How Did We Get to Where We Are?

Our planet is in trouble: climate change, a consumer society that extracts more resources than what the planet can provide, a broken economic model, combine with politics gone wrong. We also have incredible power in communication technology, especially through social media. We have enormous capacity for data analysis, trending rapidly to data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). However, we are not able to transform all this information and knowledge into wisdom, yet. According to Wikipedia, “Wisdom or sapience is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. There appears to be consensus that wisdom is associated with attributes such as compassion, experiential self-knowledge, non-attachment and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.”1 The first sentence shows how far away we are from our true goal. We are officially undergoing the sixth planetary extinction, we have moved 1 “Wisdom,” Wikipedia, January 15, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom. E. Müller (*) University for International Cooperation, San José, Costa Rica e-mail: emuller@uci.ac.cr 122 from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. This is the best scientifically documented planetary extinction—we have all the science and know with great precision what we are doing wrong. The second sentence relies on intangibles which cannot be accurately measured and thus not very popular in traditional academic approaches. The acceleration of time, with changes happening so fast, has contributed to immediacy and ephemerality. Taking time to step outside of the daily rush and look at the broader perspective, beyond our immediate needs, has been downgraded in response to the urgency for action, and the competitiveness of human enterprise. Determining what went wrong at this point in history is probably impossible, especially since there are so many factors involved. This is precisely what brings me to my main argument: The reductionist approach to Western education is a key challenge!

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