2025: Why schools make us dumber – The celestial openness of the child’s mind.

I have already shared a few thoughts about my recent stay in the Himalayas, but something else happened there that I don’t want to keep from you. On the third day of the conference in Leh, I attended a panel discussion about spirituality, science and ecology. The discussion took place in the Palace Hotel, on the edge of the city. The hotel is set against the backdrop of a colossal grey- and ochre-coloured mountain massif. A few hundred metres above the hotel you can see the seventeenth-century Lechen Palkhar, palace of the former Namgyal dynasty, and the century-older Buddhist monastery Namgyal Tsemo Gompa. Both buildings perch like swallows’ nests, moulded onto and against the mountainside.

In a small room at the front of the hotel, a small audience has gathered – about twenty people. They sit at tables arranged in a rectangular shape. The three speakers are seated side by side at the short end of the rectangle, closest to the door. I won’t go into the content of the discussion here. It matters little for what I want to say. I am there only as a listener, but during the exchange with the audience at the end of the conversation, I make a rather long comment about the problematic relationship between science and the university. There are a few approving reactions, and then time is up and the meeting is over.

A little later I am standing under the awning at the entrance of the hotel, waiting for a taxi to take me to the town square. I watch dusk fall over grey houses with carelessly stacked firewood on the roofs. To the left and right, Royal Enfield motorcycles are parked in front of and against the walls. The only country where these icons of the British Empire are still made is India. They are ridden everywhere here, enigmatic witnesses to the complex relationship between coloniser and colonised. Here and there donkeys look for a place to sleep against a tree or a wall. Their hoarse cries sound plaintive in the silver light of the rising moon. They beg the city to hide from the awakening demons of the night.

I feel my thoughts dissolving in the endless evening air and look dreamily at the snow-covered mountain peaks. No donkey or human can unsettle them, steadfast witnesses to all the justice that has already been done and all that is yet to come. I fall back to earth – to my left a clear little voice sounds. “Sir, can I ask you something?” Two black eyes of a little boy of about twelve look up at me. “Of course.”

“What is totalitarianism?” (I feel my face turn into a smile.)
“The word totalitarianism refers to a state system that not only wants control over what people do in the street and in the marketplace, but also in the kitchen and the bedroom.”
“Do they want total control, Sir?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why they call it totalitarianism?” (My smile blossoms.)
“You could say that, yes.”
“Why do they want that?”
“Because sometimes people crave order so much that they forget that only chaos can give birth to a dancing star.” (Is Nietzsche taking root in that young soil?)
“Will you still be here tomorrow, Sir?”
“Not tomorrow, but the day after I’ll be back here.”
“May I ask you a few more questions then?”
“Certainly.”
“I will bring an audiotape.”
“Oh, are you going to write an article about it?”
“No, but then I can listen to our conversation again later.” (My taxi arrives.)
“What is your name?”
“Maahir, Sir.”
“And how old are you?”
“Thirteen.”

I try, while making my way through the maze of little streets, in vain to remember at what point during the panel discussion I used the word “totalitarianism.” Do thirteen-year-olds come to academic conferences here?

Two days later Maahir is present, equipped with a digital recorder and accompanied by four comrades. During the lunch break we sit on the steps behind the town hall, where that day’s lectures are taking place. Before that conversation I had never considered giving lectures for children. Afterwards, I did. The precision of their questions about the mechanistic worldview, about the nature of narcissism, about the connection between totalitarianism and science, about the way in which the ordinary citizen is totalitarian—it dawns on me how much more the child’s mind grasps than I had thought.

As I write this, it suddenly occurs to me that when I reread writings or diaries from my own young self, I am often pleasantly surprised by what I wrote at that age. Why do we not see children’s capacities? Why do we forget the capacities we ourselves once had as children? Perhaps because we want to maintain the illusion that we are growing and making progress? I do not doubt that many people do in some respects actually grow throughout life. But perhaps they are mainly the people who rediscover the child within themselves? “It took me four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” (Picasso.)

