Education Involves Two Kinds Of Learning

Monday, 10 November 2025, 11:27 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

In truth, there’s a stronger correlation between America’s terrible educational system and the election of an ignorant and cruel president, than there is between economic conditions and disgruntled voters.

The disaster of modern education extends beyond America of course. An education writer in Britain bluntly defined schooling in the UK as “a curriculum that is overly academic and culturally barren, with teachers treated as robots.”

Better robots than propagandists, as the Trump Administration is hell-bent on installing from elementary school through university. Then again, most American teachers have always been propagandists for “the American way of life,” the core values of which have been materialism, capitalism and consumerism.

Therefore the blatant stupidity and brutality that now rules the USA didn’t originate with Trump and his henchmen and women, but in the long-neglected psychological, spiritual and cultural soil that gave rise to the monstrous outgrowth of Trumpism.

The remedy, both here, in England and globally, goes much deeper than “teaching children to confront online harms or misinformation… and learning self-defense against a daily bombardment of misinformation from social media and artificial intelligence.”

Half measures like this, as necessary and commonsensical as they are, won’t address the challenge to human cognition, identity and mental/emotional health that social media and AI pose, much less the environmental crisis outwardly and breakdown of globalized western civilization inwardly.

I wanted to be a teacher once. But I did as a writer would do before I became a writer – I took a couple jobs as a teacher’s aide and pre-school teacher to see what teaching was in practice rather than in theory at university.

I saw some good teachers and learned a lot, though most of it was disturbing. I learned the most however, from being with little ones and attending to their behavior and development. One little guy stands out.

Brian was a baby when I first met him. His parents were friends and we saw a good deal of him as he grew from infant to crawler to toddler.

Having long been keenly interested in child development, it was a joy to play and interact with Brian. His parents were well-educated evangelical Christians (dad with a degree from Berkeley), but their belief system only came up when his father and I debated evolution.

Undoubtedly because I simply attended to Brian, rather than harshly conditioning him in a Christian belief system, we formed a strong and affectionate bond.

One day when he was just 10 months old and I was intently watching him, he caught my eye and non-verbally communicated something with an affectionate laugh. I was floored. This child, who had just begun to stand and walk, was unmistakably conveying shared awareness!

My ideas of child development went out the window. From that day on, I never looked at Brian, or any child, through the lens of the “adult-child relationship,” but as a developing, individual human being with his or her own mind.

I saw that simultaneous attention to oneself and the child in the moment is the true soil in which children develop into free, minimally conditioned human beings.

The bond with Brian with grew, and being a very bright boy, he was learning quickly, both in the conventional cumulative way, and in an essential non-accumulative way that few parents or teachers understand.

However, a subterranean conflict with his rigid parents was also growing, of which I was not sufficiently aware. When Brian was two and half, they began ritualistically spanking him. When I intervened as tactfully as I could, they cut all contact.

I didn’t see Brian for two years. He was now five, and when we met he seemed sad. I asked if he wanted to go for a walk. For some minutes we didn’t speak. I could see Brian wasn’t angry, just confused.

I broke the pregnant silence. ‘Brian, it wasn’t your fault.’ Instantly he shot back, “Then whose fault was it?!” Again the perspicacity of his mind surprised me.

Of course I couldn’t say, ‘your mindless parents,’ so I just told him I cared about him and that he would understand when he was older.

In the months following the break, Brian’s parents went from Christian evangelicals to Christian fundamentalists, and later to Christian nationalists -- the core of Trump’s proverbial base.

It’s true, as far as it goes, that “the teacher’s task is to bring ‘the curriculum to life … to reflect their students’ lives and experiences.’” And that “it is not to be subservient to an establishment fanatically resistant to change.”

But with AI, for better, and so far for worse becoming the repository of human knowledge, humankind’s basic relationship to knowledge itself has to change.

Yes, “children “crave a knowledge of the real world,” and need “to be given a knowledge of money, law and legal rights, politics and voting, and skill at finding a job.”

However, to use that or any other knowledge wisely, and navigate and transform a corrupt and corrosive global society (not to mention being masters rather than slaves to AI), parents and teachers have to be able to transcend knowledge, and gain insight and liberation from their own conditioning.

Attentive self-knowing is something that can only be taught by example. Sadly, whether in the home or in the schools, few parents or teachers understand its supreme importance.

The planet is on fire and the world is in chaos. And the online world has bled into the ‘real world’ to the point of a distinction without a difference.

Never before in human history has there been a greater urgency in adults for a practical, applied understanding in the education of children of the difference between the cumulative learning of knowledge, and the non-accumulative learning of attention and insight.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail