Reconstituting the Curriculum

By M.R. Islam, Gary M. Zatzman and Jaan S. Islam

This inspiring work presents a truly knowledge-based approach to education as an alternative to the current curriculum that is based on consolidating pre-conceived ideas. It demonstrates the advantages of the new curriculum, both in terms of acquiring knowledge and preventing current problems such as technological disasters, global injustice, and environmental destruction. It also shows how it can eliminate plagiarism, low retention in classrooms, non-representative grading, and other common problems. Examples are given from various disciplines, ranging from science and engineering to philosophy and law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Nov 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118867907

Book preview

Contents

Cover

Half Title page

Title page

Copyright page

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 Widespread malaise — a Summary

1.2 Thought as Material

1.3 Renewal of Thought-Material Resources and the Nature-Science Approach

Chapter 2: Curriculum — The Place Where Tangible Content Wrestles Intangible Process

2.1 Introduction

2.2 What is ‘Human Thought Material’?

2.3 Why This Starting Point?

2.4 HTM from the Nature-Science Standpoint

2.5 Commodification of HTM

2.6 HTM vs Commodification

2.7 Skills Development versus Learning from Acts of Finding Out

2.8 Current Practices in Education

2.9 The Need for the Science of Intangibles as the Basis for Education

2.10 The Tangible-Intangible Nexus

2.11 The Encounter between European and Islamic Outlooks — a Delinearized History

2.12 Final Words About Education and Training

Chapter 3: Intention: Its Individual and Social Purposes

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Human Thought Material: A Root + Pathway Analysis

3.3 Fœtal Learning

3.4 Aspects of Pre-School Learning and Early Development of Individuals’ own Thought-Material

3.5 Intention: Origins

3.6 Nature for Sale?

3.7 Conclusions

Chapter 4: Fundamental Changes in Curriculum Development

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Struggle for Educational Reform: Internal and External Factors

4.3 Muslim-Christian Conflict: A Delinearized Short History

4.4 Why did the Scientific Revolution Break Out in Europe and Not the Islamic World?

4.5 Education and Civilization: a Delinearized History

4.6 Education and Civilization: the Delinearized Future Prospect of a Reconstituted Curriculum

Chapter 5: Sustainability and Change in Curriculum Development: The HSSA Syndrome and Other Maladies

5.1. Truth is Knowledge, Knowledge is Peace, So … What’s the Problem?

5.2 What is Sustainability?

5.3 What Happens When a Process is Not Sustainable

5.4 Theories Proven Wrong? How About ‘Laws’?

5.5 Could this be Averted, and if so, How?

5.6 Theory, Empirical Outlook and Disinformation in the Social Sciences

Chapter 6: The Nature-Science Criterion:

6.1 Introduction — Can Modern Science Distinguish Truth From Falsehood?

6.2 Tangible-Intangible Nexus & the criterion of Truth vs Falsehood

6.3 Negative Impacts of the Science of Tangibles

Chapter 7: The HSS®A® Phenomenon

7.1 Introduction

7.2 The HSS®A® (Honey → Sugar → Saccharin® → Aspartame®) Pathway

Chapter 8: Concluding Remarks & Observations

8.1 Introduction

The Appendices: An Introductory Word from the Authors

Appendix 1a

Opening remarks

Appendix 1b

Appendix 1c

A1c.1 Taking Economics Backward As Science

A1c.2 Developing A Theory of Marginal Information Utility Based On The Alternative Approach of Beginning with Highly Simplified, Quite Concrete Models

A1c.3 Imperfections of Information, Or Oligopoly And Monopoly?

Appendix 1d

Part One

The Roller Coaster Ride of The Information Age or: the world rendered as through an aphenomenal mask

Annexes

Appendix 2a

A2A.1 Introduction

A2A.3 Islamic Scholars

A2A.4 The Mutazilites

A2A.5 Islamic and Eurocentric Conceptions of the Unity of Knowledge Compared

A2A.6 Islamic Scholars who were Founders in their Fields

Appendix 2b

CONTENTS

Glossary

End Notes

Appendix 3a

A3a.1 Summary

A3a.2 Why Do We Need A New Curriculum?

A3a.3 Why Research?

A3a.4 Seeing The Bigger Picture

A3a.5 What Is New In The Proposed Curriculum

A3a.6 Final Words About Education And Training

ANNEX A3a.x.1

Appendix 3b

Government & Industry Policy-Making

Appendix 3c

A3c.1 Introduction

A3c.2 What’s with left-handed people?

A3c.3 Why it is also such a minus for the colonizer

References and Bibliography

Index

Reconstituting the Curriculum

Scrivener Publishing

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Title Page

Copyright © 2014 by Scrivener Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Co-published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hoboken, New Jersey, and Scrivener Publishing LLC, Salem, Massachusetts.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 978-1-118-47289-7

M. Rafiq Islam would like to dedicate the book to his wife, Meltem Islam, whose love of children has turned her into the most natural teacher he has come to know personally.

Gary Zatzman would like to dedicate this book to all the three dozen researchers who participated in the groundbreaking work unfolded by the Energy-Environment-Communications (EEC) Research Group between 2003 and 2008 and published in some 100 refereed articles and more than a dozen books and research monographs.

Jaan Islam would like to dedicate this book to Allah, the Creator of everything and His final messenger, Prophet Muhammad, who epitomized the principle of teaching by example.

