10 human needs education should consider

Last Updated on May 4, 2016 by Patrick

Written by Solomon Marcus, mathmatician, titular member of The Romanian Academy.

He taught as a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Bucharest. He wrote many books regarding the use of mathematics in linguistics, in theatrical analysis, in natural and social sciences etc. He published over fifty volumes in Romania, translated in many languages and approximately four hundred articles in science or specialty magazines. His work has been cited by more than a thousand authors.

We have the Ten Commandments. In complementarity with them, I propose the Ten Human Needs. They are rooted in childhood. It should have been the subject of education and learning at all ages. But this doesn’t happen quite this way. Maybe someone can hear us; now, at the moment of this new beginning. Here they are:

1. The need to give life a meaning, at the elementary level.

At least once a day enjoy that you breathe; that you can see the sky and the earth, that you can move; live them as great events. Be glad that you exchanged a smile with a child passing by you. These should be enough for you to feel that life has a meaning, that is worth living, that it is a gift for the ones who brought you in this world and raised you, and that they have the right to your love and gratitude.

2. The need of freshening.

But movement and breathing are with us all the time. There is the risk, the temptation that they become routine, that we don’t pay any attention to them, as it generally happens. Routine cannot and should not be totally eliminated, as a huge part of our behaviour follows precise rules, they belong to being civilized. The question is to reduce routine to the necessary minimum, to not be its slave, as unfortunately frequently happens. As we daily care to refresh our body through rest, through movement and through using water and soap, we need a freshening of our mind, our senses and our soul. Let’s wake up every morning capable of freshly glancing over the world, available for a new beginning, with clear senses and thoughts; in a certain way, to regain, to recover childhood’s innocence.

3. The need to question and wonder.

I was always asking questions, as a child, out of curiosity, wonder, ecstasy in front of the world’s and nature’s spectacle, of my own Being. To give just one example, I am downright charmed by the antics of my brain, when it comes to memory and imagination. Every evening, when I surrender to sleep, I wonder what unexpected journeys will my dreams offer me that night. The state of bliss, wonder, always nurtured my appetite for life, being always a source of energy for me. When I’m asked: “why do you live?” I answer: “to wonder”.

Too often, school, instead of maintaining and developing this need, annihilates it. But if we don’t maintain the state of inquisitiveness, wonder, aspiring to understand the world, not just to record it, then we cannot build for us the capacity of problem solving, identifying the unsolved issues, also we cannot grasp the magnitude and nature of our ignorance.

4. The need to doubt and suspect.

What can be more human than hesitation, indecision, bewilderment? For Rene Descartes, the state of doubt is the clear sign of the thoughtful nature of the human being. The same can be considered from many points of view and, in these conditions, the critical spirit compels us to a comparative analysis, which sometimes leads not to a strong result, but to a plethora of possibilities, each being described in terms of its degree of plausibility. In Justice they work with the presumption of innocence. In Education and Learning, it is advisable to adopt the presumption of suspicion. We are born criticizing; the newly-born is crying criticizing of discontent.

Let us look with interest, but with suspicion anything delivered to us from the teacher’s desk, from a tribune, from the internet, from books, any kind of publications, just as a policeman looking for the perpetrator of a murder suspects everything. Educators, teachers should be the first to recomnend, to stimulate this atitude to their pupils, their students, to tell them this: “the clearest sign of respect you could show me is to pay attention to me, but don’t accept anything I tell you before your critical spirit assures you the truth and the interest of my words; if you don’t understand me, don’t let me move on to the next chapter, asking me to be more clearly, and if you think I’m wrong, show your dissapproval with arguments.” A similar attitude ought to be adopted towards the printed letter in the handbooks, or in any other place. The man at the teacher’s desk should not pose as a know-it-all; it is normal sometimes to tell those he trains: “I don’t know”, “I don’t understand either”, and when someone in the class corrects one of his oversights, mistakes, should thank them for their attention. I was sometimes deliberately introducing a mistake in my performance to test the vigilance of the students.

