“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

EDUCATION AND CULTURE. THE NATURAL PERSON.

In actuality, the body’s response to such information is always instantaneous, whether or not the results show at once. Ruburt is beginning to hold a more “realistic” picture of how overall reality works. He is managing to disentangle himself from many disadvantageous cultural beliefs — beliefs that both of you for years, like other people, took for granted.

Education in your culture is a mixed bag (with ironic and humorous emphasis) — and education comes not from schools alone, but from newspapers and television, magazines and books, from art and from culture’s own feedback. Generally speaking, for the purposes of this discussion, there are two kinds of education — one focused toward teaching the child to deal with the natural world, and one focused toward teaching the child how to deal with the cultural world. Obviously, these are usually combined. It is impossible to separate them.

Your educational systems, however, for all of their idealism, have largely ended up (pause) smothering the natural individual bents and leanings of children, and overemphasized instead the cultural organization. It became more important, then, for the child to conform to the culture rather than to follow its own individual natural leanings. Its own characteristic ways of dealing with nature were frowned upon, so that education does not work with the child’s abilities, but against them. Education then often goes against the grain of the natural person.