Foreword

In the modern age, we have learned Image is everything. Image, however is not the truth. It is no wonder that we are also familiar with the slogan: Truth hurts. If knowledge is the familiarity of the truth, seeking knowledge is perhaps the most dangerous pre-occupation. This is only matched by the pre-occupation of creating a curriculum that is based on Knowledge or the pursuit of it. In fact, the pre-occupation of promoting pursuit of truth, even when that truth could very well speak of destabilizing a system that gave rise to the onset of revolution is so dangerous, requires unprecedented courage to write about this idea. The book promises a paradigm shift, it’s a such buzzword that if I didn’t know or admired the courage of the lead author for over a quarter of a century, I would have discarded the notion of paradigm shift in education as a ploy to draw attention. I do know the lead author as the most-published petroleum engineer in the world and as the mastermind of many breakthrough ideas in topics ranging from petroleum engineering to clinical research, from engineering education to political science and economics. I also know him as possibly the most fearless advocate of freedom of speech and the defender of the weak and vulnerable. It doesn’t come to me as a surprise that he has the courage to confront and expose all shortcomings of modern education system and to tout the principle of equating Knowledge with the pursuit of Truth and relate it to the only motive of education. This concept is incredibly simple, yet the outcome is so revealing that few ventured into writing about it. Only in the Information Age that assured us transparency that we can tolerate and, in fact, cherish such a book as a treasure.

If pursuit of truth is a dangerous preposition, touting it as a means of creating revolution in anything, not to mention in Education, is an absurd concept. In fact, history tells us most people do not consider revolution as anything other than ‘trouble’ until the trouble is over and revolutionaries have prevailed. If the ‘trouble’ succumbs to the Establishment, the revolutionary concept is quickly discarded. Such reaction to revolutionary ideas is easily understood through the fear of failure. People who lack self-confidence often find themselves having an axe to grind and find all the reasons to support the Establishment. It is also a well-known fact that no Establishment ever supported revolution or revolutionaries. In this, the Establishment of the education system is no exception and indeed is the most unlikely place to create revolutionaries. Unfortunately for the Establishment, no quantum change - change worthy of a mention in a positive context has ever taken place without a revolution. The modern age hasn’t seen a revolution for sometime. It is about time such revolution take place in the most unlikely site - the educational arena.

Few have the aptitude of seeing education and revolution in the same breadth. Education has been touted as a means to promote status quo. How can that be open to create a revolution? It is true, if the original intent of education was ever promoted (or even tolerated), there would be no need for revolution. As this book points out, we have somehow moved away (or we were never there) from the fundamental principles of education. When did we ever glorify the person who enters a University to learn and exits to serve? How often we honor a professor who calls himself a partner in learning (along with students)? How often we see the grade point average of a student reflective of his/her knowledge?

This book talks about revolutionizing the education system. Because this is done through Knowledge-based curriculum, with any self respect and notion of human dignity, we have to call this revolution safe and indeed essential for the future. Knowledge being the truth about everything, it signs toward infinitude. Only human being with unwavering passion for the pursuit of truth can approach this infinitude. Any short-term or worldly motive can only hurl a person toward negative infinity. This is the essence of the message delivered in this book.

What is not talked about is how this approach will revolutionize the society. Even though examples from energy, environment, and communication (which virtually cover all aspects of human lives) are given throughout the book, the same approach can be used for revolutionizing any curriculum. This indeed is a very tantalizing proposition and the impact of this education system on the society cannot be over-emphasized. Either the author has a plan to write future books on the impact or he wants the readership to develop their own research topics on the subject, but I can hardly wait to see the impact if a university indeed used the curriculum. It will be the onset of a revolution that is bound to sweep the academic world.

This book will certainly offend many - perhaps the vast majority of those who benefit from status quo. The author questions every single popular slogan, even the ‘progressive’ one that has been in the works from virtually all sectors. He calls ‘sustainability’ a distraction, ‘economic development’ a ploy, ‘learning-based education’ a mere training scheme, ‘know how’ a euphemism for selling status quo, and the list goes on. It is not easy to swallow this pill. After all, any revolution is a nuisance at best, unless successful. Revolution in education is no exception. We cannot expect the author to promote the virtue of self learning, learning without expensive tools, overbearing overburdens, and the pomp of classical learning and be supported by the establishment.

For those who have found the Information Age breaking all promises of Infinite Justice, and for those who feel perturbed by the omens of Infinite Injustice in all areas of life, this book brings hope for the future and shows the way to reverse the trend of infinite injustice and form a society based on Justice, Peace, and Equality. For those who benefit from the status quo, this book comes with a warning - the policy based on self-interest and short-term focus never pays and indeed can bring down the most fortified infrastructure beneath the rubble of history. This book could not have come at a more appropriate time.

G.V. Chilingarian

Professor, University of Southern California

President, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, USA Branch

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the unintended role that so many teachers by negative example have played throughout our lives in helping expose unexamined First Assumptions. Each author has a number of such teachers that they can cite. However, for the purpose of this book, it would suffice to say that such teachers should be acknowledged because their negative examples represent the most important database for human thought material. They also teach the valuable lesson that both good and evil serve unique roles in fulfilling the purpose of the universal order.

It would be a remiss if the authors didn’t acknowledge the role of other teachers as well as similarly remarkable individuals that helped sharpen arguments in favor of knowledge-based education and against robotic training, often misconstrued as ‘education’. These individuals are real assets and their well-intended contributions must be celebrated.

