When I ask if you have a soul, I will not discuss philosophy, religion, or modernism. I am not caring about psychology topics as much as a teacher’s actual role in a classroom. Sensory gratification is a terrible disease plaguing society in ever more significant amounts since the 1960s. Free sex, free education, action without consequence, unrestrained debt, drugs to get high, drugs to come down off the high safely, want something take it, steal it, buy it, all these sensory gratifications, and more, are linked to individual appetite. An appetite that is never sated. Leading to the questions, what happened, and where did we learn unrestrained appetite?
What happened?
The answer is embodied in the saying that yesterday’s school philosophies became today’s governmental actions. Education has proclaimed the pernicious idea that a human can be programmed with sensory inducements, like a fish, a dog, a cat, a chicken, etc., and “educated” to be nothing but a social animal, devoid of anything but unrestrained sensory desires. History has revealed the origin of education’s pernicious idea lies with Wilhelm Wundt.
Paulo Lionni. “The Leipzig Connection” offers the following as the aim of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the “Father of Modern Psychology.” “…For the emergence of a society more and more blatantly devoted to the gratification of sensory desires at the expense of responsibility and achievement.” If this phrase does not hold the fullest description of society’s problems, all societies worldwide, I will eat my hat.
Lionni went further and detailed that, “Wundt asserted man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism.” Meaning that man, which includes women, has no eternal spark, no divinity, no individualism, and lacks the ability to choose the best growth path. Man can be reduced from a noble spirit in a temporal body to an appetite that can be artificially triggered by electrical connections. Would it surprise anyone to know that Pavlov, the guy who treated dogs to electric shocks to get them salivating when they hear a bell, and Skinner, the guy who conducted box training for conditioned responses, both went to Wundt for learning and training?
Conditioned responses are not, in and of themselves, bad or undesirable. As a firefighter, conditioned responses have saved my life, have improved my response times, and have kept my fire teams alive. However, as the sole education method for government education in K-12 training, conditioned responses, also known as sensory gratification, have created severe social issues that are killing potential, ruining lives, and robbing freedom and liberty.
Where did we learn unrestrained appetite?
There are two schools of thought about education; these schools of thought are defined by their definitions of the term “education.” Education is a concept dating back to the Latin root of the word, Eductus, “to bring out, lead forth,” from E, “out of,” + Ducere, “lead.” Hence, “to develop the faculties and powers of another by teaching, instruction, or schooling.”
School 1:
“Originally, education meant the drawing out of a person’s innate talents and abilities by imparting the knowledge of languages, scientific reasoning, history, literature, rhetoric, etc., —the channels through which those abilities would flourish and serve.”
School 2:
Education is “… the result of modifiability in the paths of neural conduction. Explanations of even such forms of learning as abstraction and generalization demand of the neurones only growth, excitability, conductivity, and modifiability. The mind is the connection system of man; and learning is the process of connecting. The situation-response formula is adequate to cover learning of any sort, and the influential factors in learning are readiness of the neurones, sequence in time.”
Until the 1930s, America and most of the world used education as represented as “School 1,” described above. Students were led to bring forth talents and abilities through the knowledge imparted by a teacher. Between 1930 and 1960, both schools of thought were competing for dominance, and “progressive schools” were all about socializing and sensory gratification. By 1960, the domination of School 2 thinking had overtaken the majority of educational establishments. Removing the individuality and replacing the individual with “the gratification of sensory desires at the expense of responsibility and achievement.”
What was the result of School 2 methodologies?
Dyslexia was invented to cover those students who struggled. Ritalin was introduced to control those whose sensory inputs were not in line with what was being taught was acceptable behavior. Student’s potential was measured by race and poverty and not upon individual effort, achievement, and development. Functional illiteracy became the standard for graduating from High School to have a ready-made population of drones for the workforce. The powers supplying the sensory inputs into the population rose to dominate government, media, technology, and much more. Suicide rates climbed. Depression rates climbed. Mental diseases exploded as a means of excusing and separating the population. Debt at all levels, household, city/town, county, state, Federal, credit card, school loans, etc., exploded to the insane levels witnessed today. Single-parenthood became desirable. Sex without consequences, abortion on demand, and so much more became socially permissible, accepted, and cheered.
Where we are now!
This brings us to 2021; education is now all “School 2” thinking. The vast majority of workers are functionally illiterate, and the government is stealing freedom and liberty through a “health emergency.” As long as the population’s senses are being filled, the powers in charge can do whatever they want; including stealing an election, robbing unborn children of freedom through debt captivity, and abusing the electorate at will (California, New York, Oregon, New Mexico, and Michigan’s Governors) and robbing the Social Security Fund to pay for the pleasures of today, with no thought of the consequences tomorrow.
December 2020, I began reviewing the outstanding accomplishments witnessed in the last century, and a question percolated, “Where are the new great accomplishments?” Consider the “Big Historical Moments” of the 1900s. We have the automobile instead of the horse-drawn carriage. We have space flight, trans-continental flight. We have all these technological advances. Humans witnessed so much growth from 1900-1999, but in the first two decades of the new century, we appear to have come to a plateau and lost our way. In delving deeper into this question, School 1 and School 2 philosophies’ discovery is the driving factor in why we appear to have plateaued in making discoveries, pushing boundaries, and driving innovation forward.
Maybe, plateaued is the wrong way to describe the advances witnessed from 2000-2020. I read almost weekly about new discoveries in science and medicine, but to read these advances, I have to dig through media blaring about someone’s clothes, hair, sexual orientation, etc. The headlines cheering Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, Amelia Earhart’s flights, and more were the talk of the town; newspapers the world over celebrated these achievements. Now, new advances and achievements have to compete with political bloviations, smoke and mirror editorials, and envy has become the topic of discussion and is celebrated. All because too many generations have been reduced to animals by School 2 methodologies.
Leading the issue back to the initial question, “Do you have a soul?” If so, then School 2 education is abhorrent, and mighty change is immediately required to correct the problems. If not, then School 1 education and the mighty thinking and doing of the 1900s is lost forever. Are you a social animal that is all unrestrained appetite for whatever power that provides you the most sensory gratification, or are you an eternal being, in a temporal existence, willing to shoulder accountability for the blessings of growth, freedom, liberty, and independence?
I know my answer, and I strive every day to learn, change, grow, and control my passions and other sensory-based appetites in an effort to develop. “Do you have a soul?”
© 2021 M. Dave Salisbury
All Rights Reserved
The images used herein were obtained in the public domain; this author holds no copyright to the photos displayed.
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