By Arthur Zajonc
Download the article: Love and Knowledge: Recovering the Heart of Learning through Contemplation
“Preventing conflicts is the work of politics; establishing peace is the work of education.”
– Maria Montessori
If I were to ask: What should be at the center of our teaching and our students’ learning, what would you respond? Of the many tasks that we as educators take up, what, in your view, is the most important task of all? What is our greatest hope for the young people we teach? In his letters to the young poet Franz Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke answered unequivocally:
To take love seriously and to bear and to learn it like a task, this is what [young] people need. …For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love, they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upwardbeating heart, they must learn to love.
Need I say it? The curricula offered by our institutions of higher education have largely neglected this central, if profoundly difficult task of learning to love, which is also the task of learning to live in true peace and harmony with others and with nature.
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