Hardial Bains

Prof. Amit Chakma

Prof. G.V. Chilingar

Prof. R.E. Collins

Les Ferley

Prof. Farouq Ali

Dr. Sk. Saad Dabbous

Dr. D. W. L. Earle

Dr Andrew Garrod

Ali Islam

Prof. M. Aminul Islam

Prof. M. Anwarul Islam

Prof. M. Monirul Islam

Anthony Kennett

M. Moniruzzaman Khan

Prof. Axel Meisen

M. Ali Hassan Mughal

Dr. Shabbir Mustafiz

Prof. K. Nandakumar

David Prior

M. Rahmatullah

Dr. Sadeq Magboub

Dr. Mohammed Muntasser

Dr. J. Speight

Dr. Sara Thomas

Prof. C.L. Tien

Dr. Hans Vaziri

Prof. T.F. Yen

Preface

Do we want whole-people or half-people in society of the present and future? The modern age discovered division of labour as a device for harnessing to the purpose of rapidly accumulating wealth. But this has been done with a ruthlessness and thoroughness that utterly overwhelmed humanity. We have today arrived at the Information Age. Even the most intimate products of the human brain are routinely converted into so-called intellectual, i.e., private, property. This is evidence of the existence and operation of an economic machine that thrives on cannibalizing the so-called valuable parts of people – their labour time, their skill at this or that, their creativity – while leaving the rest of the carcass behind to rot.

At the same time, meanwhile, massive social problems have accumulated and festered on global scale. Whatever worked to alleviate these problems (we cannot speak yet of solutions) in the past no longer works on a local scale. The old cannibalistic methods of mustering only the valuable bits of the human person have guaranteed failure and almost ensure that the problems will overwhelm us.

As for the material preconditions necessary to tackle problems on global scale, we actually lack for nothing: we basically know how to overcome ignorance, illiteracy, disease and so on and so forth. The problem is at the level of 1) intention and 2) conscience.

People in general do not harbor particularly evil intentions towards their fellow humans. To get them to condone or not resist the infliction of evil, the British discovered, the Nazis industrialized and the U.S. today has further modernized the techniques for the corrupting of conscience. The corrupting of conscience is something that is not easy to do on an individual, person-to-person basis, but terrifyingly easy to accomplish on a mass scale (through mobilizing mass media to purvey disinformation, etc.).

One important starting-point for reversing this trend and undoing the damage is to stop the corrupting process in its tracks. The educational system has become a vehicle of such strategic importance in all societies for accommodating people to accepting the globalized status-quo. The reconstitution of the whole human person is what can and must be addressed through the new curriculum that invokes paradigm shift in the education system.

Some present education as a transmission, or uptake, of skills that lead to employment. Others view it as a state of being, protected by an academic priesthood for whom an aspirant must first prove himself/herself worthy before being permitted to continue through the gates towards ever more refined stages of excellence. This book, however, rejects both positions and delivers the message instead of researching and investigating matters in order to arrive at the truth. Truth is that which is transparent, reflecting no image back and therefore unavailable for twisting or corruption through subsequent acts of interpretation. Education is thus redefined as that which takes place as the result of the individual’s personal participation in acts of finding-out. This finally disposes of the straitjacket created by the obsolescent and sterile debate over whether education is a matter of skills or of excellence and grace.

Consider what happens when it comes to the training of engineers and the repositioning of how problems with energy supply, environmental risks and the opening and maintenance of channels for the most direct and least-mediated communication between technical experts, administrative officials and different sections of the public over how to implement solutions and which problems to prioritize. Clearly: insisting today on such a revolution in education could not be more relevant.

Ah, Enron!, the reader might rush to guess. But actually, the best example that one can cite comes from a common phenomenon – a system-protecting power grid shutdown –unleashed on an uncommonly unprecedented scale. In August 2003, 10 million residents of the Canadian province of Ontario and a further 40 million in the American states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire were caught and left largely on their own to cope without electricity, in the biggest power blackout in either country’s history. The fact that the stock exchanges of Toronto and New York were reopening before many people have even made it back to their homes and families and lives is being hailed as proof of the resiliency of a system that is broken. The disconnect between the authorities and the public in these conditions was never clearer than the moment when New York mayor Michael Bloomberg addressed his fellow citizens and the world concerning the measures being taken to reach out and keep the public tuned in to developments and measures undertaken for their safety and welfare. As corporatizer of one of the most advanced computerized financial reporting systems in the world (Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Financial Services), the New York mayor is a real-life dot-com millionaire. The city, he said with the greatest tone of reassurance in his voice, is posting updates on its website… And just how were any of his fellow-citizens supposed to get there? Even authorities as savvy about high technology and its possibilities as the current mayor of New York City still don’t get it! This incident is not about the inconveniencing of millions of individuals. It is about society being caught unprepared – actually: utterly stripped and devoid of any reserves or redundant capacities to deal with – the known and predictable consequences which were latent from the outset in the choices taken years before as to how to implement crucial technological changes in modernizing the largest-scale power grids of the North American continent according to the gospel of deregulation.

This book takes apart the current education system that is indeed based on doctrinal philosophy. Even though a secular status had been claimed for it, the European Renaissance did not remove any of the paradoxes that were rife and left over from the Middle Ages. If one sets apart the hypothesis that modern public education and its New (all tangibles all the time) With Science’s core based on secular logic, it becomes clear that the modern education system is full of paradoxes and contradictions precisely because it includes the same process that doctrinal philosophy used. Because of inherent flaws of our education system, it is impossible for our system to make the necessary paradigm shift that requires change in both source and process of scientific cognition. This book suggests a very clear general outline of the curriculum transformations needed to get out of the present rut. These curriculum suggestions all rest on essential fundamental principles and groundwork for advancing a truly secular, non-dogmatic curriculum in any field or level of study, be it short- or medium training programs or more fully-rounded professional formation/preparation, and in any venue from classroom to online, and at any level from elementary to PhD.