Professor of developmental psychology Patricia Kuhl studied the cognitive and linguistic abilities of babies in the first six months of life. Newborn children, quite remarkably, possess perfect knowledge in certain respects. For example, they can distinguish all phonemes of all the world’s languages from one another. An adult needs years to learn this. They also detect, almost instantly and with mathematical precision, complex patterns in the sounds of language and music. They never had to acquire that knowledge or those abilities. It is freely available. Kuhl therefore calls babies “linguistic and mathematical geniuses.” To use Aldous Huxley’s words: they are in direct contact with The Mind at Large.

Kuhl reaches for a concept from nineteenth-century romantic philosophy to describe this phenomenon: “The celestial openness of the child’s mind.” Something in the child is still “open.” That opening forms a source-mouth through which a crystalline consciousness wells up abundantly in the childlike mind. Kuhl seeks that openness mainly in the brain structures of the young child. The biochemistry of their brain must be different. I think we should look elsewhere for the answer to the riddle. A child in its first six months does not yet have an Ego. It is not yet enclosed in a narcissistic shell. That shell forms only when a child, somewhere between six and nine months, first recognizes itself in the mirror. From then on its energy and attention begin to be absorbed by the superficial ideal image of its body.

That external ideal image, object of the Other’s enjoyment, becomes a psychological “shell,” a wall of narcissism, which increasingly isolates the growing child from the world and from other people, and ensures that the antenna picks up less and less of Huxley’s “Mind at Large.” By the age of seven the ego-shell has reached such a thickness that a child has already largely lost the spontaneous consciousness of the first months of life. From then on, for example, it must exert almost as much effort as an adult to learn to distinguish the phonemes of foreign languages. It likely takes until after adolescence for the ego-structure to have fully reached adult consistency, and for almost all knowledge to have to be realized through laborious rational thought.

The Ego is a boundary, a boundary between inside and outside. That boundary is not an end in itself. Its function is to keep what is good within and to be able to move destructive elements outward, to literally express them. Our Ego is not built to be the palace of our vanity; it is the workshop of the Soul. In the same way, our intellect is not made to be the ultimate guide — it is made to work in the service of a truth and a knowing that it can never fully grasp. An intellect that tries to lead will mostly mis-lead. That is, in my interpretation, the tenor of the book The Master and His Emissary, written by one of the true intellectual giants of our time, Dr. Iain McGilchrist.

Our education system has one merit: it indeed transfers a substantial amount of rational knowledge from generation to generation. But in general, even the transmission of rational knowledge is increasingly under threat. Whoever focuses too much on a secondary matter in life eventually loses even that secondary matter. Education is producing more and more illiteracy — neither writing nor reading reaches a reasonable level anymore, even among the highly educated. With Artificial Intelligence, that problem will, in all likelihood, become even more severe. There are already experts who apparently consider the greatest goal of education to be teaching students how to work with A.I. Why should a human do what a machine can do, after all?

In a certain sense, this is the deepest misconception of Enlightenment culture: true knowledge of the world does not come about through rational thought; consciousness does not arise in the small cave of our skull. Consciousness exists outside of us, sovereign and timeless. It comes to us in the quiet moments when our narcissism subsides; it flows in wherever it finds a crack or an opening in our Ego; it gently lifts us onto its ship, where for a moment we stop clinging to the false lifebuoy of our little intellect; it ap-pears where, with sincere words, we break through the Veil of Appearance behind which we so eagerly hide our nakedness.

There is a certain connection between sincerity or truth and intuition. In samurai culture this is well understood: the warrior who fails to speak sincere words loses his sixth sense and dies on the battlefield of life.“All living creatures as well as human beings lose intuition and awareness of their subconsciousas the level of culture becomes higher and higher. Supernatural power is not a skill or trick. It exists in your heart, in your sincerity.” (The Essence of Ninjutsu, pp. 49–50).

