Sheldrake
Education in the New World Order. Everybody agrees there’s something wrong with the educational system that we have today. I mean, even the mainstream official education is so worried about it. There’s something about it which doesn’t seem to be working. And obviously, in the New World Order, there will be an educational system of some kind. Every society or civilization has one. So one has to think what kind do we actually want. And we know that the present kind needs replacing in some way. So what kind do we actually want? And if we take a walk through it, what would it look like—the educational system in the New World Order?
Well, I think that the first thing about it would be that education would recognize that it is in fact a form of initiation; that its entire archetypal role is that of an initiation process. In fact, the present educational system mimics the initiatory process. Indeed, it is a kind of initiatory process where you go through the different exams. Like every initiation, you have a training. You pass through a time of testing or trial. And some fail, others pass, and the passed ones are the initiates.
And so, at every level you have 11-year-old sort of 15 in high school graduations, college exams, bachelor of arts, master of arts, doctor of philosophy. And these higher and higher degrees and qualifications—each of which involves its test of initiation; each of which, once initiated into that hierarchy and the academic grade within the academic hierarchy, people have a kind of official certification of higher and higher levels of education recognized throughout our whole modern society, which pays great respect to things like academic qualifications. You’ll get better jobs, better employment opportunities, more respect. And that’s of course why everyone wants these degrees, and why, to the despair of educators throughout the world, most college students passing through the university seem to have so little real interest in the subjects they’re studying. They want to—in the third world it’s very clear: they just want the degree. Because of the BA or an MA, your entire social status has changed in India. And your marriage prospects, the size of dowry you can command, and so on. It’s a quantifiable sliding scale of status.
Anyway, this is the present educational system we have, and the present educational system is based on an initiatory model. And, in fact, I think it is an initiation into a model. It’s an initiation into what one could think of as the rationalist or humanist world view, or mind set, frame of mind, way of thinking. And so one of the things that it does all along is to mean that the mind or the intellect is the predominant God-like point of view from which everything is seen. So when you teach school children literature within this framework of this system that we’ve got now—its mechanistic, humanist, rationalist model—you don’t just read them the great poems by sort of beating and drumming and bringing magic at the poem and going into the myth. So this poem was written in 1635 by So-and-So, who was born in So-and-So, and you then learn all these facts about the poets, which you have dates when they were born and died, and that kind of thing, which you have to be able to know for exams. And then certain stock ways of analyzing Shakespeare’s plays, for example, for school exams, where such and such a character does this role, and here Shakespeare was borrowing from this tradition and putting this, and taking the whole thing to pieces by this kind of detached analytical mind. The same in the fine arts; as soon as this mind gets onto the arts, you’ve got the same thing. This was painted by So-and-So in the school of So-and-So, bought by So-and-So in such and such a collection and so on.
So I think that all these ways of distancing the self and bringing the rational, academic, trained mind, as being the supreme point of view, is the initiation into which this educational system works. It makes that the supreme arbiter, a kind of human reason. And so it’s this kind of rationalistic humanism.
So it is an initiation right now. The present educational system is an initiatory system. One has to recognize that. And each of its levels, like commencement, graduation day from high school, and so on, are attended by impressive public ceremonies—which, in the classic tradition of public initiation and recognition to a higher grade or status, like a medieval guild or craft, makes it one of the few realms in which that kind of world lives on. These hierarchical gradations with robes and all the apparatus in the realm of science, of a scientific priesthood, in fact. And indeed it is the scientific priesthood envisaged by Bacon in the scientific world, the academic model, and the priestly role of the higher initiates in running and ordering society; the more educated.
So we do have that kind of system, but in order to replace it, we obviously have to have not only just tinkering with the present system, which is entirely dedicated to that view of the world. And when it extends its baleful influence over the third world countries, as I’ve seen it do in Indian villages, as soon as the school comes in, and the secondary school, these kids go through that, they become alienated from tradition. They want to wear pants instead of dhotis. They want to work in cities instead of staying in the village. They want to have an office job, sort of with an account, sitting behind a desk, and being a kind of bureaucrat rather than getting their hands dirty. All these classical archetypes of kind of Indian bourgeois aspiration take over, and they’re alienated from the village culture in which they were educated. Most of them could get dropped off and go to the cities, and the villages sort of, they sort of distill off, fortunately, for village life.
You can see this whole new frame of mind being introduced in the entire third world through UNESCO and through educational things. The first step is literacy. You’ve got to have them reading and writing, because then you can get across that what’s in books is more important than what you actually feel or experience. Because books—in fact, the world of books; huge libraries and stuff, scientific journals—is vastly larger than anything any one of us could ever read, comprehend, or experience. So there’s this overwhelming weight of fact which one can’t but be in awe of and respect. And as soon as one of them is initiated into that world, and the priesthood of the world of books and of the written word, then the more one’s mind is bound up in that whole realm, and the more one’s being is assimilated to it, and the less the realm of ordinary experience counts for anything. In fact, it still counts, but it counts behind the diaphragm that separates the educated public persona from the private domestic, or romantic solitude, or hiking in the wilderness weekend persona, or holiday and barley persona. These other wilder, freer aspects of the personality are relegated through time, not in the educated parts.
So the alternative educational model would still be based on initiations, but it would be based on going with the grain of initiation, which is throughout the world what most people want to be initiated into a lot of things. And they realize that being initiated into them means taking on a new social role, a new social pattern. And usually these roles are in some sense sacralized—you know, guilds of craftsmen, et cetera, with their patron saints. And Indian castes, each with their own traditions—you know, the potter caste, the weaver caste, and so on, with traditions and skills which are passed on with them. And the children want to be initiated into being a potter or a weaver, you know. And there’s a respect and accord given to the initiates, which the young aspire to.