The need to doubt and suspect works simultaneously with another one, in opposition: the need for complicity to a convention. For example, we go to a theater perfomance. We obey the presumption of complicity to the convention of fiction proposed by the show, we accept it and we give it credit. But our critical spirit doesn’t stop working and we subsequently have the right to express our possible dissatisfaction, to pretend that the authors of the show failed our expectations and the credit we gave them. It’s the same for a poem, for a novel etc.

5. The need for mistake and failure.

Many times we have failed until we learned how to use the fork, the knife and the spoon! Many times we fell until we learned to stay on our feet and walk properly! It is obvious that learning the way to a new behaviour goes through trial and error; they are the price we pay for enriching our understanding and to gain new capacities. However, we must make a distinction between these mistakes, which have a positive role, and the ordinary mistakes made out of inattentiveness or due to other sensory or mental imperfections. To place mistake and failure in the sphere of crime or sin denotes a serious confusion, which is always committed by the educational practices. We always hear: “who made a mistake, should pay”. But the example of the child falling before learning to hold his legs and no normal parrent thinking to punish him for this failure should always be in front of us.

An old latin word of wisdom reminding us that to err is human. But the said reflection goes on to condemn the persevering in error. There is a need for clarification here. For example, to always repeat the mistake of crossing the street on the red light is indeed condemnable and sanctionable; generally, the deliberate infringement of certain rules of human, social behaviour is sanctionable and here comes justice and morality to work; but to always make mistakes, other kinds of mistakes, in your attempts to venture piercing into the unknown, is normal and inevitable.

History is abundant in examples of mistakes and failures of outstanding people in their attempt to increase human knowledge. We could write a history of mankind centered around mistakes and failures. A great part, perhaps the greatest, of pioneering actions, of works that opened new roads in knowledge and in social action included mistakes as by-products of the novelty of the launched ideas. Furthermore, following in the footsteps of certain mistakes made in works and bold actions, has come to new ideas, new areas of research. “The Mathematical Error, The Source of Creativity” was many times the title of some of my dissertations. To give just one example: the new science of chaos began with Henri Poincaré in his attempt to eliminate an error in one of his memos of celestial mechanics. I could personally verify and suspect that it is generally true the fact that the road to many (if not most of them) ideas and mathematical theorems followed a sinuous path of probing, wandering, confusion, mistakes of all kinds, until the version under which they are accredited was crystallized. To know, at least some cases, this tumultuous history it seems essential to me if I want to understand the profound nature of human creation. I personally experienced this in some situations in mathematics, computer science, linguistics, literary and artistic field, but I think that is generally true.

Taking into account the inevitability of failure, it is essential to educate the resistance to it and understanding the fact that failure is normal; moreover, a failure always gives you something to learn.

6. The need to play.

I appreciate games based on predetermined rules, from football, to tennisball, to Chess and Go. They have an important role and deserve young people’s attention. But I’m not referring to them in the first place. I regard the games that value the need  for freedom, the inquisitiveness to understand what we perceive with our senses and through direct observation, the need of, and the right to, mistake and failure, without being punished. I considered these examples previously when I spoke about the way we learn to hold our feet and walk. It’s obvious that every child on the face of the Earth goes through this experience.

Now I’m going to refer to another game practised too, as I could figure out, by all the children of the world: the game of hide-and-seek. I hide and you search for me, and if you find me you win. This game only imitates another, which nature and the world, in general, practices it with us at any age and from the beginning of mankind. In our natural attempt to understand the world, everything happens as if the world would tell us: “you’re looking to understand me, but I’m hiding; and the more the thing you search for is more interesting, more significant, the more I hide it better and make it harder to find. But it’s worth to search for it. Even without the expected result, the search will give you satisfactions, which could be other than those you thought about initially. You search for something, you don’t find it, but you find something else; sometimes more interesting than what you were looking for initially.” Learn to enjoy this show of humanity, to get enraptured by it and to feel again that life is worth living. Often, the search proves to be more important than the find. The pleasure of climbing a mountain is first of all to savor every moment of the journey, even if you don’t reach the top.

