Who Is Really Dreaming And Breathing

Education should be the process of helping everyone discover their uniqueness.

Leo Buscaglia Ph.D., was a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. His thought about education is a simple but brilliant one. Our current educational process starts with conformity and progresses to the point of sterility. We don’t celebrate uniqueness in our educational system unless it conforms to the standards set by a narrow-minded group of zealots that learned to put rationalism above all else. Uniqueness doesn't live in rationalism. Uniqueness lives in individualism.

We think we are products of our brain and an isolated part of our subconscious. We add a few other influences in the mix and come up with a product called the self. We say we breathe, but who is breathing? We can't tell the self to breathe or not to breathe. We say we dream, but we can't tell the self to dream or not to dream. We cut ourselves in half and wonder why we don’t feel whole. We admit to only the things we can see, touch, smell and hear, and we disallow the part of the self that functions without those associations.

The part of us, the uniqueness that dreams and breathes is buried in the muck of physical conformity. We cut ourselves in half in order to meet the standards of rationalism. Our subjective self waits for us to realize that no one taught us to see or to hear. No one taught us to smell or touch. Our education process doesn't value the uniqueness of a whole self. But that is the uniqueness we want to experience. Our education should start with celebrating our uniqueness and appreciating and knowing the self that is really dreaming and breathing.