And you get exactly the same thing in our own society with driving. I mean, nobody, most adult people, don’t want to be the kind of people who either can’t drive or haven’t qualified for a driving license. They have to go through a learning period and they have to pass the test, and once they’ve passed it, they join the club of qualified drivers. Most kids actually want to be initiated into that. There’s a real power, a kind of magnetic pull about being along. There’s a glamour to it, which they want. And a whole new freedom, and a true initiation takes place. And these are very deep, and people want to be initiated into swimming, into sex, into drugs of various kinds, into games, into skills and professions. These are basic desires for initiation. So the model of education would be this initiation-based education, of which the present educational system has many of the elements, but in a kind of parody version, because these tests only operate in the written mode. They only operate in the language mode. All examinations are not sitting at a desk with a pen and writing. But they entirely work through this written mode, and they’re initiations into the written world, as it were. So there are other kinds of initiations, and if you think about it, a lot of the present educational system could be transformed by recognizing its initiatory quality, like medical students, to become doctors, have to dissect a complete human corpse. This is an absolute requirement. And every medical student, when they first come into the dissecting room, undergoes an instinctive, deep-done revulsion from this room full of partially dismembered corpses, something against which all societies have had taboos, you know, on the respect for the corpse, and that sort of thing, the power of the corpse. And to overcome all these traditional taboos, they have to adopt a highly detached and usually jocular attitude with dissecting rooms for the people playing hockey with, as they did in the Cambridge ones, with severed legs using testicles, with the hockey balls, this kind of thing. A typical medical student hijinks in the dissecting room, where this kind of jocularity is forced as a response. Say, instead of that, to become a doctor, you have to dissect a dead human body. And to do that, you have to have a meditation on death first. You maybe have to, like in a Tibetan meditation, spend a night in a graveyard, and, you know, really confront what one’s doing, the initiatory quality of being in it, confronting death in some kind of way. This is a solid moment. And in most other trades, professions, skills, etc., there would be this initiatory way of doing it, which exists to some extent in voluntary organizations and clubs and hobbyists of every kind, who want to have their people pursue things because they’re really interested. There’d also be adolescent initiation rites somewhere in there. So long, we mentioned that at Holly Hawk, Joe and I were talking about vision camps, summer camps, where kids go and where there’s a truly initiatory program there, involving a vision quest, for example, at least 24 hours away, alone in the wilderness. These camps already exist in Northern Vancouver Island in the summer, mostly for Indian youths. And so there’d be this initiatory quality introduced throughout the educational system, and computer modeling, for example, would be a very important part of the initiatory thing into mathematics, which would be an initiation into the mathematical landscape, which is the hidden mystery of mathematics, into which most students of it never get an inkling. They don’t even know it’s there because mathematicians don’t talk about it. They pretend that it’s this rational system of numbers and symbols. But actually, the really good ones have these vivid, visual imaginations, which is where it all happens, where the magic goes on. Well, now, one of your great points is this can now be rendered visible through computer models. You can enter into it through fractal programs and that kind of thing, and actually explore the mathematical landscape and the privacy of your home from moderately priced diskette available from aerial press. And so this obviously is part of it too. And also, within each branch of learning, there would be through a ceremony, you’d learn about how to mend cars, you’d learn from plumbers about the elements of plumbing, you’d learn useful things in schools, and to be initiated by members of recognized trades or professions, like a plumber who teach you plumbing, a real plumber, who’s really part of the plumber’s union, the really initiated plumber world. And so you’d see that you’d have an entry into these different worlds through these initiations, which could take place within the framework of ordinary schools. And through acknowledging the tradition, which is in each of these cases a way of life, a whole cultural tradition, not just a piece of book learning or things written on paper, you’d come into the larger group dynamics, the social psyche, the education would be integrated into the larger emotional and intuitive and social bonding aspects of one’s life. Anyway, one kind of educational system that has this initiatory quality to some extent is the workshop system, and this is the principal alternative educational system that has developed outside the orthodox one. And it’s obviously the best model for actually replacing the present one, a vast extension of the workshop system of education, because workshop type education involves people interacting as a group, and it’s impossible to forget the group dynamics. It’s not just a teacher in a classroom who are meant to be quiet, although in fact what’s going on is group dynamics are often turbulent kind. The workshop makes the group dynamics explicit, and is the model of people who actually want to learn something together to make some new insight, to make some new step or experience or transition, which at the end of which, Friday noon, there it has been through a kind of group initiatory experience, which has involved a group bonding, a new shared way of seeing the world, a new consensus reality emerging, a new insight into self-transformation, etc. Initiatory hopes anyway. The other thing is that the other final point is that for the educational system to be transformed, each branch of it, each professional, already exists as a kind of guild, like mathematicians have their own kind of guilds and biochemists, and these are guilds with their founding fathers, their own traditions, etc. They’re like guilds. Each one of them has to, from within itself, within the group, have a new vision of what it could be, like revisioning psychology, like Helman’s book, there’s the revisioning model, revisioning medicine. What would happen if a group of net doctors got together, led in a workshop type format, somewhere like Esalen, who did things like shamanic chanting in a workshop format, and then also discussed what was their original vision in becoming a doctor, what was going right back to contact the original inspiration for each of them, and then tell it to other people. What was your vision? What did you see medicine could be? What’s your experience of it as you’ve actually come into it? Limitations and so on. What could a new vision of medicine be? A new kind of healing profession? This kind of revisioning could occur within each of the... What could a real botany be? Within the botanical? A real botany would be a science really related to the spirits of the plant world, as well as with an understanding of their forms, names, colours, embryologies and so on, but essentially knowing in the greatest detail and relating to the spirits of the vegetative kingdom. So this would be what the new professions would be like, and they could be transformed, I think, by a whole transformation of consciousness that could come about in a group format within members of the profession, a whole new vision, what it could be. So, in summary, I think that in the New World Order, the educational model would be an education through initiation. The initiations would be things that people on the whole want to do and involve far more than just writing things down, but actually a real mental, physical and social competence to do whatever it is that needs to be done, which is what involved in real guild initiations, apprenticeships and so on. And that the workshop mode is probably the best model for what the new educational models would be like. And the professional groups that already exist to transform these traditions from within, which has to be done to maintain their organic integrity as a profession, I mean, it intends to be a source of ancient traditions, which can actually have a mythic power and therefore help to transform. All this might happen in a new millennium and lead us into a new psychedelic world order.
