Holistic Learning & Emotional Knowledge w/ Co-President of The Club of Rome PAUL SHRIVASTAVA

"I would love to have an educational system that allowed children to remain with that sense of wonder or retain that sense of wonder and the emotionality that makes them children. In our hurry to grow up and become rational—because rational gets rewarded by a rational economy—we have distorted many parts of being human. And not just distorted, we systematically keep on suppressing and distorting it. It might be that at some point, humans—at least some humans—will realize the power and the utility of being emotional and being more natural to who they are; being feral in some ways, and embracing wildlife and nature in more naturalistic ways than we currently do through our socialized ideas about what nature is and what we can do with it. Because the socialized ideas are the ones that are destroying nature. They are making nature into an asset. Then you put a price on it, and you forget that it’s also a tree. I feel that all this knowledge I’ve accumulated over 20 years in colleges and universities and working in those environments has diminished my own humanity. I think we are the final authors of our lives. If we look at ordinary things, we can make them extraordinary just by our sheer will and by experiencing them in a different way. Ultimately, it changes the big picture because I see people changing jobs, changing their livelihoods, and changing their communities in order to maintain the integrity of what they want to do in these small, ordinary things."