M Rafiqul Islam

Gary M Zatzman

Jaan Islam

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1 Widespread malaise — a Summary

Current education and its institutional order seem to be in a mess everywhere. There’s no point beating about the bush. Education represents nothing but training, and that in a system that promotes maintenance of the status quo and induces a thinking pattern that can be characterized as ‘anti-Knowledge.’

So, why yet another book on the theme of why our education system must change? The authors reside in Canada, where a general North American educational processing system reproduces all the same problems seen on larger scale in the United States.

The U.S. population is 10 times that of Canada’s. Discussion and debate is accordingly louder, its addiction to the status-quo accordingly more acute, and the desperation to be found at the extremities of the discussion spectrum of discussion accordingly more crazed.

For some time in the U.S., some faction or other has been popping up here and there predicting imminent doom and disaster looming as a result of some actual reform of the education system, or some proposed reform or some resistance to any reform. Is there anything different this time? Where’s the fire?

Public education has been a major part of social discussion in the United States since the 1840s. Ferment of this kind, however seemingly alarming, has become normal ever since. Today, no less than before, this discourse still includes a wide number and range of predictions about the education system’s imminent crash or decline. Widely divergent recipes are touted, each promising to reform, salvage, or somehow fundamentally transform the system. Few if any of these promised scenarios, meanwhile, have subsequently lived up to their advance notices.

Over the decades, a number of unstated assumptions have become built into the discourse surrounding education reform. Probably the single most widely accepted assumption concerns the social purpose(s) of education. Until very recently, there have been few newcomers to, or citizens and residents of, the United States who were in any doubt about the major role the education system was expected to fulfill. It was expected to prepare the next generation for taking up all the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic republic, from contributing to society and one’s family’s development in some position of employment to voting.

Within all the social, political and economic structures and discourses of U.S. society, a number of deep fractures have opened up during the last decade, especially since 9–11. The extent, depth and intensity of these fractures frequently exceed even the existing and long-established divides of race and class. The emergence and further development of these fault-lines challenge a previously-assumed broad consensus about the existence and historic mission of the United States as a democratic republic.

The revolution in information technologies of the last several decades and its impacts in the education system are on many peoples’ lips. Far less remarked, however, have been the accumulating impacts of such developments on the present and future of the educational process, which are increasingly profound. Daily, meanwhile, it is these impacts that can be seen transforming the actual discussion about the needs of educational reform. These are the processes forming the backdrop to the kinds of change in the education system that the present book proposes to address.

The argument for the kind of change this book has in mind now proceeds to prepare the reader with an examination of the usual evidences of reality, focusing on some of the more concerning negative trends.

Performance indices:

international comparison of math scores¹ for elementary and middle school students within the United States;

dropout rates from Grades 9 thru 12 in U.S. schools²;

changes in graduation rates for science and engineering³;

Dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the performance of and future prospects for the public education system have become widespread throughout the United States and other countries of the Americas and Europe. Crushingly high rates of unemployment and underemployment confront university graduates, further fuelling this malaise.⁴ Public soul-searching about the value of formal education seems to intensify by the month, by the week, by the day and even by the hour.

Notice, however, the sorts of things about which the most detailed statistics are collected and analyzed: they are all about outcomes. Whatever may actually have happened personally, subjectively, to or for the individuals undergoing processing by the educational system is secondary to the point of invisibility. The criteria of interest are those that can be measured and ranked. The fact remains, however, that such a seemingly rational and quantitative approach tells us little or nothing about how individuals combine what they take away with them from the experience of the educational process into the rest of their lives. Absent this human factor, the education system reduces to some mere training regime. It seems patently obvious to the authors, and to many of our colleagues, friends, relatives and other associates, that reordering or reforming any aspect of the educational process without any serious handle on this supremely important qualitative dimension we call the human factor is a fool’s errand, inherently wasteful of scarce and highly-valued public resources.

The main upshot of such an intensely narrow focus on readily quantifiable outcomes and comparisons has inevitably favored, and strengthened, certain ideological agendas over others. Thus, there are those who think that, since everything that is truly valued in this society carries a price-tag and some privately-based level of ownership of the productive apparatus, meaningful educational reform conditioned by these criteria could best be accomplished by re-casting the educational process as a commercial service operation. Government support for those necessary parts that as yet cannot be rendered a source of private profit is accepted, but any other kind of government support is considered an undesirable intrusion. As might be expected in a society that places the greatest faith in private-sector solutions to major social problems, the charter-school movement in the United States has taken off over the last couple of decades as one of the preferred alternatives to publicly-maintained K-12 schools. Today, this has reached the point that a number of public school districts in the U.S. have launched charter schools of their own, with special federal funding, as something of a controlled experiment in providing private school options alongside public ones.⁵

Back in the second paragraph of this Introduction, we mentioned the fact that ferment around the perceived or most cherished purposes of public instruction is nothing new in U.S. education. Starting less than 20 years before the Civil War, a broad discourse emerged — centred in Boston, which was already the scholarly and educational centre of the American republic — concerning the appropriate roles to be fulfilled by public education in a country that been created both as a negation of continental European traditions of feudalism, monarchy, an Established Church, etc. from the Old World and as a bastion of Anglo-Saxon liberty in the New World. Although the U.S. by no means invented the theory or practice of systems of public education, its people and communities at various levels were historically open to a wide range of experimentation.

