Over the past 250 years or so the ancient and wise focus of our educational systems, from kindergarten through the BA Degree, has been on what used to be called the Liberal Arts. It was the wise understanding, that only after at least this basic level of education, would a student know enough about the world to make a wise choice on what further specialized vocation or career she or he would like to pursue. Eventually, it became obvious to some that “a liberal education” IS a deep study of The Ageless Wisdom.

Let us realize that it is the “Wisdom” that is Ageless, that has no age, that “was before, is now, and forever will be”. Neither the books, no matter who wrote them, nor the art, no matter who produced it, that tries to reveal the Wisdom are Ageless. It is the Wisdom that is Ageless and every turn of the spiral of evolution will produce a new formulation of it.

Wisdom is what drives and constitutes the evolution of civilizations. It carries and reveals the benefits of expanding one’s awareness of the concepts, the principles, and the behaviors that fostered and grew our understanding of the co-creation of these Civilizations, and thus, that education became “mandatory” or compulsory for all children.

The first Compulsory Education Law in this developing nation (U.S.) was in Massachusetts, in 1627, when it was still a British Colony.

This program, pursued in practically every developing nation in the world, was largely responsible for the evolution of Humanity from a scattering of groups of humans in tribes, clans, bands, and gangs into the nations that we see today. These random groupings, like the animal groupings from which our bodies evolved, were ruled over by a dominant male who was called a King, or Emperor, or something for thousands of years. These random nations, which were more or less in constant war with one another, were considered to be the personal property (which included not only the land but the people) of whichever King happened to be the most recent conqueror.

Individual human beings were bought and sold, without a second thought, like any other property.

For the intellectuals, our history was all about the wars, the armies and navies, the trade, and who had rights to which hunk of dirt in this or that part of the world. What these endless wars were really about was the egos of the rulers. The personal prestige, the property, and wealth of the ruling class of any Nation was, and still is in many respects, the measure of who was a person of quality and who was a serf/slave. It is this condition from which we have evolved into a nation based on the principles of the Ageless Wisdom. This Ageless Wisdom was given renewed voice on July 4th, 1776, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Most of the “wars”, many of which were generated by “revolts” during these centuries, were wars of one set of rulers against another set of rulers. It could be a big or small war, but nothing much changed except, O.K. who’s the new boss-man. To whom do we now bow?

Although called revolutions, the American Revolution 1775–1783, and The French Revolution 1789-1799, were not revolts at all. They were not “against” anything. They were Evolutions rather than revolutions. They were for Liberation. They were huge evolutionary developments. They do not represent shifts in dense physical wealth or property. They were evidence of a major expansion of consciousness manifesting through the Human family. It is consciousness which is evolving.

After these events, there occurred an exceedingly rapid expansion, relatively speaking, of liberal arts education. This continuing expansion of consciousness raised the literacy level of humanity from around 15% in the 15th century to 90+% in 2010. https://ourworldindata.org/literacy. It was this acceleration of literacy that drove the expansion of consciousness, the growing ability of individual human beings to read and write, to see and understand what was going on. The realization of the illusion of Separation, of the falsity of the claims of the Ruling Classes, the Royalty and Exclusivity, generated the evolution that we see today. These huge expansions of awareness concerning what constitute the birthrights of a Human Being were a direct result of the education of the “property”–the peasants, and the “mob” or the “masses” as the people were called.

As any look at the history of our evolution will reveal, that after every advance in the Great Unfolding of consciousness which usually led to what is called the golden ages, there was a conscious, and deliberate, retrogressive effort to set it back or at least to stunt its momentum and to re-institute the Big Lie, and the controls of the many by the few. However, it does appear, to me anyway, that each effort of the retrogressive forces was less and less effective, and the spiral periods of consciousness expansion were more and more explosive.

As I mentioned, the American and French Evolutions were massive evolutionary advances which in a few decades overthrew Monarchic rule all over the planet, which was the way it was for many, many thousands of years, and established democracy. So, it is not unusual, after this enormous expansion and growth over the past 200 years, that the present presentation of the Ageless Wisdom, the so called Liberal Arts Curriculum, has been under a highly-focused attack by the retrogressive forces for the past 40 or 50 years.

