Creating the Perfect Society:
Contemplating the Role Of Public Education
Three months ago, in reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward [originally
published in 1887]; H. G. V. Ogden, translator (Garden City, NY, Dover
Publications, 1996), I was impressed with Bellamy’s refusal to accept life as
perceptible at present and to advance a vision for developing the ideal
society.
Considering
Bellamy’s vision reinforced at a high degree of magnitude a propensity that I
have always had to look beyond what is to envision what can be. But reading Bellamy moved me to consider such
aspects of life as violence, war, and economic inequity--- often considered degradations that can at
best be ameliorated--- to be
unacceptable conditions of life that could be eliminated if we only mustered
the courage, intellect, and activism to work toward the extinction of those
conditions that make this one earthly sojourn so excruciating for the majority
of our fellows on the globe.
In this
edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution:
Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I 1) review the
seminal vision of the perfect society found in Thomas More’s Utopia [originally
published in 1516]; H. G. V. Ogden, translator (New
York: Appleton-Crofts, 1949);
2) consider Bellamy’s vision in Looking Backward; 3) advance my own vision of the ideal
society; 4) consider specifically the
nature of religion, spirituality, and ethics in the perfect society; 5) and explore the operant determinants of
human behavior that must be recognized and applied in public education for the
development of human beings whose decisions, cultivated by environment rather
than made under the illusion of free will, might actually create the perfect
society.
Never have
I produced a more important series of articles, to which I urge readers now to consider
in the succeeding pages.
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