McKenna
Well, it’s very interesting. I agree, I think you put your finger on it, that this initiatory thing is the continuing thread from the archaic that could lead into the future. And that means there’s reason for hope. The only thing I would really add to that is that when I imagine the educational system of the future, I think that part of our problem and how we reached this historical impasse was through accepting a kind of historical amnesia, and that the education of the future should have a tremendous focus on history. The educational system currently in place I take to have as its sort of paradigm, the teaching of physics, in other words the conveying of an extremely abstract, mathematically based description of nature that ushers into high engineering competence. And I would imagine in an ideal educational menu in the future that perhaps the science of archaeology might replace the science of physics as the place where focus was to go. Most people are not aware of the revolution in information recovery ability that has occurred in archaeology in the last even ten years, so that in a sense a kind of telescope into the past is being erected by the world archaeological community. And teaching this is a way of re-anchoring ourselves from the post-industrial notion of history as a kind of friendless fluctuation or a class struggle, or some of these other very dis-en-sole models of what the human journey through time is. So I think we have fallen into a kind of historical amnesia. This has blunted the acuity of our political decision-making, and that part of reforming education has to be to teach people that history is a system of interlocking resonances in which they are embedded and they are going to be called upon to make decisions which will affect the state of life on this planet, millennia in the future. So without a complete knowledge of history that is seamless from the birth of the universe down to yesterday’s headline, we’re not in a position to act toward our best interests. And I take education broadly to be the inculcation of attitudes that causes to act generally in the interest of all. That’s about it. I think your other very strong point is the power of the feudal guild model, and that goes hand in hand with the McLuhanist expectation of what he called an electronic feudalizing of society. That this hierarchy of academic talent that has been built up is in fact a sham thing of squeaking gears and creaking collages that is left over from another age. And that we should just understand that education is a kind of value neutral medium, and that whether you learn to the dow of waste disposal or the dow of 16th century Spanish literature, you are essentially tilling the same field and that people have lost the sense of the howness of their professionalism. And the educational system has been contaminated by concepts like class struggle, class difference, this sort of thing. Ralph, what’s your take on that?
Abraham
Well, I like these visions, revisions, as far as they go. I think the initiation mode is a good one in that it has a traditional track record, successful track record, that engages the motivation of children to try to proceed from the green belt to the brown belt and so on. And it also is, as you correctly pointed out, we’ve produced a system that we have in today’s educational factory. So I think that this is excellent as far as it goes, and I like the workshop mode, and I think I agree, Terence, it would be valuable to infuse the curriculum of new dimensions of history, archeology, and the revision of the past. The past must be re-revised annually, and this mode would make that possible, because I presume in the workshop model you have in mind asking a different plumber every year, asking a different archeologist, not be a professor with tenure.
Sheldrake
Oh, no, there are ones that remain actually professional plumbers that are coming here.
Abraham
Yes, but still I think that this somehow doesn’t go far enough. I feel uneasy that the main problems in the current system haven’t really been engaged yet. And the trouble is we don’t know exactly what they are. And I think this view is kind of focusing on higher education. Maybe that’s good, because lower education will always be on the way to higher education, and when higher education is transformed it will somehow change the whole system. And myself, I took a shortcut in school, left in the ninth grade and never returned, and then I entered early in university and I’m now starting my 40th year, so I can not really suggest revision of the elementary school system.
McKenna
Well, the implication of feminism, of feminine values, there’s some kind of way of feminizing the whole system in those early grades. That’s probably the most important factor.
Abraham
Infusing the current system with a new spirit I think somehow won’t do it. Among the Rachev books criticizing the higher educational system this year, there’s one Paige Smith’s The Death of the Spirit, which he’s a historian, America’s premier historian. And he spent half his book complaining about the current system, and the other half discussing how it got that way. And I was pleased to discover that the higher educational system of Europe in America is not getting worse and worse. It was always this bad. Because it’d take fault even if we go to the first one, which is when Ptolemy gave this huge endowment to the Alexander Museum. Here we had professors with lifetime tenure, and the responsibility was to give one lecture per week or to contribute a poem or amusement for public display.
McKenna
Sounds like a good contest. So Paige Smith takes issue first of all with the tenure system.
Abraham
Now I like the tenure system. I would be out on my ear years ago if I didn’t have this very, very strong job security. But somehow it’s part of the problem, I think. And you have to ask in your vision of the new educational system in the new world order where the workshops are, who is organizing this? Where is the Department of Administration, the Administration building, who’s deciding which workshops will be offered, which plumber will be, and so on. Will there be new emphasis on feminist revision of history? Will there be new results from archaeology or not? Well, somebody after all is deciding, whether it’s the PTA or whatever, how many people are going to school? All, a few, those who wish, rewards will be offered, yes or no. And these things have to do with getting ready the nuts and bolts of running a school system. And as the system evolves, or devolves would be more ominous since we don’t expect it to get better and better in the course of time. Somehow the paths of the devolution, the seeds would be contained in this administrative system put in place in the beginning, who is in charge of students’ participation, decisions, and so on. Then even with the initiation model, I find some anxiety in thinking about this because we have in the current initiation system, there are two different roles in the initiation in the beginning of your introduction you alluded. One is initiation as with the corpse, and the other is valuation. Accreditation, a guarantee to the world that this doctor has reached a certain level of skill and is therefore accredited, authorized to dispense antibiotic medicines by prescription. That means that in the initiation there has to be a test. And in the test, usually verbal, as you said, although when I was an engineering student, we had to pass the welding course, the test was given by a Petzl test machine.
Sheldrake
Oh, in the sciences practical as well, of course. Yes.
Abraham
So I, as a teacher, always hated this testing aspect and claimed other people should do it. I would only, I’m only willing to teach people who want to learn from me. That is my only role that I accept. But nevertheless, I must write letters of recommendation. Students who have been friends, who have respected me, who now beg me to assist them by writing a letter of recommendation. I must say that this student reached a certain level. I don’t even know what level this student reached. Whatever I thought it was, I’m not sure. And even if I was sure, I wouldn’t know how to say it in the sentence. I hate this role. And I hate grading tests and trying to figure out where to place the lines between the grades A, B, C, or whatever. So the testing aspect and the initiatory aspect must not necessarily be combined into a single tool, function, or whatever. No. And so I like the initiation. I don’t like the testing. And yet, if you don’t have the testing, then the educational system is somehow failing its mission to society in doing one of the things that society asks of you, which is to produce trades. And you see, I don’t accept plumbing in the educational curriculum. Everybody should learn computer programming and other kinds of plumbing, of course. But I think the heart of the curriculum, the school system should somehow transcend the trades and the apprenticeship for a profession and the learning of basic skills, walk, run, jump, eat a complete diet, and so on. Where is spiritual value? Where is moral and ethical value? Where is the fabric of society? Where is that taught? If not in the school, then embedded in soap operas or where? Somehow, the curriculum has to have a spiritual, moral, well, social values which could fit in the workshop mode, which could be consistent with the initiatory but have nothing to do with the trade school and the trade union. There would be maybe some spiritual elite, some professors of moral philosophy. We would have Plato and Socrates would be leading workshops, something like that. Then I could see that it fits in this mode. But somehow, whoever is arranging the workshop in plumbing and who is arranging the workshop in spiritual value, this must be, I guess, differently qualified people. Finally, I think this, another thing that has crippled the modern university is the isolation of specialties. And I don’t see in this new vision a way of dealing with that. I think that besides the workshop with one leader, we must have workshops with trilog leaders so that the interplay of the different specialties could be given due time, in fact, equal time with specialties. I don’t propose, as many people do, to replace courses in specialties completely with interdisciplinary courses. I think it’s kind of a partnership, Mother Earth, Father Sky, that there will be specialties and equal time for syncretists to put it together and obtain some meaning from three or four specialties and to free associate on all of this relating whatever is the subject matter of a workshop or the entire educational experience to the progress, the future of society and the evolutionary challenges presented to each generation. Well, that’s just some other problems I think not addressed by your suggestions so far and that somehow these have to be not addressed individually but taken into account somehow in the overall design of the educational system for a new world order. It needs the participation of the community in the selection of the curriculum. It needs a certain rigidity that resists evolution that’s too fast. It needs the partnership of the special and the general. It needs the relationship to life not only in terms of fixing the faucets but also in making moral decisions in every day about how to relate to altruism and selfishness. And synergy. And I have no idea how to do this, how to change the system. I just think that what you’ve suggested is the beginning of an evolutionary track very similar to the one that we’re now on and in the course of just a few years or generations would result in the same mess that we know how. We need a newer, new idea.
