Campaigning for Consciousness

According to progressive child behaviorists, the nature of children is to seek connection with other children and the worlds of experience within reality. When allowed to nurture their own creative natures children evolve with pride, self-confidence, honor and respect for each other and the world around them. A recent European Youth Conference’s ‘white paper’ illustrates these concepts.

Can you imagine, just for a moment, a place for children to build a future for themselves in an empowering environment that supports their natural connections? What do you think would happen? The desire to explore their connections to life, love and the world around them offers us a unique opportunity to take our planet and its people into a healthy new millennium.

Is it time we became the global family we know is necessary to continue life on planet Earth? Nobody says it will be easy. It can be fun, though. Holistic education is a growing attraction for educators that sincerely look forward to the development of this paradigm shift, creating collaborative alliances much the same as our various industries already have found works for the benefit of all.

Many authors across the gamut of progressive thinking including Bloom, Covey, Csikszentmihalyi, DeBono, Dyer, Gardner, Goleman, Hunter, Peters, Senge, and Tart are proposing that we look at the bigger picture of societal development. In many different voices they are all voicing the need for a collective reassessment of personal and professional goals and objectives as our civilization evolves.

A systems approach to learning and living as ONE is recommended by even the most skeptical of futurists, requiring that we redesign and retool our economic and social systems to serve people better. We can start by asking ourselves what we can do as individuals and groups to help support this change of attitude and agenda. It is difficult, at best, for a population to address accountability and responsibility toward future commitments when, as family units, there is an alarming failure rate.

We point fingers at problems without realizing that our way of life is the essential problem, from which all perspectives are skewed to one degree or another. Maybe it is time we looked at basic community development and how we can increase our chances of survival as families – nuclear, extended and planetary.

Mutants of the Monster

The reality is that we have also created at least two generations of children who have become angry, complacent and selfish in their actions and thinking to the point of violence beyond anything in history.

Marketing spin-doctors continue to escalate the ‘consumerism’ that is doing much to pollute our air, earth, and water without regard for the health and well-being of the individual or general population, including direct to consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals that due more to promote a nation of addicts than healthy communities.

This is a reflection of the state of our society, partnering with political correctness and profit-driven motives, turning our educational system into a promiscuous and permissive environment under threat of lawsuit for maintaining order or even mentioning God in the classroom. Why?

Not only in America have we seen such a transition of the value of education, ethics, and morals, where family units continue to break up at an alarming rate. This pattern is spreading to developing countries as well. Profit-driven media moguls have helped a great deal in this process with little regard for the social results.

Parents, social workers and teachers are painfully aware of the gluttony of our youth today, especially in the West. We set them up through our neglect of what we say is important… healthy relationships. They are often scarred to confront situations due to fear of retaliation or repercussions from administrators bound to dysfunctional systems.

Unfortunately, the United States is influencing the rest of the world in the same fashion. Many ‘third world’ countries are suffering from the results of consumer advertising and marketing now. Will it end? How can we manage change more effectively? Perhaps something like Spectrum Academy?

Service providers, organized religion, and even corporations have become nothing more than dysfunctional families unable to communicate their needs and wants effectively, let alone meet them. We have created a system that not only enables this to continue; we feel helpless and hopeless in the face of what seems to be an unstoppable proliferation of adversity.

Rapid industrial development and accompanying social shifts were difficult to manage effectively on a large scale and many well-intentioned programs have failed. In a victimless mindset we must begin to ask ourselves how to change this trend; sharing the solutions and ways to implement them as quickly as possible with every institution engaging youth today. The youth themselves are begging us in so many blatantly obvious ways.

The phrase ‘can we all just learn to get along?’ echoes in the hearts and minds of humanity as we blaze forward in a technology-driven evolution of society now, even more demanding than the industrial revolution because of the increase in communication networks, computer-driven intelligent systems, and human ignorance of the relationship imbalance between man, machine, and environment.

How can we use this technology effectively for the benefit of all instead of the desensitization of community values, morals, and ethical practices? There are some individual, corporate, and educational leaders who are making great strides already, yet there is no ‘model’ that brings everything together in one place that is publicly funded, or even privately at this time.