Navel-Gazing is the Paramount Impediment to Human Progress--- With Implications for the Overhaul of K-12 Education

Navel-gazing is the paramount Impediment to human progress.

 

This is the general dilemma pertinent to the current circumstances of humanity;  and it is chief among those problems that impede our way in revolutionizing K-12 education.

 

Two great psychologists strongly suggest the reasons that cause the great bulk of human beings to be such navel-gazers, that is to be so busy looking distractedly at themselves that they cannot listen to others, understand the circumstances of others’ lives, feel genuine compassion for other people, or act with consistency in a spirit of love.

 

Sigmund Freud offers observations as to what he regards to be the key personality structures of id, ego , and superego: 

 

Actions emanating from the id are impelled by the basic drives for food, water, and sex;  much of a hungry world is understandably concerned with the former two objects of quest, while at this stage of human development  few people have learned how to deal with sex in ways other than crude expression of desire.

 

Actions emanating from the ego are impelled by the drive to establish oneself in the world:  to gain employment, to establish security of habitat, to make a name for oneself, to obtain recognition for achieving those measures communicated by society as indicative of success;  behavior manifested in fulfillment of the aims of the ego are focused on one’s own selfish considerations and, by extension, those in one’s family and very limited inner circle of friends and acquaintances.

 

Actions emanating from the superego are impelled by one’s moral sensibilities, typically bequeathed by one’s parents or parental surrogates;   but since most adults operate according to a substandard ethical code and many adults have moral standards that are clearly wretched, emanations from the superego tend not to reach the highest potential of this structure of the personality, which in that elevated potential would result in altruistic and empathic behavior.

 

Application of Freudian principles result in an interpretation of human activity in the world as driven overwhelmingly by the concerns of the id and ego and under circumstances in which the superego does not reach its highest potential for the manifestation of altruism, empathy, and compassion.

 

Freud’s observations suggest that humankind has no free will, driven as we are by these drives and by unconscious and subconscious forces hidden far below the surface of mental consciousness.

 

This lack of human free will is a chief observation of the great behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, who details the way in which human behavior is determined by our experiences in the world, according to whether we have found particular experiences to be positively reinforced (rewarded with pleasant primary reinforcers of food, water, sex;  or secondary reinforcers such as money, smiles, kind words), negatively reinforced (having an aversive situation removed for the display of a given behavior), or punished (resulting in aversive consequences). 

 

Favorable outcomes for the manifestation of altruistic, compassionate, and empathic behavior can also be powerful secondary reinforcers, but in a world in which morality and ethics are less emphasized than the satisfaction of basic biological drives and the attainment of self-focused desires, the scope for altruistic, compassionate, and empathic behavior is limited.  To combine the constructs of Freud and Skinner, behavioral emanations from the id and ego are much more consistently reinforced than are those highest behavioral expressions of the superego.

 

The result is a world in which people stare incessantly at their navels:

 

When the typical person is having a word exchange (there are very few genuine conversations, so the term “word exchange” is more apt), she or he rarely listens very carefully, so focused is that person on the matter of how she or he is appearing to the other, and so focused on what she or he is going to say once the other person pauses long enough for the inattentive listener to inject her or his own comments into the word exchange.  When a public issue arises in such areas as health care, taxes, economic policy, transportation, and public works the typical response is driven much more by individual and private concerns than by focus on the public good.

 

This is saliently true in the United States, where focus on issues pertinent to K-12 education is trained on individual, private, and localized concerns;  rather than on what is favorable for the attainment of collective, public, and universal aims.  Even for the most engaged parent, paramount and typically exclusive attention is given out of concern for what is best for her or his own child.  There is very little attention given to those philosophical and organizational principles that would actually impart an excellent education to all K-12 students at the level of the locally centralized school district.  Retreat to charter, parochial, or private schools ensues, although such schools are of indifferent and often poor quality and cannot offer the curricular coherency and commonly acquired sets of knowledge and skill that public schools of genuine excellence would provide.

 

We will only progress toward a higher level of human consciousness and better behaviors across the world when we boldly recognize the absence of individual free will.  A human being has no “mind” that is capable of exercising free choices;  rather, she or he has a powerful brain that can be used to make better decisions once the lack of free will is understood and comprehension of the inner and outer determinates of human behavior is attained.  Ironically, we will via better decision-making move closer to achieving the best aspirations of the intuitively seductive but erroneous notion of free will once we realize that free will is a chimeric illusion.

 

Similarly, we will attain better lives for ourselves as individuals when we realize that our only hope is collectively to make decisions that will yield physical and social environments more reinforcing of those altruistic behaviors, jettisoning purely selfish concerns for those empathic and compassionate considerations that will make us better listeners capable of genuine conversation and citizens truly intent on making this one earthly sojourn the best that it can be.

 

We must quit navel-gazing and lift our heads to survey and comprehend the landscape of humanity.