Sheldrake
Well, I mean what’s obviously the element lacking from what I talked about and which you draw attention to is largely the kind of spiritual dimension because I was talking about a reformed secular educational system taking for granted the fact that the present educational system is secular. Now, if one can think of a spiritually based educational system and there’s a completely different realm of possibilities the problem, however, is that if it were Christian based then all the Jews, Muslims, Hindus and atheists would object. If it were Jewish all the rest. If it were Hindu then fundamentalist Christian parents would object. What’s stymied, one of the terrible impasses of the modern educational system is because of secular pluralism and because the role being stated, the importance secular pluralism has for the modern political ideology which is this kind of humanist, capitalist, free market idea. I mean it’s a very important feature. It means that no one spiritual traditional practice can be used in schools except in explicitly Roman Catholic schools or Jewish schools or Muslim schools which is why a lot of people want separate German Catholic, Jewish, Muslim schools exactly because they do think this is important but in the secular system you can’t do it. So there’s a terrible blockage there and the only way to overcome this problem would be to have a new official world order which could empower accredited etc. which is not the secular state because the secular state by its very nature is desacralized. It’s a humanist concept. So the thing is that this revolution would have to go a long way if you want the entire panacea. A long way, if we want to go a long way. It would require some kind of new religious consensus into which people could be initiated. Now I think that’s perhaps hoping for too much and my more moderate suggestion would be firstly that each initiation has to involve a real experience at different levels of reality. So like archaeology, you wouldn’t just study in books and see slides and videos of these things. You’d have to go to certain sacred places and maybe spend the night there alone if it was that kind of order day there or whatever. So you actually came to know the spirits of these places that you’ve been talking about, the kind of place. You knew it directly from real experience and you’d also do this kind of thing. You’d have a group initiation quantity to it as well and there’s a sense of initiation into social groups and the honour of groups and so on which would be a series of self-regulating societies which have been models. Then if for the entire society to have a system of regulation you’d need to have official state rights like they do in Japan through the Shinto religion and the emperor and as we do in Britain through the monarchy and still acknowledged official state rights like royal opening of parliament, praying for the queen and that kind of thing. But most countries don’t have the possibility of transforming that system. In Britain we do and I think the problem is quite different here in America because there isn’t American politics based on a different model, a desacralised model. So the alternative is the American way it would be to have a free-for-all. And how it would work is this, each student at age 17 would be given a book of 55 workshop bachelors and they’d be told that to become an initiated adult they would have to take 55 workshops over the next three years or maybe 40 workshops or whatever and there’d have to be five in the kind of group dynamics, social myths, history, understanding our society and the kind of social ethic as well as direct group experience. Some would be in philosophy, others in natural history and knowing about the natural world, etc. So you’d have some stipulation on the minimum number in each school and then there’s simply, there’s a computerised, centralised, Esalen, Hollyhawk, etc. catalogue, far many more workshop centres would spring up all over based on modified summer camps, etc. and into all modified schools, existing schools. And you’d have local patents of workshops and you’d have also ones to which people travel and stay.
Abraham
I mean that the students’ credential on finishing the use of the 55 vouchers would be the list of workshops that had been completed to the point of initiation.
Sheldrake
Then it would be, the whole process would be started by some initiatory thing into this pathway, each workshop would itself have an initiatory pattern. And the whole thing would culminate in some final test, which would be the borderline from the student having passed a certain, a test not only involving intellectual skills but also skills in groups, also some kind of social sense or responsibility as actually done through groups and workshop learning, making group dynamics conscious and so on. And then there would be some final test that involved all these. And it would be like one of these, and I think it could probably also involve like the Ellisonian Industries, a psychedelic revelation. I think this would be probably the best way to have the graduation thing, to have the psychedelic initiation thing. Maybe mushrooms would be the best thing.
McKenna
Oh absolutely, a BRK return, the culmination of the educational process in the BRK industry, which is where it always ended.
Abraham
Well besides the fact that you address my complaint about the lack of the sacred with actually an interesting covert plan for the introduction of the New World religion through these religious aspect of the initiations and the visits to the sacred sites, there’s also the possibility, since there’s no school in this plan, there are workshop centers all over the place. That ordinary courses of religion, ethics and so on according to different traditions would also be offering workshops as due to their choice of ancient tradition. Yes, yes. A new, new, and platonic, and neo-pathography.
Sheldrake
A Roman Catholic Methodist. Yes. Islamic. Hindu. There’d be workshops in these Tibetan Buddhists led by people in those traditions. If you want to know about Judaism, you don’t go to a religious education instructor who tells you about it from the book, you go to do a workshop with a rabbi. Yes.
Abraham
And then the relationship between education and the job market would be imagined then through some classified ads that a person wanted, must have three W courses, two E courses and one S or something like that. Right. And then as these requirements of different industries became known, people seeking a certain profession would see to it that they learned how to read, for example, or how to write a computer.