Among the more prominent names associated with this trend were Horace Mann and Noah Webster. This openness itself evolved out of the general acceptance of an important connection that would need to be maintained between the responsibility on the one hand to participate in public forms of democratic decision-making and the ability on the other hand to discharge such responsibility in meaningful ways. Teachers, parents and politicians shared an abiding faith on this point, namely: that all the outstanding problems could and would be addressed and eventually resolved in favor of increased democratic participation. Even in the teeth of the most blatant forms of class and racial discrimination that would blight the delivery of public educational services across most of the southern United States until the 1960s, and that also hampered educational opportunities in many of the impoverished inner cities of the largest conurbations of the north-central and northeastern United States for much of the 20th century, this point of consensus remained intact.

Over the last two decades following the end of the Cold War, however, it has been precisely this longstanding appearance of consensus that has come increasingly into question. Alongside the maintenance of a wide range of choices of private education facilities for the sons and daughters of the upper middle classes and topmost elites of the United States, entire swaths of the mass public education system itself are increasingly privatized and maintained according to the shehadeh, or central unquestionable central pillar of faith, of post-Cold War America, which is that there is no God but Monopoly and Maximum is its Profit.

Amidst the widespread sense of unease among Americans over a widely-perceived acceleration in the decay of the quality and content of public education and other educational and training opportunities, meanwhile, it turns out that there has been little or no consensus about the best starting-point for overcoming these burdens.

The authors have been moved to produce this book as a contribution to the search for that best starting-point. We see that big business and high finance possess countless tentacles that can, and do, reach into many areas of the education system, ranging from the Channel One phenomenon⁶ to building relations with a prominent local football team or coach(es) from schools within the public system. Could these arrangements and resistance to their negative consequences lie at the core of present day-struggles over the form and content of curriculum renewal? Could action around these issues, and about the best practices for facilitating curriculum reform on an ongoing basis, bring about lasting impact?

In sum, regarding this bottom-line matter of outcomes, the results produced by so-called modern systems of education suffer from three major short-comings. They are:

disconnection between research and academic curriculum;

compartmentalization of different disciplines; and

lack of conscious and conscientious experience.

The disconnection between research and academic curriculum often translates into a reluctance of teachers to upgrade their notes or their knowledge base. A teacher does not consider acquiring knowledge as an integral part of teaching. For students, the lack of research is reflected by their longing for spoon feeding of information. Teachers/professors teach what they learned many years ago and not what they are learning now. They constantly engage in asking the same question over and over, in name of homework, tests, midterms, or final exams.

In this, the concept of asking real questions or even guiding open-ended questions to has become a forbidden practice among teachers. While asking questions to learn something new remains the most natural reason for asking any question, teachers are engaged in ‘testing’ rather than examining or asking questions while maintaining the term ‘question’. Few teachers even think of asking questions that they do not know answers to.

One of the most deeply entrenched misconceptions stems from the old school approach, which prohibited questioning the Establishment. If research starts with asking questions, teachers today are least likely to be any part of research. Their training and work experience leaves them with little or no faculty or aptitude to formulate questions that would lead to new knowledge. Students, on the other hand expect no original research or even individual investigative studies as part of the curriculum. At a later stage, this translates into rejecting the notion of finding new solutions for themselves, instead settling for technology transfer, turn-key projects, and filling out template forms.

Such compartmentalization stems from the isolationist approach promoted since the dawn of the modern age. Until today, many teachers/professors create intellectual silos around themselves and do not feel they have anything to receive from colleagues, from the industry, from other disciplines or even from different age groups. They are there to ‘preach’, ‘indoctrinate’, ‘teach’, but never to learn for themselves. This modus operandi itself encourages tunnel vision among students that remain unprepared to live in a society that demands interdisciplinary interactions.

The ultimate result is failure among teachers and students alike to see the big picture. Graduates are treated by the employer as robots, merely conducting repetitive tasks without any knowledge of what the bigger picture is. In today’s world, there is hardly anyone who can see the big picture and one does not have to look beyond the headlines to realize how helpless the situation is. This has reached the stage where three Nobel Laureates — the Dalai Lama, Shirin Ebadi, and Desmond Tutu — have expressed grave concern for the ‘unintellectuals’ and declared that morality or the presence of empathy is divorced from intellect. They concluded that intellectual consistency may conflict with moral conviction and hence one should sacrifice the intellectual consistency rather than re-evaluate the moral conviction!⁷

What has just been described summarizes much if not most of what employers and parents and society-in-general see on the surface much

It has long been implicitly assumed that the over-riding ultimate of education or learning or skills development is for individuals or their employers to make money. While such obsession with tangibles is not in itself new, the monopolization of this dogma as the only ‘civilized’ is. Numerous examples could be cited, but here we consider just this example, from Nobel-Prize-winning work. In 2008, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to three scientists credited with the discovery of the so-called green fluorescent protein (GFP). While discovering something that occurs naturally is a lofty goal=, New Science does not allow the use of this knowledge for anything other than making money, without regard to long-term impact or the validity of the assumptions behind the application. It turns out that this Nobel Prize-winning technology is being put to work by implanting these proteins in other animals, humans included. Two immediate applications are: 1) the monitoring of brain cells of Alzheimer’s patients; 2) use as a signal to monitor others (including crops infected with disease or infested with disease-carrying pests. Both are money-making ventures, but more importantly: these ventures are based on scientifically false premises. For instance, the first application assumes that the implantation (or mutation) of these ‘foreign’ proteins will not alter the natural course of brain cells (affected by Alzheimer’s or not). So, what will be monitored is not what would have taken place. Rather what what will be monitored is whatever is going to happen after the implant is in place. These two pathways are not and cannot be identical. More in-depth research (something not allowed to grow out of New Science) would show this line of application is similar to the use of a CT scan (at least 50 times more damaging than an X-ray) for detecting cancer, whereas the CT-scanning process itself is prone to causing cancer (Brenner and Hall, 2007).⁸ The problem here is not insufficient knowledge, as in the proverb about a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The problem is the actual motives of those with a plan intended for using such discoveries allegedly for the benefit of mankind.

