Our current dilemma in education reflects Western civilization’s obsession with rationalism and materialism. For centuries, our mantra has been: “I am important because I can measure, own, control, know precisely, predict, judge.” We have turned the river’s visible and invisible currents into currency--replacing the ancient traditions of gifting and bartering with precisely defined, linear transactions. We no longer find our source in the stars, the four winds, waters' mysteries, or earth’s fertility; instead, we confine ourselves to square rooms, rectangular books, and screens to interpret "our world" with ever more precision. The Dehydration of Mystery Children arrive in our classrooms—waves of pure energy sliding on the contours of imagination—and we sit them at square desks. We hand them rectangular worksheets and books filled with "precise facts"designed to produce right answers. In this system: Numbers are for combining to get the right answer. Letters are for memorizing and placing in right orders. Learning is stripped of the "magic" that inspires gratitude and awe. By collapsing the participatory magic of a "wave universe," we have reduced the "quantum" world into a curriculum of clockwork particles. We've atomized it and left the ever-emerging possibilities out. Returning to the Dance But a shift is coming, and we must breathe more deeply into making it happen. We are beginning to see measurement and judgment for what they are. As we do, fear gives way to trust and trust to play and acceptance so deep that grief becomes a fertility ritual born from love's heart. We are entering an age where observation learns how to NOT interrupt the flow of beauty within innocent, playful thought. Thus, we can move education beyond "levers, classifications, and ledgers of right and wrong," to inspire children to be in their world of mystery and tender care. Like dancers, we must learn to move from stillness to the many rhythms of creation—sky, sun, moon, earth, sea and life--all emerging from cycles. We are moving from a culture of linear parts back into a world of waves, where imagination and reverence birth true communion and right action. It is time to lift education back into an initiation into wonder and trust as the ever-welcoming nest of love.