Sheldrake
Well, that would be one way it would work. Yes, and I think that this educational system probably would fulfill the needs of industry though. I hadn’t thought about it. They’d be better than the present one because it would actually give a much better sense of the industry. They’re not interested in taking graduates who just think from books. They complain all the time in Britain about how they don’t want university graduates in a lot of British industries. Their heads are too big and they’re too big for their boots and they don’t respect practical experience. They’d rather take people straight from the school. Common pattern.
Abraham
Well, English universities were started by the church, but American universities, as Page Fifth, Fort Salty’s book, were started by tycoons of business. And each successful tycoon had to have among his credentials a university he’d started with in Dalmatians. So besides, I think the vision, this is a good one, is becoming for me personally more and more satisfactory and also plausible. I think that some people have suggested actually that the public school system be replaced with a voucher system. This is the active proposal at the moment.
Sheldrake
This is a thatcherite idea too. The point is this voucher system is part of current political orthodoxy, so it’s very easy to see how it might be realized in the new form.
Abraham
I think a question we have to face is besides the vision of the final product, also some idea as to the path that goes from here, point A to there, point B. And it’s hard to see how to get rid of this entrenched public school system. It would have to be, as we’re talking about politics here, there would have to be the plebiscite, you know, the voters insist on the opportunity to control the school system and that they want a voucher system.
Sheldrake
You simply privatize it. And you privatize the education, you have a voucher system valid at any school, a well known approved list which is constituted by a new kind of educational board, not the old one. And the approved list includes Waldorf schools, you know, Montessori schools, it would include Catholic schools, Islamic schools, and there would be a whole range of accredited schools, including former public schools, which would now become sort of an autonomous town schools or something. They’d compete in the open market. And this system would be extremely, it would be pluralistic, it would be extremely responsive to what people actually want and what parents and students are really interested in. And it would have the advantage of being very decentralized and self-regulating. School is a business. Yes. That you prefer. Well, right now, school is a business, it’s a professional career. The only thing is that it’s administered by money taken from us through taxes and administered through a centralized bureaucracy for a bureaucratic organization. Now, school is a business. Both ways, we’re paying for it and it’s not coming free either way. But the way that you can deal with this is that the voucher system is issued by the government to each student by the Ministry of Education. When you’re 18, you get a book of vouchers.
Abraham
Probably medical schools and attorneys and so on would continue more or less as it presents. And they would have entrance requirements, some of the D courses for biology or S courses for science or something like that.
Sheldrake
But I think that the voucher system, the workshop mode, like you see the other side of this is the reform of the existing profession. Because if you have a group of astronomers, for example, we vision an astronomer in our workshop weekend led by some astronomer, plus maybe Terence or you or somebody they want or me, an outside person also to be part of the workshop, maybe George Egan’s enchanting. And then you’re going to watch the original vision of astronomy. What is it that’s interesting the most? What could astronomy be again today? Well, one thing it could be is we could help to reconnect people with the heavens, designing these henges that we were talking about, setting these things where you know where Jupiter and things like that. So that this goes into every school and so that children actually learn about the heavens. Then there’d be things where people who are learning astronomy go out at night, have class at night under the stars and learn the constellations and have tests and how well we know them. Astronomy related once more to the actual heavens. That would be the new vision in astronomy, which with the direct experience, including maybe communicating the stars and start the subject of star-spot together with all the stuff on radio, passing, nebulae and quasars and stuff. So and in each science, Gaia, geology, the new geology, would not only involve studying rocks and knowing about them, but studying them in the context of the sense of the life of Gaia, a Gaian geology that would be in a Gaian perspective and which would begin and end with the right rituals that connect the geological profession to its patronets, none of that.
Abraham
Well as the bond issue and the parasite are put on the ballot and passed, the students are issued the booklets of 55 vouchers and the new structure is put in place and simply begins. And so the students, they still may remain a terrific lack of teachers who would wish to or be able to offer such courses. The ignorance of the meaning of the ancient sites and the significance of the stars and so on can’t be overcome in a day. So chances are in the new form people would continue teaching exactly what they teach today and that the workshop of astronomers to revision astronomy and so on would not have a very quick feedback or maybe any feedback into the curriculum or the actual conduct of the school. So that while they envisioned a new astronomical profession that the workshops, all the workshop centers kept on teaching the old one, somehow they would have to be a miracle to get the whole system on to a new track. It wouldn’t happen overnight. The recirculation aspect that we are mostly longing for could never happen, might never happen.
Sheldrake
Well I think we need to trigger it. Well I think that it would have to happen in this new model. We wouldn’t just get a booklet of vouchers through the post. To start your path you would now be entering the stage of apprenticeship or learning. There would be an initiation ceremony and you could be initiated in any one of the number of ways through a Christian, Jewish, Muslim each religion could run or if you didn’t want to have any of the ones offered by the various religions.
Abraham
The new world religion would always be a possibility.
Sheldrake
There would be a new world, there would be a chance for free enterprise in this area, sort of new age initiation with vague stuff about Christmases. Green fables. Yes, that kind of thing. There would be all sorts. But you would have to go through one of these initiations which would be based on initiating you on the path you are going on and calling in blessings on your journey and that kind of thing. Then you get your booklet of vouchers as part of this family. And this happens at one of the sacred places of your choice. You are not forced to go through any one tradition.
Abraham
So setting up that particular system of initiation rates would be the key step for switching the whole system onto a new path. It has to sort of engineer that.
Sheldrake
That would be fairly easy though because you would say the importance of initiation and the psychology of children is of vast importance as now universally recognized. And you can make a strong case that therefore our educational system needs to have a more initiatory quality.
Abraham
We are talking about the 27 million young Americans who are of the age for this first initiation this coming fall and how exactly are we going to accommodate this number of people in a new system with the production of 3,000 to 5,000 new keep theories.
Sheldrake
You are thinking about a model of overnight change of the entire American system. I am thinking of a pioneering experiment in the limited area. The slowly grows if it deserves to. The thing is the way that things happen organically in society you never convert a system without some prior model of it working. Whenever you try and get any money, any persuade anyone, if you can say this is an agonist going here it is, you can come and see it. It is vastly more sophisticated and short term does not defecate. Here at the Council this is the tenant garden that is here. Rather than with a bit of paper saying this project and I have built something concrete. And so if the workshop system is already up and running as a concrete alternative, that is its great advantage. It exists. It exists in a pluralistic free market form which is self sustaining so far without states after this. But people do because they want to do them. And they want to do them because they know that in the workshop they are on balance coming out feeling better than when they went in.