In the fall of 2007, as the time for Nobel Prize awards approached, another controversy broke. Dr. James Watson, the European-American who won the 1962 Nobel Prize for his role in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, created the most widely publicized firestorm in the middle of the Nobel Prize awards month (October 2007). He declared that he personally was inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa because all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says ‘not really.’ Here we see the clash between a first premise on the one hand and a conclusion based on a different premise on the other. Their intelligence is the same as ours stems from the unstated premise that all humans are created equal, a basic tenet of the nature is perfect mantra. All testing to which Watson refers, on the other hand, is based on the premise that the theory of molecular genetics/DNA (which is linked with an essentially eugenic outlook) is true. The entire controversy, however, ended up revolving entirely around whether Dr. Watson is a racist, which he could then reject by hiding behind the claim of being interested solely in the science. No one seemed interested in addressing the root cause of this response, namely, an unshakeable conviction shared by Watson and his opponents that New Science represents incontrovertible truth. This faith has the same fervor as those who once thought and disallowed any other theory regarding the earth being flat.

Consider the apparently magical symmetry of the shapes perpetrated as the double-helix structure of DNA. These representations of the founding blocks of genes are aphenomenal. That is to say: they are not consistent with the more detailed descriptions of the different bonding strengths of different amino-acid pairings in the actual molecule. Much as atoms were considered to be the building-block of all matter (which was incidentally also rendered with an aphenomenal structure — one that could not exist in nature), these perfectly shaped structures are being promoted as building-blocks of a living body. It is only a matter of time before we find out just how distant the reality is from these renderings. The renderings themselves, meanwhile, are aphenomenal, meaning they do not exist in nature. This is a simple logic that the scientific world, obsessed with tangibles, seems not to understand.

Only a week before the Watson controversy unraveled, Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies received Nobel Prizes in Medicine for their discovery of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells. What is the first premise of this discovery? According to Prof. Stephen O’Rahilly of Cambridge University, the development of gene targeting technology in the mouse has had a profound influence on medical research…Thanks to this technology we have a much better understanding of the function of specific genes in pathways in the whole organism and a greater ability to predict whether drugs acting on those pathways are likely to have beneficial effects in disease. (BBC 2007) Not even a breath of a challenge was reported as to why only beneficial effects should be anticipated from the introduction of drugs acting on those pathways. When did intervention in nature, meaning: at this level of very real and even profound ignorance about actual pathways, ever yield any beneficial result?

Lack of hands-on experience is possibly the biggest problem that the private sector faces today. For instance, the petroleum industry practically has to spend as much money in training young graduates as the money spent in four years of higher education. The current education system relies on an overly structured, suffocating form of imposed knowledge, in which students cannot possibly feel their intrinsic qualifications are being enhanced. How to make sure students learn rather than memorize, in the true spirit of education (from the Latin word for bringing forth, or leading out), is a central preoccupation of this book. There is another aspect to be considered as well. Knowledge can only be accessed through thinking – a tool that is available to all. So, there is no need for any University or a training program to be limited by physical structures or geographical locations. In the same token, there is no need for expensive laboratory facilities, fancy software packages, and other black box-like gadgets that usually promote reproductive thinking. Contrary to what Henry Ford once promoted as his belief, thinking is inherent to human beings (homo sapiens literally means ‘thinking man’). There is Chinese proverb, I read and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand. Doing is the key to understanding. The most natural thing for a homo sapiens to ‘do’ is thinking.

In this book, a new methodology is proposed for eliminating these and other consequential problems afflicting the current approaches to and systems of educational preparation of the next generation. A new curriculum approach is proposed in which the role of a teacher shifts to that of students’ partner in learning, rather than an authority figure or learning police disguised as coach, teacher or facilitator. The involvement of students aims to ensure that the maximum creativity is used and that the acquisition of new knowledge remains an indigenous process.

This latter point is essential. Technology transfer, knowledge transfer, training of trainers may at first blush appear politically correct. In the global economy as currently configured, meanwhile, transfers of this kind also repeatedly compromise quality, human dignity, and economic freedom. By reforming the educational system, any nation can give rise to human resources capable of leading the world. The approach presented in this book, an approach has become both necessary and possible, addresses every discipline at any level.

The cutting edge of such a program would seem to lie with reconceptualizing the content of K-12 curricula. In the upcoming chapter, we begin tackling the fundamental issues of curriculum from a standpoint not usually found or adopted within the framework of discussions about educational reform.

1.2 Thought as Material

Setting its sights on the educational process, this book necessarily considers that process taken in its most general aspects, and in specific detail as actually found across various social formations.

This approach necessarily takes into account what various individuals think or have thought about what the educational process should be. However, it does not take any of those views as its own starting-point. The starting point of this particular book is rather the raw-material content on which the educational process operates — thoughts, ideas, information both collected today as well as compiled in the past by others.

The very idea of thoughts as material, and of education as a process of shaping or refining that material, breaks radically and fundamentally with the approach of every other book, journal or presentation that the authors have encountered in their own careers as writers, teachers and researchers. All the claims made for every education process currently in use today — distance or person-to-person, in cyberspace or physical space — repose ultimate success or effectiveness in acceptance by the individual student or teacher of the AUTHORITY guiding the particular process.

At first blush, since the delivery of educational services is always a work in progress, such an approach seems reasonable at least as one kind of measure of the effectiveness of the educational process. However, this approach seems to leave no room in which even to fit, much less consider, the aims either of the individual student participating in the education process, or of the individual teacher in delivering educational services.

