Education for Spiritually Conscious Living: How Parents Can Give Children the Education They Really Need (and Why Schooling Can’t)

This book is about a new paradigm of education for humanity. It explains that, since schooling focuses on the mind, on abstract knowledge-as-a-commodity, on the future, and on ranking, it alienates children from the world, from other people and from Being, their true self.

In the practical chapters of this book, Andrew Seaton outlines activities, experiences, conditions and relationships that would support the full flowering of a child’s consciousness, faculties and abilities. He explains how, by providing this truer kind of educational experience, parents can help children to strengthen their sense of their own ’beingness’, of presence, of the awareness self beyond their mind. They can come to know people, objects, phenomena and situations freshly-not through rigid, conditioned patterns of memory, labels, definitions, expectations and judgements, but by a delicate yet profound relatedness or identity with them. Their uniquely individual expression of talents and abilities comes to reflect not the mind, but intuition and creativity that tap the deep intelligence of Being.

The book includes a chapter about the negative impacts of schooling and the failure of innumerable efforts at significant reform of institutionalised schooling over the past century. It also includes a substantial discussion of educational theory, philosophy and psychology, from first principles-a scholarly rationale for education for spiritually conscious living.

＂Just excellent! I read it twice.＂ PROFESSOR B.K. PASSI, Past UNESCO - Indira Gandhi National Open University Chair in Teacher Education, Past President All India Association for Educational Research.

＂Institutional structures, especially as they prevail today, refract any attempts to penetrate the deeper levels of being and transform them. Dr Seaton has rediscovered this great truth about education. However, the greater value of this book lies in its outlining of ways and means of imparting education for spiritually conscious living, which have not previously been adequately or appropriately articulated.＂ PROFESSOR D. RAJA GANESAN, Dean (Retired), Department of Education, University of Madras; Past member of the Executive Board of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Alienation; Editor, Experiments in Education.

＂The truth is that the majority of children experience the traditional and prevailing system of education as an assault on their emotional selves. It negates and damages the core of their being. This book outlines a completely different approach to education, one that recognises, respects and nurtures that inner core, as well as the unique gifts each individual brings to our world. Dr Seaton’s vision is not only an appealing alternative to the present system. It is an urgent necessity.＂ DEIRDRE MIDDLEHURST, Clinical Psychologist