User talk:Abhidevananda/Neohumanist education

For the record

None of the initial content of the user page on Neohumanist Education was written by me. In fact, I question much of the content and the way it is presented. However, this is a valid and worthy topic for a WP article. Hence, I have set up this sandbox so that an accurate and informative article may be submitted for approval to WP.

I strongly believe that Neohumanist Education should be presented as a separate article from the article on Neohumanism, the focus of which is mainly on the substance of the philosophy or social outlook. I do want to add a section to the Neohumanism article that will briefly mention Neohumanist Education (among other things), but I would also add a caveat regarding Neohumanist Education. The simple fact is that though there is a system of education run by AMPS that now commonly goes by the name Neohumanist Education, that does not mean that neohumanism is fully reflected or even well reflected in any kindergarten or primary school. The simple fact is that though there is a book of compiled discourses entitled "Discourses on Neohumanist Education", nowhere in any of those discourses does Baba use the phrase "neohumanist education". That book was first published in 1998. Hence, there is no reason to assume from the title of the book that Baba endorsed this particular name for the Ananda Marga education system. Furthermore, it is entirely legitimate to question whether all of the discourses in that book have a tight relation with neohumanism or even the Ananda Marga education system, currently called Neohumanist Education.

One thing that is not mentioned in the current draft of the Neohumanist Education article is that there is a faculty of the Ananda Marga Gurukul - a university faculty - dedicated to neohumanism. This is just one faculty out of many (perhaps around 30). Interestingly, to the best of my knowledge, neohumanism is not a course that is compulsory on any level of the Neohumanist Education system at present, including the university level. Perhaps it should be, or perhaps it should be part of a broader course on philosophy at the secondary or tertiary level of education. At the very least, as mentioned in my book Rennaisance in Education, I believe logic should be made a compulsory subject in the Neohumanist Education curriculum from the primary level (if not the kindergarten level) onwards. To the extent that this is not so, given the stress placed on rationality by neohumanism, I think it reasonable to question how far the Neohumanist Education system is really neohumanistic.

--Abhidevananda (talk) 08:00, 7 November 2012 (UTC)