This is where the present book breaks away from the rest of the pack. To the extent that it vests the individual’s own conscious participation in any educational process with an aim — and one that is both personally satisfying and socially progressive to boot — the approach taken by, and developed between the covers of, this book either inherently negates or at the very least challenges every one of the claims made for most if not all the conventional education processes currently on offer.

Real-life education ultimately is not some sausage machine turning out a product but rather a complex arrangement of ordered, as well as spontaneous, human interactions. Any approach that leaves aside these aims of the targets and principal agents of the process would seem fatally flawed from the outset. As for those responsible for maintaining the authority of the education system itself, few indeed among those representing that authority in the larger public social order would be so foolhardy as to deny their own responsibility. Such persons have a responsibility as policy-makers and as decision-takers to ensure that the interests of students, teachers and the rest of society are harmonized, so that the aims of all may be achieved without imposing undue sacrifices (or gifting undue extra privileges) on any one constituency over any other.

This shift of emphasis away from the aims of educational policy and its apparatuses to the aims instead of the principal human participants in the educational process also entails another shift, a shift of primary focus away from the forms in which education is delivered — curricula etc. — to something more fundamental, namely: to the thoughts and ideas past, present and future that are to be brought forward, weighed, and assessed by students and teachers within the educational process itself.

1.3 Renewal of Thought-Material Resources and the Nature-Science Approach

The notion of thought as material challenges the conventional discourse of science, and especially engineering, from several directions. These challenges are not trivial. For example:

Treating thought as material positions it as a kind of resource. So: are we then dealing here with a renewable or non-renewable resource?

Thinking and thoughts have material consequences. If thought is not material, is it still acceptable to treat human action as a species of material reality created in part at least from some immaterial source?

The truth-content of material reality — mass, energy, momentum etc. — is inarguable. But — on the other hand—what about the truth-content of dreams, fantasies, gossip, etc.?

The way out of these conundrums comes ultimately by way of recognizing the primacy of the larger environment within which any given material reality unfolds. Thus, some criteria for adjudicating the truth-content of any material reality would seem logically to repose in those features that may be said to be characteristic of that environment, meaning: features that mathematicians would consider invariant under transformation. Before Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, on the one hand, and quantum mechanics, on the other, took hold, the only environment that surrounded material reality came either in two or three dimensions. Time itself — and especially: how it passed— was immutable, and could comfortably be treated as the independent variable. In the outermost reaches of the intergalactic space of Einstein’s theory or the subatomic spaces of quantum theory, on the other hand, time can no longer be assumed immutable or independent. Even in normal 2-space or 3-space, many of the organic transformations routinely seen in the natural world cannot be fully or accurately accounted by means of the conventional mathematics of Newtonian mechanism.

Over the last decade, in a struggle to deal with these and other anomalies dogging their research into various energy sources and their systems and flow, the authors and a large number of coworkers have patiently staked out the premises of an approach to these scientific realities of our own time that they call nature-science.

As will now be discussed in the remainder of this Introduction, the connections between these matters and what the authors of the present book call human thought material turn out to be both extensive and profound.

1.3.1 Education as Thought-Material processing

The availability of a wide range of systems or programs of education and skills training is a characteristic feature of modern life today. These are available and delivered in both the public sector and the private sector. Such programs are now to be found in all countries, from the already highly industrialized to the least developed among the developing countries.

Today in the second decade of the 21st century, the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America comprise more than two-thirds of the world’s population — a proportion that continues to grow. They are also the fastest-growing countries, with populations ranked among some of the youngest demographic profiles on the planet.

All this represents a particularly dramatic change that has exploded into existence over only the last 50 years. Thanks mostly to the energies unleashed by such a demographic trend, including the far-sighted decisions taken by specialized agencies of the United Nations such as the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquartered in Paris, the international community in general has become ever more involved in assisting the most affected countries to address the implications of such a situation.

Examining the possible deeper or larger meanings of these developments from the standpoint of the future of the entire planet, one very crucial conclusion emerges most clearly. It is that the potential for these societies to advance their own nation-building programs (for which many of them shed oceans of blood in liberation struggles, especially throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s & 1980s) continues to grow.

Today, an entire generation of post-independence leaders have come into political office. This is deepening the challenge thrown down at the end of the Second World War to the developed countries to give up their colonial and neocolonial designs once and for all and get with the program.

When the content and pædagogical methods themselves of the truly bewildering range of education and training programs now available are examined, however, one observation in particular stands out and overwhelms all others. For a long time, there has developed a widespread acceptance of this content and these methods as scientific or necessary or representative of a consensus of the world’s foremost experts. Nay more: this uncritical acceptance is itself often coupled with a formidable resistance to rendering the content and pædagogical methods either more indigenous or otherwise more directly relevant to the current needs of these societies and-or the current stages of their nation-building programs.⁹

The present conventional approach to the delivery of most education and-or training programs can be summarized generically as follows:

an educational/training system, order or authority, which appears as a black box to all those not part of that authority;

a teaching staff;

students; and

a curriculum or syllabus of material(s) whose content is to become transferred to or otherwise appropriated by the students.

Everything decisive within this arrangement remains hidden, however, inside the system (or authority) black box. From the vantage point of the students or society generally the teaching staff appears as the sole visibly active element, the proverbial tip on an iceberg of gatekeeper elements.

Within this arrangement, it is the thinking process and thought-material itself that is commodified as knowledge or some transferable skills-set. Yet, the thinking process and its thought-material constitute the sole entirely natural resource of the whole arrangement. Everything else is subject to the authority black-box.