There is another aspect, as Blaise Pascal noticed: you often search for what you already found. You find something like a hunch, an intuition, an extrapolation of empirical observations. But you need a more convincing confirmation. It’s the case, for example, in mathematics that many theorems are “found” long before they are demonstrated; the case of Pythagorean theorem empirically found long before Pythagoras.

But all this search to which we refer, what else is but learning, discovery, invention? Our need to understand the world, to understand ourselves. A search that need to value all human needs discussed previously, but also those that follow.

7. The need of identity.

There is a major, dramatic challenge here and a chance to give our life a superior motivation. Directly involved are all the other nine needs we are discussing. Biologically, we have an individual identity, by the fact that every living being on this planet has a specific DNA. The deoxyribonucleic acids are “words” in the alphabet of the four types of nucleotide bases. This alphabet is the same for all the living beings on our planet Terra. But the order in which the elements of the alphabet in comprising of the DNAs is different for each of us, so every human being has a specific biological identity. We are born taking an entire genetical heritage from our parents and through them, from our grandparents, great grandparents etc. We take a number of traits, habits, representations, prejudices determined by the geographical and historical context in which we grow. All this gives us a genetical identity of family, geographical location and historical moment, therefore a local, regional, national, language and faith identity. This identity which nature and history imprints us, often without realizing, remains for too many people their only identity.

Too many people don’t feel the need of a richer identity than that which they have received with no personal effort whatsoever. During the transition from childhood to adolescence the awareness of the need to build a richer identity than the one nature has endowed us, should begin. How to teach this need to as many young people (valuing critically, selectively their identity received from nature)? How to make young people realize the fact that under the current conditions of globalization all social levels are acting upon us, directly or indirectly, from the local to regional, national, European, Western to planetary ones? Let us explain to them the typology of cultural identities: Balkan, Danubian, from the Black Sea, South-Eastern European, Central European, Meditarranean, European, Western, planetary, but also the typology resulting from linguistic, faith and civilization diversity.

Something unprecedented happens in human history: many human identities are in permanent dynamics and continuous interaction and cannot be understood unless they’re taken simultaneously forming a system. Either we understand all of them or none of them. Globalization and the internet have an essential contribution to this new configuration of identities. Education fails to deal with these problems, it has hardly any attention. But the existing tension between different identities of each person and between the identities of different individuals are, ultimately, at the root of many conflicts and wars; here global terrorism finds its roots also. The possibility of harmonious development of identities remains yet just a project.

8. The need for being human and humanity.

Identity is the essential first term of a couple in which the second term is otherness. None of them is clarified in the absence of the other. At any level, we define our identity in relation to what is different. The difference may refer to age, sex, nationality, language, skin color, religion, level of culture, social position, political affiliation, philosophy of life, literary preferences or of any other nature and so on. Let us be prepared to understand humanness in its various aspects, and to admit that its very infinite diversity gives it charm.

There are no two identical human faces, there are no two identical human voices, there are no two identical human glances. But beyond this diversity, all the children of the world have a charming freshness, all of them alternating laughter and cry, they all laugh in the sun, they all love movement and play, they all have a burning curiosity. Humanness is an endless source of delight and wonder. Here, choose only one of the charming human manifestations: speaking, language. Such a subtlety, finesse, such a game of nuances words, phrases, speech give you! Their music, their significance. How pleasant it is to discover that you manage to say what you thought, but how easy, even imperceptibly, phrases slip and are no longer expressing what you wanted! A continuous alternation of findings and hidings, of confirmations and frustrations. Or games of human memory, recollections and forgettings; or imperceptible transitions from smile to tear, from seriousness to tenderness. Here’s a major bet of education: to teach our children to enjoy humanness in all its diversity. Humanness is not like the game of tennis, where you win over other who loses; humanness may be a universal winner.