Abraham
So it is not much growing now but perhaps if people did have vouchers then it would suddenly start a rapid change.
Sheldrake
I think it would be a completely new format because at present no one aged 18 gets a workshop. It is a system of education entirely for the middle aged. What is all this like? Yes, no, it is art. It has made no contact.
Abraham
How could one possibly age about that? A craft of an 18 year old or a workshop.
McKenna
What would be necessary if they talk about psychedelic drugs? I get them. Not quite 18. Oh, I think if we
Sheldrake
did dialogues on morphic resonance and chaos and psychedelics and trilogues I think there are a lot of younger craft. Yes, if right now they have to pay 385 dollars. They don’t have the money, they don’t have the vouchers. The problem with the workshop system is because it is self-financing it is expensive.
Abraham
What about Esalen giving what you call them scholarships for young people?
Sheldrake
That would be alright but I think it would be a kind of token thing at Esalen. I think they maybe have to have some young people’s workshops here. That would be a two or three a year where they offer to a much reduced price. And that the people who come on them have to be recommended by somebody who has been to Esalen. So it would create the sense of the Esalen community.
Abraham
We have to recommend this to the community. Because we are really liking that generation. It is a serious problem. The Lindisfine Fellowship which is just one of these many invisible colleges existing around the globe that I think are valuable is now proposing to dissolve itself on its 20th birthday because there is no coming generation. People are dying of old age and nobody knows the young person to introduce them to the circle. So this is a tremendous hole in our bucket.
Sheldrake
Exactly. Well this is exactly where there is a tremendous scale to the initiatory model. You see the Esalen coming to Esalen is a kind of initiation. Whenever you come here for the first time it has an initiatory quality. And most people are the initiates who have an easy familiarity with things like hot tubs and getting webbed at large and that kind of thing. So if you create this one group of initiates, the teenage workshops, the 18 to 20 year old workshops that happen at Esalen, which are initiations into kind of the staff and the kind of things that happen here and you talk about the engineering and so on. To get there you have to be recommended by someone who has been here and therefore there is a much greater sense of initiation into this world. The fact is a lot of teenage may not know that this might exist or if they do have a totally distorted view, but it is an independent autonomous adult world and that’s exactly what people want to be initiated into. So the sense of a kind of somewhat more mysterious realm of possibility they didn’t know about. This is a real thing that is a whole world that they don’t know about.
Abraham
We should end this trivah and run out immediately and grab Steve and that. It’s not the world the Esalen youth program.
Sheldrake
But you see things like in schools, the initiatory things you could do here, like I did on my Rebirth of Nature, we came. One of the things everyone did was the tree sounding. You go out to the tree and you ask the tree four questions. There was a North, South, East, West side, the tree oracle. Well, Joel Garp is in her workshop and I found that within three hours of talking about in this kind of context, the reasons for thinking the old world view is inadequate, the problems of the mechanistic world view, it’s a temporary nature in relation to the sainte-animism, the rising tide of new attitudes, etc. the temporary nature of the mechanistic predominance. Then people, everybody is happy to go and hold the tree and ask it questions and sit down by it. This tree oracle is very effective, it really works. Now that can be done and is being done. The kids could be over at the foundation, they’ve now started workshops for school teachers to teach them about the kinds of things you can do, no chance, fire circles, no vision quests, three salmoners. And they’re now doing this with various schools including bringing them onto the land and doing salmoners with them there. From Hollywood there’s 15 schools now, in part. So they’ve actually already got something going along with life. And so you see this initiatory quality, so that if you’re doing botany, then you learn about tree oracles. Part of it, you know, you have at the beginning of your course a tree oracle quest at the beginning of each term. And you have vision quests of various kinds built through the system. So I think that the excellent places which could be centres for these quests, these initiatory journeys could fulfill them immediately. And I think the age range they should be doing the initiation is not the key one from 12 to 13. I think that’s best done through modified summer camps, specially designed. But this could be the initiation into adulthood, at 18 or 21.
Abraham
So these 55 workshops, they would begin with adulthood. Is that your idea? The entire elementary and junior, what we call high school, all that would remain as it is.
Sheldrake
Well, I think that the model of having, trying it out with the initiation at 18 into adulthood, all applicants must be 18 or over. And, you know, this would have to be a pioneering thing that we could talk to Steve about. It could happen in six months, fine, right here. Now, the other thing that we’re talking about is to change the initiation through summer camps since none of us are in elementary or primary, in middle school education. But if you are in that, it’s quite easy to do, isn’t it? The people who we were studying, Matthew and Dredd, their sons are at a very open school. And I said, you know, why not get... He did the tree sound, and he really liked it. Why not? She used to teach that. Why not do it in school? They did a visual class to do the tree sound. They’ll do it.
Abraham
There are the 55 vouchers and the workshops. How long are they on these weekend workshops? Week-long workshop, or five weeks on many courses?
Sheldrake
Well, I mean, this is for these little details that one would work out. But obviously, there’d need to be a whole new bead of workshop type leaders. So the other thing is that Esalen, Holly Hopp, Omega and some take on a new role. They’d have workshops for workshop leaders, where you’d actually train people how to do workshops. You’d initiate them into being workshop leaders, and where better to initiate them into being a workshop leader? So you’d have these... And then instead of these so many thousand people come to us, and if a few hundred of those that came to us in every year were initiated into being workshop leaders, they reached doing workshops, this system could very rapidly propagate. Yeah, very rapidly. In a self-initiating, self-populating mode, there’d have to be some attention given to the initiated structure of each type of workshop. To start with a dedication or acknowledgement of the spirit of the place and the powers in the light of which the workshop is being done. If it’s being done in the light of the spirit, or of reason, or of emotion, or of the whole of the more integration, or whatever. I mean, whatever, what’s the guiding principle? An initial ceremony, and a closing ceremony, and some kind of opening dedication, a child’s order. I mean, this is a pattern of most workshops anyway. And so initiating people into workshop-leading would very easily, very naturally be modified, I think. And I don’t think even one would have to write the program for it. I think that people have worked out themselves in the workshops for that.
Abraham
So how standards would be maintained for workshops, at least at the most famous workshop centers? Yes, and then the entire... It wouldn’t be only the popularity of a certain workshop, which guaranteed its continued existence. It would have to, for example, we wouldn’t want to continue some workshop that only taught that the body is the body.