The education of Enlightenment culture is guided by the illusion that rational knowledge is the compass on which the ship of our life must sail. The ideology on which our education system is based is not rational, it is rationalistic; it nourishes the illusion of an ultimate rational understanding. That illusion mainly feeds the Ego and increasingly shuts us off from the Mind at Large. The great scholars of mass psychology and propaganda have repeatedly observed: the higher the education level, the more easily people allow themselves to be deceived, the more susceptible they are to propaganda. Jacques Ellul, perhaps the sharpest thinker in the field of propaganda, believed that formal schooling is ultimately a form of (unconscious) indoctrination that makes children vulnerable to the propaganda they will encounter later in life.

At this point I remember something from when I was barely twenty years old. I travelled to South Africa and, for the first time in my life, spoke with children who had spent very little time in school. The effortless precision with which they answered all my questions, the mischievous sharpness with which they questioned my answers to their questions—I could only conclude that a brighter light shone in their minds than in the educated minds of European children. The same was noticed by the Jesuits who studied the Indigenous cultures of North-East America: those unschooled minds surpass the highly educated European elite in both intellectual and rhetorical ability.

Maahir and his friends, with their sparkling intelligence and their moving sincerity, are all students of the Coveda school. That school combines pre-colonial Vedic education with modern subjects (English, mathematics, etc.). Schools do not necessarily make one dumber. Looking back on my own life, I must say that the school system both took much from me and gave me much. Like all institutions, schools tend to fall into the vice that is the opposite of the virtue they originally sought to cultivate. Thus the church becomes the breeding ground of the greatest immorality, the courthouse becomes the place where humans fall prey to the most systematised injustice, medicine becomes the most sophisticated assault on the health of the population, the police apparatus gains a monopoly on gratuitous violence… and schools become the place where children lose their minds.

Does there exist an education that is not indoctrination? Can one human teach another (a child) without indoctrinating him? Any education that sets rational knowledge as its ultimate goal is indoctrination and does the opposite of what it should do. Knowledge always belongs to a doctrine, to a system—but a good system is ultimately always aimed at abolishing itself and making itself unnecessary, like scaffolding that is dismantled once the building is complete. With the idealisation of reason in Enlightenment culture, that was lost, and the school system spread like a tumour and a tyranny. A child has essentially become a prisoner of the school bench. To place a being bursting with the energy of spring on a school bench for eight hours a day is something we will one day look back on as a kind of mistreatment.

I was moved and touched by the conversation with Maahir and his friends. I asked him if he would send me the recording. Liesje Breyne was kind enough to make a transcript of it—many thanks for that! Below you will find the entire conversation with the children of Ladakh. When I read the transcript earlier today, I noticed something else: in my own words I found something of the children’s clarity and unpretentiousness reflected. Le style, c’est l’homme. L’homme à qui l’on s’adresse.

Dear friends—I present to you the sparkling voices of the children of Ladakh. Enjoy!

Mattias

**The children of Ladakh**

Sumer (13 years old):

“We had lot of observations and with them came a lot of questions.”

Maahir (13 years old):

“I have like two questions. So like what is your worldview? To moving towards a more connected way of being instead of the way like you said the mechanistic way?”

Mattias:

“Yes, what is my world view and how can we move away from that mechanist world view? That’s a very good question and a very difficult one.

I think that first and for all we have to think about what the mechanist world view exactly means at a psychological level, and I think we cannot go really deep into that analysis, but I think that mechanist world view is a world view that starts from the desire to control the world.

In the mechanist world view we believe that the universe is a machine, a machine that we can understand in a rational way and that we can manipulate in a rational way. And I think that as soon as we understand that, we can see that this world view and this desire to control our environment is actually connected to the structure of the ego.

