“What Is Education?” (Quora)
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is education?“
Education—i.e., the correct form of education and not how education is currently about skills and knowledge acquisition—is our integration in a particular social environment that gives us a line of action and a direction toward a future state.
We need to see our next state in our social environment. Our next state urges us forward, awakening, encouraging, motivating and inspiring us to be like it. In a social environment, it is easier for us to change.
Educators should thus create a social atmosphere whereby our feelings and moods become impetus for us to adapt to our surroundings, and thus the units from which society is composed gather into a harmonious group, which becomes our next state.
A harmonious group is one in which individuals who are egoistic by nature, i.e. made up of desires to enjoy at each other’s expense, become reshaped into positive social beings, and in which they start understanding that they are in absolute and mutual cooperation with the surrounding society, where only through mutual cooperation can they provide for everything that they need in a peaceful, harmonious and convenient way.
Accordingly, by entering such an environment, we apply a certain kind of pressure on our ego. That is, we wish to succeed and hold a certain level of respect in society, so if we enter a society that principally values mutual cooperation, then we try to become more cooperative and giving in order to fit in and gain society’s respect. In other words, we feel that our egoistic goals become satisfied through altruistic actions. Then, the more we nourish such an environment and participate in it, the more we will develop to become giving, cooperative and altruistic beings, values where if regularly upheld and strengthened in society, will raise us to become truly happy and confident people. That is the essence of an optimal form of education.
Based on a lesson with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, “The Last Generation,” on July 9, 2015. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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