Really New Education for Social Living

There is nothing wrong with our educational system, except the psychological ignorance of our “educators.” This indictment is limited to education as that concerns our social life and the miscalled “social sciences.” To an evolutionary psychologist it seems that an intelligent system of education must be designed to accelerate the natural process for mental maturing. If you are a professional “educator,” or have been “educated” then perhaps you should ask yourself if you can guess what I mean by “mental maturing.” Do you really know how to read this essay, empathically, so as to duplicate my mental content? This will be specially important, when it comes to describing the really new education of the future.

Practically everyone appears to be suffering in some degree from his own unreconciled childish impulses, or his more conscious conflicting desires—suffering from being a “split personality,” so-called. In our society the most general and most pernicious of psychosocial phenomena are those of the “split personality,” especially when these are accompanied by that degree of emotional intensity which is characteristic of the borderland, just this side of a psychosis. The chief responsibility for the “split personalities” lies first with our moralists and next with our “educators.”

Everywhere “education” is subordinated to religio-moralistic sentimentalism, and therefore by the psychological imperatives which make for the perpetuation of infantile impulses and intellectual methods. These imperatives include the religious temperament and its anti-scientific method for promoting social progress; and for the promulgation and glorification of the morally approved emotional and ideological symptoms of the “split personality.” Since these religious guides are always “split personalities” or their ignorant imitators, they live mostly in a illusional world of feeling and fantasy and not by means of any real understanding, of the actual human beings, who constitute their human e