And what is the ego? That is the next question then. The Ego, what is the ego? Well it is good to study how the Ego emerges or is born in the life of a child. Like before a child is 6 months old, it has no ego yet. A child during that period is in a very specific state. It feels a perfect empathy with other people. When a very young child watches another child that drops to the ground for instance it will very often start to cry itself because it feels the pain of the other child.

And this changes when a child is 6 months old. At that moment a child for the first time recognizes itself in the mirror and it starts to believe that it is its outer image in the mirror. And that is the moment that the child starts to live in the world of appearances and where a child starts to try to become an ideal image.

And that is what we all do, we all try to look as a model on television or as someone we appreciate and that is the moment where we get isolated from our environment and where we do not feel empathy anymore.

And I think that is, when you ask me what the alternative for the mechanist world view, well the alternative I think is a world view where the ego is weaker, less important, where we feel more connected with other people and with nature around us, more in resonance and where we because our ego gets weaker we have a stronger ethical awareness. Jah.”

Maahir (13 years old): “Hmmm, I just ask another question I guess.”

Mattias: “Ask me no matter what, if you don’t understand certain aspects or it is too difficult what I’m talking about; feel free, ask me when you don’t understand something.”

Ashmita (15 years old): ”I had connected to this one only … I had a question… Like we … In some talk she was saying that we are locked up in this modern world view or something like that and it is quite limiting, she said. So I just wanted to ask what should be like done to break these frames of ours so we can also learn to listen to the other world views of people. Sometimes we are not ready to or are not listening to theirs and just … “

Mattias: “Exactly, listening is extremely important, I think. And I think it relates again to what I was telling about the ego. Like when all our attention, our psychological attention, when we are constantly thinking about the outer ideal image, how we want to look like, what degree we will get at school, and so on, when we are constantly focussed on the world of outer appearance, we literally, you used the word prison, I think, we get locked up.”

Ashmita: “Yah” (insightful, confirming)

Mattias: “And, and, and in what [do we get locked up]? In our ego! All our attention goes to the outer surface of our body and literally we do not feel anymore what is inside our ego. And in order to break free from that prison we first and for all have to learn to speak sincerely. That means: we have to speak on the basis of what we really feel inside and not on the basis of what we think we have to say in order to be as successful as possible. No, we have to speak in a sincere way on the basis of what we truly feel. And secondly – and there is where I come to what you mentioned – we have to listen in an open minded way. That means if someone, if we are confronted with someone who has a different opinion than us, we have to really try to open up and say “Look, okay, this person has a different opinion but I will not judge him on the basis of what I think. I will open up as much as possible, allow his words to enter my soul and my body. I will really listen, try to feel what he means.

And that is the moment I think where we are connected again with the other people and where we feel we are no longer locked up in our own world view. So, I think speaking, in my analysis, ànd listening, is the most important thing. What will change the world is the act of speech and the act of listening.”

Shinthoy (14 years old): “So is it like unlearning? Is that what unlearning means?”

Mattias: “Well, it ìs unlearning. I think because we all are locked up in a certain world view. For instance, as your friend referred to the modern world view or the mechanist world view, it doesn’t matter, we are all locked up in it. And what does that mean to be locked up into something? It means that you look at the world through the lens of a certain world view. Or in other words: you look to the world in a way that you learned in our culture. And we have to unlearn to look only in one way to the world, I think. We have to unlearn to immediately interpret and read the world in a certain modern or mechanist way. So it’s a process of unlearning on the one hand. But as again, I believe that the most crucial thing is that we practice the art of sincere speech and sincere listening. I think that is the most important thing. If you do that you will automatically unlearn to look always in the same way to the world.”

