Patrick M Foster

Education in the Third Evolution Patrick M Foster

The first evolution is our biological heritage. The second evolution is human technological development that has come to protect us from natural selection and allows us to defy ecological constraints. Living outside natural harmony is a form of alienation that has made the planet physically sick and humans psychologically unfit. This alienation manifests in the greed, fear, violence, and loss of meaning that have plagued humans for thousands of years. Now we are at the major crossroads: one road leads along our existing path of unguided technological free-for-all and eventual self- and planet-destruction; the other path, a possible third evolution, has been slowly brewing outside our established wisdom. It will be up to each one of us to turn it into a new consciousness aware of our historic wrong directions, understanding their causes, and urgently ready to reconceive our existing worldview into a more truly evolutionary one. And this begins with radically altering our educational philosophy and practice. This work presents a glimpse of what an education for this third evolution might look like.