McKenna
Well, presumably the feedback, the automatic free market feedback mechanism would regulate this because it’s something...
Abraham
No, because corruption is a known mechanism for the downward spiral of society. And the worse and worse workshops become more and more popular because they give the valuation, the value of the accreditation to keep on the initiation without you actually doing anything, other than sitting in the hot bath and repeating three times the event is the event, or the body is the body.
McKenna
Well, what you’re implying is what you sought to avoid, which is that there has to be a second entity which casts the workshop graduate to see what it is.
Abraham
I want to avoid that. Well, it could be intrinsic and the industries would not employ somebody just from having graduated, that is to say spent 55 vouchers. They would insist on the courses from some of their favorite teachers or institutions as, obviously, a bachelor’s degree from Stanford is worth more than a bachelor’s degree from Great Westwood.
McKenna
Well, a corporation could post a list of courses that would enhance your likelihood of being hired by them. And then you could choose for yourself whether or not to include those as you formed your curriculum.
Abraham
So this is the self-organizational model.
McKenna
What is the very quality of most of these?
Abraham
Well, we’d have to persuade, I mean, industries would have to suddenly start opening their doors to graduate from the new system. And this, of course, was a great ambition for students choosing UC Santa Cruz, although they did, because it was considered a great experiment in its early days 20 years ago.
McKenna
Well, you would have to go to people like Lawrence Rockefeller and Andrew Mellon and people like that to get a group of corporations to commit to accepting and hiring on the alternative.
Abraham
Yeah, through the great railroad magnates of today would not yet end out in the university. Well, you could go to Apple computers, or IBM, or some of these hip habitations.
McKenna
So this would be a big corporation?
Sheldrake
Well, you could start it actually with just a voluntary system right now. You could offer these scholarships where you have to be recommended by an alumnus if one of the existing, you know, Omega, S-Lin or something. And you get these scholarships for, say, five workshop vouchers, down at 8 or 6 months period or something. And with an initial beginning ceremony, an ending ceremony for the whole thing, is this kind of initiation into that. This could be started right away. And, you know, they could do them in their vacations or in their summer vacation. You know, it could fit in even with a standard student life pattern. But there would be then this category of people who had a different kind of initiation, and each of them, when they went back to their college or university, people would be curious about what they’d done, and whatever it is they’d done, whatever they said they did, would be quite intriguing to a lot of people.
Abraham
So the New World System would actually begin with its educational program. And the New World System educational program would have to have a pilot project, which I guess would be the New Village. The New Village Schools.
McKenna
The Hawaiian Island.
Abraham
And then we would have to seek a way to actually begin this pilot project with, I guess it would take one leader, one workshop leader, one ritualist, who would make the arrangements for this first initiation, the Class of 92. And then there would be a few people coming of age, maybe children or people we know or something, who would enthusiastically volunteer to be the first, you know, entrance of the Class of 92. And then if successful in design, this attractor would then grow. But we have to begin. Probably it would be here at Esselund, because we’re here dreaming this up for some reason.
Sheldrake
Yes. I think it would be called the, what would it be called? The personal, the growth? No, no, something like, there’d have to be some kind of certificate you get from this five workshop course and beginning and end things through places like Esselund. Initiative education. Initiative education or initiative, initiative, initiative, initiative. You’ve been initiative, initiative, and an I.I. for short. And this, when you’re applying for a job with the New York Times or the bank or something like that, you have your degrees and you time also initiative, initiative. And they get to know that people have done this kind of thing, if indeed it did do them any good, were much cooler, much better, much more together, much more aware of group dynamics, you know, sort of like more elite. And so this would then become something that would be highly attractive to a lot of employers. It would be attractive to others of more conventional kind, but the kind of people who’ve been through this course wouldn’t want those jobs anyway.
McKenna
Where do you pass away from? And all the course of people in past, their place like Esselund, would feel a subtle pressure to convert their highland practices to recognize and to send their children to hire these kinds of people into their organization.
Sheldrake
And that would be the feeling of a kind of, a real kind of group or, because there’s this initiatory quality, a feeling far, actually more effective than the usual bonds from college and alumnus, graduation festivals. I mean, it would be much more true.
Abraham
Some colleges could be persuaded to offer transfer credit for a set of five workshops in this program. Yes. So they would, five workshops would count as one course. It adds up about right. And it’d be like an extension course, or transfer of credit from a course taking another university.
Sheldrake
That’s right. And that would mean students from the more attractive, from the more liberal minded, experimental liberal arts, that kind of thing could give students these vouchers
Abraham
and make them feel that they have the freedom of the course of five weeks of the summer. Yes. They could take workshops in five different workshops. They could make them in Hong Kong, Esselund, and get a college credit for it. Yes.
McKenna
I think you should be the main minister of education.
Abraham
Of the New World, aren’t you? The NWO. Yes. Well, it’s a devious way of achieving the recycleization of the world. Assuming, always, of course, that corruption doesn’t somehow annihilate the system as soon as it started. But I think century in a place like this, which has, and there are track record, a good habit, as it were, would be a good chance for success.
Sheldrake
I think so. I think a lot of, I mean, if I had the chance of spending a weekend hanging around with my 10-year teenage friends at home, or coming to Esselund and doing something as a threshold, I mean, yeah, they knew what the intention was.
Abraham
Meeting some of the new majors from far away. Right.
McKenna
No, I went to a summer camp. I was... At both sexes. Yeah. From age 9 to 13 or something, I went to a summer camp for musical prodigies. And no one went there and let them interested in music. And anybody who was really interested in music went to this particular camp. It was a great escape from a small town in Vermont, because I went there, there were a lot of kids from Philadelphia and New York and Miami and so on. And they were very exciting. And mostly we played music together. But such things specialize camps to learn ballet, you know, sports and so on. They exist and some of them have track record. They have terrific reputation compared to other ones for the quality of the faculty, also the quality of the students. And such a summer, particularly a summer youth program that Esselund would give it a huge additional scope. And training workshop leaders would give them a bigger choice of workshop leaders in the future. So then they would be creating expansion of their own system. As they don’t do now, they have to hand on serendipity upon new workshop leaders.
Sheldrake
And as the popularity of workshop type education grew in schools, as people in 16, 17, 18 got into an age group where some of their friends had been on workshops and had come back, obviously changed in some way in talking about this thing, a kind of secret to which they were not yet pretty. The only way they could have this expensive scale movie by a child from B-Party was through. They really want to do it. And a huge new market would open up in the sort of high school age.
