ISSN 2225-7063
74
International Journal of Science
people on the planet by the 2046. The norms of the past in many respects will not be valid and reliable guides for success in the modern day and in our future. The concept we are a global community is not rhetoric or the fanciful idea of romantics and idealists. It is a pragmatic reality and only if we work in collaboration together as world communities will the planet earth survive (at least for us human beings!). We are a culture that promotes, celebrates, and passively accepts violence and discrimination under the guise of economic, self-protective, and patriotic rationales. When the founding fathers and mothers of the American society created a country based on the unity of people under the auspices each human being is endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, arguably they did not envision our modern public education system. The desire to be superior to others, to have more material wealth and success than others, to be revered for being better than others are the underlying rules of the game for ‘winning’ in American public education. Simply, educating young American citizens to be better than their classmates will not logically lead to bringing a unified understanding of what it means to be a global citizen who contributes to the security, beauty, and creativity of the world community through our culture as Americans. Public education in a democratic society such as America is rightly concerned with the individual growth and development of young citizens. This individual growth and development has; unfortunately, been distorted to mean something incongruous with the intention of an educational experience which promotes a sane society. A sane society requires individuals to be free so that he or she can be in authentic communion with other people and think and act in ways which demonstrate respect for the sanctity of life (McTaggart 2011, 2008a, 2008b). Holistic human growth and development in a sane society requires an education aimed at fostering integrated human beings who seek to consistently improve his or her self, influence the meaningful learning of other people, and transform the social and academic milieu of the places a person interacts (Csikszentmihalyi 1998, 1996; Whitehead 2008). It is an insane society which prizes and celebrates the accumulation of factoids, awards, honors, and the seeking of domination over other people. It is an insane society that reveres symbols as more real than what they represent; holding dearly to simulacrums which are atavistic to holistic, healthy human development. In a sane society the institutions, whatever they may be, are never more important than an individual human life. This is what ultimately separates a democratic life from most others ways of organizing society, such as communism. In communism for instance, an institution can logically be considered more important
International Journal of Science | No.2