Sumer: “I have a question. Open to hearing and to speaking sincere speech. At the conference I observed a lot of fake. All the adults over here who just speaking like “Oh, me, me, me.” They are only speaking like that and not even touching connecting to one another. That is not happening at all. They are just saying like “Oh, I have this degree, this Phd, I’m from Schumacher college”, whatever, so …”

Mattias: (laughs a bit) “Have you observed this here, yes? That people are often talking in terms of “me, me, me”, that is interesting …”

Sumer: “Yes, that’s what they are talking about. They try to fill up their ego and like they are not connecting to one another at all. They are just saying…the kind of communication from inside, like I said, they cannot even touch it. ….”

Mattias: “Yes, I think, like many people here, myself included, we feel that something has to change and we feel that we need to move on to a world where people are more connected. But at the same time we ourselves are very often still very much in the grip of this old “me” behavior (laughs at bit), where exactly, where everyone tries to communicate his opinion, wants to make people realize how much degrees they have, how smart they are, and so on, and where we often exactly forget ourselves to listen, to really open up to other people.”

Sumer: ”Just, adults they do not see us really, so like whenever we talk, “Oh, good kids, oh ja, kids are needed.” Like this is like such a huge divide between us. Like unconsciously they are making us into really different species. Sort of… With the big terms, but like big terms, also sometimes I feel that big terms pull you away from what you are trying to say. And I feel that simple words, simplicity, is much better to communicate.”

Mattias: ”I think that adults often are a little bit scared of children, because children are more sincere and their Ego is less strong and their soul is stronger. And everyone who withdraws in the shell of his ego, as most adults do, usually are scared of people where the soul appears, because they feel confronted with the fact that they are living a life that is not true. That’s probably why very often adults will devalue children. They will do as if it is not important what they have to say, while it is actually exactly what children say which is the kind of true speech that we would need to create a really new connected society. And I’m very happy that you ask me questions and tell me all kinds of this.”

Sumer: “I thought that you are one of the few adults who does actually see us as human beings”

Mattias: ”There will be others as well…”

Shinthoy: ”I had another question, like, when people have their own opinions, it is just like, like we cannot express it, because of like how the world is, anything, like people think something of me. Do you feel that?”

Mattias: ”Yes, you know, I think there is a lot to say about that. First, I think it is important to have your own opinion. And second it is important to articulate it, to express it. And as you say some people think it is easy to express their opinion, they can easily do it, maybe because they are a little bit more vocal in nature, a little bit more articulate. And other people can’t and very often these people are symbolically murdered. Because they cannot exist as a speaking being. As a human being when you cannot speak, we lose our existence. We need to speak, we are symbolical beings who need to articulate what they think. I think we all can do a lot for each other if we help the people who do not easily express their opinion, if we help them by making them feel that we won’t judge them, that no matter how imperfect they articulate their opinion, no matter what their opinion is, we will be listening to it as good as we can and we will consider it to be something that is important not because it is true or false, it doesn’t matter, but just because it is the opinion of someone. I think that is what we have to learn. It doesn’t matter in the first place if an opinion is right or wrong. What really matters is that we create a human living together, a society where everybody can feel he has the right to have his own opinion. That is the most important thing. The question if the opinion is right or wrong is only of secondary importance. It is the same with our own opinion, we have to just find the courage to articulate our opinion even when it is maybe wrong. Our opinion is often wrong and it will change, the opinion we have now probably will be not the same as the one we have next year. But that doesn’t mean you cannot articulate it. Everyone has the right and even the ethical duty to try to articulate his opinion, even when it is wrong. And we also have the ethical duty to listen to someones opion in a sincere way even when it might be wrong.”

Sumer: “I would like to add something to it. So uh, yesterday we went to the village for u the congress and like all what there was to do was just talking, talking, talking. No one was listening to what the other was gonna say. They were just talking, talking, talking, talking.”

Mattias: ”Yes, that is also part of the problem, I also notice that often and I also notice that in myself, like when someone, when I’m in a panel and someone is speaking I often notice that actually I am not really listening, I am already thinking about what I will say and I don’t hear anymore what the other will say. So, that’s again the Ego at work.”

