanthropy is a learned reaction to the fear of the possession beyond one’s need or ability to enjoy it, while knowing that others are kept from having less than necessary. whatever is not corresponding jn harmony with the ecocentrically biological existence, is not only unnecessary, but it is also unhealthy for the individual and the society. in nature, there is no one way action of any kind, including the charitable act. every thing is interactive, mutually beneficial, without any sense of obliging and obligation.

cronies are really motivated to help the if bill gates and warren buffet and their poor, then they may also use the story from the same biblical source, form which comes the expression: if you give a man a fish it will feed him for the day; but if you teach him how to fish, then he can feed his family for a life time. learning to fish is learning the trade of doing any thing. in the modern world of commerce, every one’s business affects everyone else’s living. what a person living in the pant house of the tallest new york building flushes down the commode, eventually comes back via the fish caught in the waters off the coast of new york.

so teaching someone how to fish, also means what to fish and where, and what not to dump in the waters that sustain the fish. that is the study of the inter-relatedness of all elements and their motions. coordinated motions of businesses will thus generate an ecocentrically sound co-existence among all creatures. in it bill gates and warren buffet will also be transformed like the other traders in nature, like butterfly or bee. in the act of gathering nectar they also pollinate and the flowering plant. and individually they are lighter than the flowers they serve. no flower is crushed under their weight. what an individual bee gathers is for the collective use.

the collective use of the resources, both natural and human in an ecological way will negate people’s search for help, and negate church, mosque and temples. and the hero worship will also end when no one is putting oneself above others, calling oneself the king or any other name.

these monuments, whether national or religious ultimately depict the divisiveness among the people of different places and generate ill will and promote the imperial mode of one upness, hoarding, exploitation and wasting wealth in ideological structures that no living person needs. the taliban young fighters blew up the big stone buddha statue in afghanistan, and both the hindus and muslims are still fighting over a place called babri masjid that the hindus demolished claiming it to have been built over a hindu temple. the worst kind of example of the animosity generated from the wealth supported ideology is the creation of israel for which the poor and helpless arabs were displaced. in the unawakened american psyche the support for the jews in helping to regain the land promised by the hypothetical god is more just a cause than the pathetic state of existence of the american indians whom they displaced barely two hundred years ago. this shows how uncharitable acts can be of the charitable foundations supported by the state or the rich.

if money is to be made, and accumulation of wealth earns one an esteem, all seems to be fair in the capitalist way of life.

weapons industry is one of the biggest money maker. and it invests in training scientists who are busy inventing and improvising ever more efficient ways to kill. then after making billions one may set up a charitable foundation to make amends with the entities in the make believe heavens, and mainly to appear more likeable in one’s society of peers.

there are the charitable foundations of all kinds, and bill and warren have taken an initiative in nurturing the flowers, the children of the 3r world to be crushed under the weight of the butterfly who practiced capitalism, here is a suggestion for them. lose weight and trade lightly like butterflies. with the un-spendable billions, you can transform even the sahara desert to a green forest that once it was. first find out what if any of the rich owned factories producing the myriad things are ecocentrically justifiable necessities of a wholesomely evolving existence. stop producing what is an unjustifiable waste. sure, that will lighten the burden of accumulation of most of the rich. but just as the down sizing of corporate industry displaces many workers, ecological down sizing, too, will displace some of the rich. but they will not be out in the cold like the laid off workers.

then, all the work places that are determined to be in harmony with the ecological nature of existence, must become ecocentric in operation, too. they would become cooperatives in form and mode of operation. this will eliminate the notion of ownership, and there fore, the absence of the accumulation of wealth by one person. operated thus, it will not only share the yield equally among the workers, but it will also be cooperating with all other workers producing other necessities of life. as far as the actual exchange of work is concerned, all world market is already inter-connected. what is missing is the rate of fair exchange. this artificially inflated standard of living terms the american and western production of work more valuable than the same work produced in the 3rd world. and it is the same inflated ego, derived from the unequal settlement between the slave owners and the freed slaves, that has enabled the thus made rich to own the factories and the former slaves to work in them. so in the name of the ownership, the rich determines how much to pay. it is thus that the owner, majority share holder and the chief operating officer earn several hundred times more than that of those who do the work, blue collar and white collar.

were the americans democratically minded people, their representatives would not be giving themselves the frequent pay raises now amounting to more than ten times the minimum wage of the working class americans. as these congressmen actually represent the rich, and the rich do not want the minimum wage increased, the congress does not dare to displease i rich supporters.

were the educational institutions democratically formed, their syllabuses would be nurturing ecologically equanimous way of life based upon cooperative endeavors in all thought, speech and actions. consequence of such an education would be that there would be no one working for some singular entity with the exclusion of the rest. people will only cooperate. now this kind of understanding of the nature of cooperative co-existence has effects upon every course offering, much the same as it is the market capitalism that writes a course offering. cooperation makes competition moot. this eliminates comparison. this accepts that, since not all students are born as are robots produced from the same factory fro the same mould. children are all children, much the same as all snow flakes are snow flakes, except that no two snow flakes are same in shape, size and so on. so, too, no two children are the same. duplication is not in the nature of nature. duplication and evolution do not happen together.

without the notion of comparison, there is no fear of losing out, no desire for the one-upness. there would be no “biggest house on the block”, be it a buckingham palace or the whitehouse, taj mahal, or the world’s tallest building in taipei. houses will still be built, and students will still learn the art of building, but much like the baby bird learns to build the nest. and when time comes, builds its nest together with its mate. all nests are individually made, using the locally available materials, and yet, no two nests are the same. in the absence of the preoccupation with the comparison, the notion of “best”, all one’s actions are ecocentrically symbiotic. then one does not strive to out do others, making the simple chores of life into circus acts, the world olympics, the beauty contests, championships, the pie eating contests, and, the richest man of the world. and when every one has what everyone else has, there is no fear of losing. hence, no defence mechanism, no super power.

man (he) has honed his skills in misuses of things, acts and thinking with the help of the profiteering in mind-type of education – for instance, before it is found that the war is the answer to a given problem, the defense strategies are taught, and some weapons are being designed which may be ready to use some ten, twenty years from now. if one can be taught to compete and fight to kill and get killed, so can one learn to conserve in every walk of life, and feel light like a butterfly in the meadows.

one cannot become a george bush, jr. or a bill gates and change in awareness what is real and what is a product of fearful thoughts, but when it comes to interacting with them, one can certainly non cooperate with them, as gandhi did. the circus acts are performed only when surrounded by an arena of the admiring crowd. there is an old saying in sanskrit: “one does not need to know the direction of a place where one is not going.”