July 6, 2022
A few years ago, I watched the documentary Babies by Thomas Balmes. It follows the first year of the lives of four babies from Mongolia, Japan, California and Namibia. The film does not contain any narration, it just lets the images speak for themselves, presenting the huge contrast that exists between these four cultures. It [...]July 6, 2022
What is the history of the Prehistoric peoples of Britain, how far can we go back, and who were the people of these ancient Isles? Britain’s history of human occupation goes as far back as the Palaeolithic age, which means ‘Old Stone Age’. Archaeologists have uncovered remains of our early human ancestors dating to 40,000 [...]July 4, 2022
In 1976, at the age of 79, after a lifetime of service in the British army where he held high commands and fraternized with presidents and kings, Lieutenant General John Bagot Glubb, a.k.a Glubb Pasha, wrote a short but penetrating essay about the life cycle of superpowers called “The Fate of Empires”. In this small [...]June 6, 2022
There is a plague that is wreaking havoc in our cities these days, causing distress, pain, and fear. I’m not talking about COVID, but about the pestilence of crime. In the United States it has been a political issue for big city mayors for many decades, much thought and money has been thrown at the [...]May 25, 2022
Integral education is a popular term covering educational systems that focus not only on cognitive skills, but also on physical, vital, spiritual and psychological abilities. The idea of integral education is to provide a complex structure that can help to develop all aspects and all levels of the human being. Students who learn in this [...]April 30, 2022
Education is, has been and always will be of the utmost importance. According to Nelson Mandela it is “the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” And according to Plato, the “direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.” Although the concept of education is universal [...]April 30, 2022
The history of education has also been described as the the history of civilisation. Education has a role in perpetuating and passing on knowledge and values to the next generation. Therefore, it has a culturally specific connection -“enculturation” as defined by the cultural historian C. Dawson. The education systems of the world are the product of centuries [...]March 28, 2022
“Sometimes there’s only a hint, a possibility. What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason.” – Mary Oliver, Such Silence If you have visited Stonehenge on the Salisbury plains of England, perhaps you sensed a powerful feeling of mystery, of something hard to define. To the eye they are a series of immense standing [...]February 24, 2022
The Movie The Matrix, released in 1999, and its two sequels (Reloaded and Revolutions), released in 2003, have together been an international phenomena. The first movie in particular, was known as a modern version of Plato’s Myth of the Cave, and the two subsequent parts are of the same universe – the real world and the [...]February 8, 2022
The concept of cultural appropriation originated in academic circles in the 1980s. In the last decade, it had gained popularity, especially in the US, aiming to give autonomy to minority populations and to prevent the use of cultural elements to denigrate these populations and reinforce prejudice. Nevertheless, like many other things in the political correctness [...]