Sumer: “I also find it by myself. Like even that noticing is enough. But over there no one is even noticing anything.”

Mattias: ”Hm, it is the first step noticing it, becoming aware of it, yah.”

Sumer: ”Like I can see that thought, oh yeah, they are talking, but I don’t care, I only care what I am saying”

Mattias: ”Exactly”.

Ashmita: ”Like sometimes, it’s like many people are trying to fit in the world, like, not, like not asking anything. Maybe they think like something is wrong with them and like they won’t be heard or acknowledged. And they just try to fit in the world”.

Mattias: ”Yes, yes, I think what you mention that is really something connected to the Ego. I think, like very often we just try to live up or match all these ideals that the world wants us to match. We have the feeling that we are not good as we are but we have to be something what the other wants from us. That’s I think where we lose touch with ourselves and that’s where we disappear in a world of appearances. That’s where we disappear in a fake world because we try to be someone that we are not. I think that what you refer to is the fact that our Ego constantly tries to convince us that we have to be what the other wants. Strangely enough while our ego always promises us that it will make us a king it actually makes us a slave.”

Shinthoy: “Yesterday this woman was like saying “everyone has common sense”. So I had this question: what is common sense, because common sense is like different for everyone and common sense is basically the fake normal. So what is common sense?”

Mattias: ”That is a good question, you know the philosopher Decart?”

Children in choir: ”Yes”.

Mattias: ”René Descartes said: ”Common sense seems to be the only thing everyone has enough of.” Everyone thinks that they have common sense and exactly, we forget about the question: “what does that exactly mean ‘common sense’?” Euh, I think common sense, we think we have common sense when we act perfectly according to the world view that is dominant in a society. Would that be a good answer? I don’t know. What do you think it is, common sense?”

Shinthoy: ”I think like it should be different for everybody, because since everybody isn’t the same why should there be common sense all the same.”

Mattias: ”So that’s probably also the problem with common sense, that when people say to one another “Use your common sense!”, that they actually mean “You should think like everybody thinks”. It is a really difficult question, ‘What is common sense?’”

Sumer: “I have something related to both their questions. I think it was your talk where you said you look in another person and if they seem like you, they have the same beliefs, the same likes, and if all the same political party, whatever, you only like them because of that, that is narcissism.”

Mattias: ”Exactly”.

Sumer: ”So, on schools, they want to make children think what they think is right, what society thinks is right, so, that is what I believe is narcissism too.”

Mattias: ”I agree, it is narcissism, literally, because narcissism, like, maybe you’re familiar with the great myth of Narcissus where the word comes from. Narcissus was a Greek prince who was very handsome and very beautiful and once he saw his own mirror image in a lake and he fell in love with himself. He was so fascinated by this own mirror image that he couldn’t here anymore the voice of his beloved. So narcissism is the love for your own mirror image. When you love people only when they vote for the same political party, when they act the same as you, what you love is your mirror image and what you feel is not love, it is narcissism. And it will isolate you and it will make you incapable of feeling love. I think that is one on the ways we could characterize the problem of our society. I think maybe much more in Belgium then here in Ladakh, where I think society here is slightly less, is less narcistic. The more technology is used, the more it will become narcistic.”

Sumer: ”Like selfies”

Mattias: ”It is all build, like the algorithms of social media are all build to select people that are like you, that confirm your own ideal image.”

Maahir: ”You have anything you want to share?”

Mattias: ”Yes, there are many things that I want to share. I’m very happy that you are here. I’ve never been on a conference where there where younger people like you are and I’m very surprised that euh that you understand most things better than adults. For me it is a very nice experience to have this conversation with you. I hope we see each other again on other conferences and if you want I will give you my email address. You can always reach out to me. And I would like to ask you a favour: can you send me the recording?”

Children in choir: ”Yeah, sure!”

Mattias: ”I will love listening to it, yes. Thank you!

Children in choir: ”Thank you, thank you!”