McKenna
Yeah, we have to get this taste of Steve and maybe Steve. With our bill.
Sheldrake
Well, they may not want to expand Esselund, but if Esselund wanted to expand as a business and take on a whole national dimension.
McKenna
Well, there may be a change in all these strategies. And because it’s a revolutionary educational concept, it’s not simply a strategy for expanding revenue. It’s actually a seen-and-all kind of thing. If it took hold and seems very sound, because the old method is breaking down. There is either some substitute off in the future, or we’re just looking at a generation in the end, largely in American education.
Sheldrake
Well, this does seem immediately feasible. This really could swing into action next year.
Abraham
And it could attract capital, you know, endowments from people who see the value of extending our successful adult educational system downward. And nobody seems to have thought of this. There are many summer camps along these lines. The traditional summer camps are excellent for everything for tenants, for organists and so on, but not for the new world order.
Sheldrake
But that most of what goes on here could be extended done. It’s only shamanic rattling, chants before sessions and groups, vision class, Germanic type, all this stuff is instantly adaptable. And it’s only chanting till that’s it.
Abraham
So the Orhei Foundation has apparently had a similar fantasy as they declared two or three years ago that they were going into general education.
Sheldrake
I think that this is something that they’re doing. And I heard about this when we were at Highhawk, but I’ve never seen it in action. Somebody talked about it. John Bloomfield talked about it. About that? No, about Ohai training between teachers. Oh. And then the teachers can bring some of the groups to the land and they do vision class, they do pre-summing, they do medicine, wheel circles, sweat lodges, all this kind of thing. And I suppose they’re private schools that are participating, but the kids love it. It’s an incredibly successful program.
Abraham
Probably they had to go to Berlin to be able to do this. But now they can do this right here in the Native American heartland.
Sheldrake
So I think that there’s plenty of scope for starting straight away.
Abraham
Yes, and for competing in systems and different versions, varieties, different flavors of the idea could be instituted in different locations. Yes. Because there’s an infinite market, essentially.
Sheldrake
As soon as people under 25 are technically insulated from this. When I give talks in Germany and England here in America, in the kind of places I’m usually invited to give them all consciousness, the age range is from 35 to 15, for example. When I’m invited to give talks in universities, which in many ways I prefer, not because I like the structure, you know, the kind of hierarchical structure that the professor of lecture theater does, and all that kind of thing. But the face is full of bright, eager eyes, 18, 17, 19, 20. Yes. It’s a totally different experience. And when I gave my lecture at the University of Bern, on my German Swiss tour, being the university one I did on the trip, it was much the best. There were 250 people in the Botany Institute. I was introduced by the man who invited me. He’s a visionary, holistic botanist who really likes the idea of morphic resonance and understanding the evolution of plant form. A quite enthusiastic. Quite enthusiastic. But all the professors from different faculties, students and so on, the whole thing in English, no translation. And the episode was absolutely electric. I mean, these kids never heard these kids, this kind of people. I mean, they were totally new. They’re normally insulated completely from ideas we take for granted. And they were extremely interested. Very excited. Everyone was excited, positive, enthusiastic. It was a really wonderful event.
Abraham
Well, my courses in history of mathematics and Santa Cruz have a very enthusiastic audience. And my feeling is that this is sort of the radical fringe of the student population in Santa Cruz. So there’s 10,000 students. I get 56 or 70 of them once a year. But these people are very responsive. And they love the Hermetic arts, magic, astrology, alchemy and so on. They’re seriously excited. They’re really turned on by it. And they do great research and study. And they know a lot already because they’ve been studying in the closet. This is their first opportunity to come out and see that other people are also interested in this and connect up and have fun and be able to do it together.
Sheldrake
So what we do is introduce this parallel system which operates alongside the existing system. But it becomes so powerful and attractive that it impacts on schools. There’s 6, 70 million year olds go to the Esalen and up at summer programs. And they go back and tell their friends, you know, school is nothing like this. And it’s really fun.
Abraham
I think this is really our best and most brilliant idea. Everyone wants to do it. I think it’s a good idea.
Sheldrake
And it will spread enormously fast. I think if it becomes something that slightly older people do,
Abraham
that’s the possibility of the CIA instituting some negative publicity action on us such as older teacher, younger student taking drugs, commuting with tree or some kind of tree such as... They’re very paranoid about this kind of negative publicity. They’re ruining it. And then for this reason they may not want anybody aged 16 or less hanging around because of the danger of scandal.
McKenna
Make it 18 to 23. For a start.
Sheldrake
I think make it 18 to 23 for start. Then the parallel for the sort of 11 to 13, this kind of puberty initiation, the parallel which is often associated with transferring to a different grade of school, being in a middle school or whatever. That whole thing is ceremonialized, or at least puberty, right through vision camps. But the people who best handle that are the people who run kids summer camps. Many of which do have another dimension to get back to nature. Yes, and they have their watchdog mechanisms in place.
Abraham
And they have campfires and so on. Better to... People from that world come to a workshop at Esslin where there’s an exploration of new, revisioning education and the two are discussed together and they go back and work out models that work there. Meanwhile, this new one works out here. We can handle that the people at Esslin can handle in general as age group.
Abraham
I think that’s 18 to 23. Yes. We’ll start by the revision of higher education as they call it, 18 to 23. That’s the university age bracket.
Sheldrake
And that’s what creates such a powerful competing attractor. Because the more people say that it’s more fun than that system. The more the possibility of doing it through or within the traditional system by duchers or going out and getting credits. The more and more people want to do it. Yes. And I think that it would then, the traditional systems parts become more and more apparent because more and more people within it would have seen, had another take on what education could be like. Yes. And I think that morale would rapidly crumble and would be placed with it. Since they’d already got it by reform, they could introduce more of that kind of thing.
Abraham
Teachers would be rushing to take courses in the new methods. Yes, through the new methods. So that they could compete successfully with their neighbouring teachers for students. Who also have an empty home room.
McKenna
That’s right. No, this is free market economics working in yet another area.
Sheldrake
Because right now education is one of the areas that’s been insulated from free market economics by being a state monopoly run by a bureaucratic institution and operated by an old-style hierarchical priesthood with higher universities at the top and higher degrees at the top. And all teachers in regular schools in awe of all these people have higher degrees. They’re lower officials, they’re like deacons. There are bishops out there, archbishops, cardinals, and so on. So it would dismantle, it’s one of the last bastions of the old hierarchical order.