Ginott's Letter To Teachers

I was listening to a discussion this morning about how someone like Assad, a trained doctor, who has sworn the hippocratic oath, could be capable of such inhumanity toward the Syrian people.

It made me think about the inhumanity displayed every day in our own country against people with disabilities, some deeply vicious inhumanity from people in the form of hate crime, and a mundane and insidious inhumanity from the bureaucracies and systems designed to deliver support to people with disabilities.

I remembered this poem written by Haim Ginott back in 1972, that describes why merely educating people is not enough.

Dear Teacher,

I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:

Gas chambers built by learned engineers.

Children poisoned by educated physicians.

Infants killed by trained nurses.

Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.

So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.

Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

We tend to believee that a good education somehow makes us better people. Certainly in human services there's a very strong culture of valuing people's qualifications. But if those qualifications become a barrier between us and our humanity, then something is going wrong.

What helps us become more human? How do we prevent ourselves from being well educated, highly efficient agents of dehumanisation?

7 Billion Hearts

According to some statisticians, the world's human population will reach 7billion on October 31st 2011. Others suggest it will be March 2012, but both are really the boldest estimates based on the flimsiest of guesswork.

It's been suggested that the rise in the human population is a big problem, a whole host of neo-Malthusians are lining up to suggest that this many people inhabiting our globe can only be a bad thing, to demand programmes of 'humane population control' and to suppress this human urge to procreate ourselves.

We must not confuse a wish to get rid of poverty with a wish to get rid of the poor. We need to reject a fearful view of our own species. Trying to artificially supress reproduction is deeply damaging to society, as the experience of India and it's transistor radios, or China and it's one child programme shows anyone who cares to look.

Despite the scaremongering, there are ample world resources, if we're prepared to think together of ways to use them less wastefully and more efficiently and fairly, and in tune with our environment.

Every human being is another set of hands ready to work productively for our world community, and our productivity has gone up at least 11 fold in the last 200 years - there's no reason why this increase cannot continue, because as well as our capacity to labour, we also all have a tremendous capacity to think, to use our brains to solve the problems that living together on our planet present to us.7 billion people means 7 billion minds that could be applied to solving the problems that collectively face our species.

The resources are there, if we have the wit and the will to release them. Just cutting the amount that the world spends on arms by 25% would mean we could feed, house, clothe, educate and provide healthcare to every single individual on this planet to the highest standards. The problem really is not too many humans, the problem is too little humanity.

Two of the key skills we'll need to cultivate if we are to find ways to generate creativity, accelerate our productivity, redistribute our resources fairly, is firstly the capacity we have to listen well to each other, and secondly the capacity to think respectfully together, across the boundaries of language, culture and traditional enmities. The UN campaign '7 billion actions' gives us the tiniest taste of the kind of things we could achieve through such consistent mindful dialogue.

What will motivate us toward such change? As well as our 7 billion minds and our 14 billion hands, we have 7 billion hearts. Human beings have evolved as social animals, that have cared for each other and held our communities together through bonds of love and duty to each other, let's also cultivate our hearts, our compassion for each other and our will to achieve dialogue, justice and peace among our 7 billion strong family.