In animals, an instinctive tendency sees in difference an adversity. In order for humans not to reproduce this behaviour themselves, a proper education is needed, thus happening what we always see: third grade elementary school boys fighting because “I said it in one way and he said it differently”.

From humanness there is only one step to humanity. The need to be good, generous, to give, to spread to others the joy of life, to adopt in your behaviour the presumption of solidarity with the others. Children who form in this way (and the internet could have a key role here) will be harder to involve in wars of all kinds.

9. The need for culture.

Mankind has accumulated a huge treasure of scientific culture, literary, artistical, technological, religious, philosophical etc. Heights of human spirituality, in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, literature, music, visual arts, theater, legal sciences, economics, history, archaeology, geography, geology and more recently in film and in the disciplines of information and communication stand testimony for the splendor of humanity, for its penetration, imagination, discovery and innovation power. But who benefits from them, how many people have access to these peaks, understand them, can fill their soul and their mind of their wisdom and beauty, thus, can rise higher above the animal state?

How many of them get to live the thrill of a verse, of a story, of a music, a painting, of an architectural monument, a sculpture, of an equation, a chemical formula, of Mendeleev’s periodic table, of a computer program, of non-Euclidean geometries, Einstein’s relativity, the quantum world, Watson-Crick’s duality of nucleic acids? I’m wondering, by the ears of how many children and teenagers, the breeze of Beethoven’s, Bach’s, Mozart’s and Chopin’s musical arrangements reaches? How many glances, that are in the morning of their life, come to delight in the presence of a painting of Rembrandt or of a sculpure by Brancusi? Will public education be able to take over this message? Do we still have time for this? A time of contemplation, of supreme excitement. Do we not release diplomas of varying degrees on a conveyor belt without cultural coverage? And if they don’t have cultural coverage, what are these diplomas’ holders other than, in the best case, service providers? And if they don’t really have cultural needs, what more profound motivation can they give to their lives? Cohorts of people, some having material prosperity, have nevertheless a status of cultural slaves. Should you feel sorry for them? Should you pitty them? Isn’t here the primary source of civic, moral, legal slippages, of verbal, psychological and physical violence? What is the level of culture of those who lead us, what human reference points do they have? What exactly gives meaning to their lives?

10. The need for transcendence.

We are here at the superior level, of the highest complexity, that the need to give a meaning to life can have. Etymologically,  the word trans means beyond and the latin verb that joins it can be translated as to climb. The habit of children to climb trees, fences, posts expresses the need, the tendency to ascend, to move away from the ground. That is how transcendence begins. To go beyond the boundaries, the context which were imposed to you by birth, to not remain the slave of empirical sensory perception, to try to overcome them. That’s how non-Euclidean geometry came to being, that defies the sensory perception of space; relativistic physics, which transgresses the empirical perception of time, energy and movement; the awareness of the limits of human language, inadequate to the situations where there is no longer a clear distinction between subject and object, and beyond which silence or compromises of all kinds folow; non-classical logics, which violate one or more of the three principles of Aristotelian logic, identity, non-contradiction, third party excluded; imagining a calculation that exceeds the Turing border given by the usual, elementary idea of calculus etc.

Transcendence is both at the destination and at the origins. Kant’s distinction between transcendent (beyond the possibilities of human knowledge) and transcendental (relative to the acquisition of human cognitive preceding any experience; a priori knowledge). Mathematical transcendence refers to, according to Euler, operations that cannot be achieved by repeating a finite number of times of elementary operations, applied to integers and to a variable x. From here, it’s only a step away from the sacred-profane distinctions, immanent-transcendent. On the same note, we can talk about transcendence in music, according to the phenomenology of sound, envisaged by Sergiu Celibidache.

Of course, these are not the only human needs. But they are some of the most important and the most neglected. We live now a moment of a new beginning. You, people of schools and universities, you, pupils and students, you, parents of pupils and students, you, people of culture, intellectuals, how about we value the second need outlined above and refresh ourselves?

Source: 10 nevoi umane de care educatia ar trebui sa tina seama.