On the basis of this crucial insight, why should we expect the sustaining (including renewal) of the educational process or cycle to follow principles different from those discovered to govern the rendering sustainable of exploration and development of the energy potential of natural resources?

When it comes to rendering energy and-or other natural resource development sustainable, Khan and Islam (2007), Khan and Islam (2012), Islam et al. (2010), Zatzman (2011, 2012) and others (Islam et al., 2012; Chhetri and Islam, 2008) have been uncovering the main obstacle to initiating or entrenching progress along this line. It has been coming from the financial oligarchy standing behind this system and its seemingly infinite variety of black boxes. This oligarchy operates according to the modern shehadeh that there is no god but Monopoly and Maximum is his Profit. Unsurprisingly, and as the authors of this book will demonstrate, it is this principle in particular that interferes with every effort undertaken to renew the foundations of education on a truly sustainable path.

Indeed, its application has reached the stage in recent years of open wrecking. Entire once-public school systems are increasingly privatized. Their profitable parts are cannibalized and sold off while the remaining stock of aging physical infrastructures is either left to decay to the point of ruin or closed even years before their end-of-useful-life on the excuse of declining student numbers. Typically, the remaining oldest and most decrepit structures become crammed to the gills with the student bodies displaced by such premature closures, while the physical space these structures once occupied is snapped up by condominium developers and other sources of speculative capital.¹⁰

As the authors and fellow members of their research group have been discussing extensively now for some time¹¹, the core ideas informing the notion of true sustainability comprise something we have chosen to label nature science.

The authors have developed the following pair of definitions of nature science and its ethical basis:

Nature science is the body of knowledge accumulated in practical investigations undertaken at the interface of social & environmental organism and Newtonian (including rational) mechanism.

Environmental humanism is the body of ethics that informs nature-science.

The key thing about such a definition of nature science lies in its principal corollary, which is that, contrary to the position of Newton’s Laws of Motion (including the other scientific results based on the Newtonian standpoint), any nature-science investigation involving the environment includes the investigator as part of its frame of reference. The foremost consequence of that observation is that neither the truth nor falsehood of knowledge accumulated by others and-or from earlier times can be assumed. A second consequence is that an agnostic stand is upheld regarding the authority of previously-gathered knowledge or its discoverers, pending confirmation by some kind of investigation on one’s own.

The seven most important guidelines of nature science thus defined are:

a) UNDERSTANDING REQUIRES CONSCIOUS PARTICIPATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL, AN ACT OF FINDING OUT. Learning outside and-or beyond such conscious participation in acts of finding out must be considered secondary. Such sources may support or help illuminate previously-gathered knowledge, but they are no substitute for authentic knowledge gathered at first hand. The participatory element differentiates such learning from all other kinds, while the conscious element further differentiates such learning from learning by doing (monkeys and others among the higher apes ranked just below humans on the evolutionary scale can also learn by doing).

b) The EPISTEMOLOGY (theory of knowledge) of nature science is generalized from the findings of the science of human cognition.

However, human perception is not prioritized as a source of knowledge. Nor does nature science accept any notion of human perception alone as either an essential, fundamental or exclusive source of knowledge. On the contrary, in profound opposition to the essentially Eurocentric prejudice that degrades entire swaths and layers of established (and Establishment) scientific outlook, nature science explicitly acknowledges the indefinitely intangible reality of many of the elements long accepted as part of the treasury of human knowledge.

c) The OUTLOOK of nature science mandates that all phenomena of interest in the natural or social environment be considered not only in themselves but also in relation to other phenomena that coincide, precede or follow them. Whether coming from the surrounding social conditions or from the surrounding natural environment, the thought-material of nature science is generated by organisms formed from collectives of individuals. The thought-material produced within such organisms is therefore a collective product — at one and the same time the property of everyone and of no one (individual).

d) The PERSPECTIVE of nature science clearly distinguishes between the claims of organism (which it upholds as primary) and those of mechanism, which are secondary. Within either the social order or the natural order and its physical environment, Newtonian notions of time t as an independent variable of infinitely divisible duration (e.g., Δt → 0), essential for dealing with mechanism, cannot be reconciled with organic complexity at a higher level without falling into hopelessly tangled contradictions. However, all these contradictions can be resolved by means of the nature science approach of considering time as a fourth dimension rather than as an independent variable, enabling consideration of such notions as Δt → ∞. Unlike the claims of mechanism, the claims of organism cannot be privatized. Upholding everywhere the fundamentally organic standpoint that nature science brings to its own thought material overcomes the most serious built-in bias of the standpoint informing the sciences based on Newtonian mechanism. That standpoint assumes an observer’s reference frame standing outside the reference frame of the phenomena under observation, and this assumption creates the illusion of an essentially private consciousness or awareness of phenomena in which the real-life connection of the observer to the phenomena being observed becomes obscured or even lost altogether. Table 1.1 below summarizes 10 major differences between organism and mechanism.

Table 1.1 Features of Organism & Mechanism Compared

e) According to the principles of nature science, the naturally CHARACTERISTIC TIME or timeline of any process applied to and within the natural or social environment must be established on the basis of investigation and testing of all sub-elements in the field. Therefore, in a major departure from the usual canons of conventional science, when it comes to work based on nature science, experimental laboratory timings of any process are not acceptable as benchmarks in the field. Indeed, in general: the laboratory can no longer be accepted as the principal locale for proving anything consequential about any phenomenon observed or studied from data collected in the field, within its actual natural or characteristic environment. Furthermore, data generated by means of a laboratory-based simulation of any process normally native to some part of the natural environment cannot be assumed to