There Are No Coincidences.

As we know, there are no coincidences. This focused effort was/is the result/effect of a very sophisticated and long range Plan for Devolution on the part of the retrogressive forces that have infested the planet from the beginning. They were able to rule the planet for centuries by keeping the people ignorant and illiterate and conned into believing the Great Lie, the Illusion of Separation and the falsity that the Kings, the Royals and the People of Quality were actually superior beings. The argument was, “If you were superior you would not be a serf/slave.”

A major objective in this newly launched assault is the elimination of the Liberal Arts Curriculum which was/is the vehicle for the expansion of consciousness, and its replacement with vocational training.

The Liberal Arts Curriculum

The Liberal Arts Curriculum teaches people how to be people. It hooks us up with our past and reveals the fact that we have a Path to our Future. It teaches us how to think. It helps us to realize that each one is a part of a larger whole. It reveals that striving to grow does not involve preventing others from growing, or competing against, but cooperating with others for the Common Good. It teaches people to see and understand the difference between Good and evil and to make decisions based on thinking and Reality rather than emotions and illusions. By eliminating or seriously shrinking the Liberal Arts Curriculum, these retrogressive forces, as they eternally have, hope to dumb down consciousness, to support and re-institute the Big Lie of Separation and exclusivity which underlies their power and very existence.

Vocational Training

The original purpose of the Vocational Guilds was to train apprentices and protect standards of the various artisans, specialists or vocations. These artisans participated in the circulation of the Life blood of the communities. They provided valuable and needed contributions to the Good of the communities, to support and be supported by the Life of the communities.

The purpose of current vocational training in the public schools is to train people for “jobs”, for employment. These persons work in the present day fields of industry, commerce, building trades, and other kinds of work. This kind of training was supported by the Retrogressors because they needed a skilled and trained work force to do the work in their modern-day plantations called factories.

As the slave owners in the retrogressive stronghold of the southern States in the U.S. had to feed, and shelter their plantation slaves, the “Captains of Industry”, the Owners of the Plantation/Factories of things had to “pay” the wages for their “workers”. These wages were recouped through various schemes including lending money with interest, that would encourage the “workers” to become consumers/purchasers of the very things they were making with their labor.

The present rapidly unfolding facts are revealing that there are almost no vocations in the “vocational” curriculum that deal with the dense physical plane including most of the functions of engineering, surgery, and the design, manufacturing, and delivering of almost anything, including robots, that, in the not that distant future, will be done with more, or at least as much, precision and speed as a human being, by robots. It is way past time for us to realize that robots are the property of the Retrogressors. Robots do not need vacations, double time, unions, health insurance, or a living wage. Robots are dead. The money that they generate goes into the coffers of their owners. None of it goes to the People.

It appears that we are literally training our children to be obsolete. They will be “jobless” and not have any “earned income”. This has some very serious implications for the relatively immediate future.

Obviously, there is a realization unfolding though consciousness, even now, that the concept of the private ownership of “property” the backbone of the Great Con, or illusion, if you prefer the arcane esoteric term, is utterly absurd. The notion that a mortal human being can own Nature, can own, simply by saying that it is his or hers, what has been here for literally billions of years before we were walking on two legs, let alone chewing gum, is simply ignorance. This realization will be one of the significant areas of consciousness expansion, and it will free Humanity from one of the most ancient chains that has held us as prisoners in the Great Illusion.

In light of these incoming and unavoidable events in the evolution of consciousness, the educational significance of the Science and Art curriculums is enormous in terms of Humanity’s role in the immediate and ongoing future of the Planet.

Science is the exploration of the unknown, of the formless dimensions of Infinity. Art is the movement of the discovered unknown into communicable form. Every Scientist is an Artist. Every Artist is a Scientist. And their efforts to share their IN-SIGHTS is what produced the works of Plato, Archimedes, Sophocles, Chaucer, Jane Austin, Bach, Rodin, T. S. Eliot, and the millions of known and unknown musicians, writers, poets, artists, sculptors and inventors. Evolution is the result of their Science, the inexhaustible explorations of the infinite dimensions of Creation and the deep passageways of the human heart. Thus, the geometry of Euclid, the equations and the writings of the great scientists and philosophers like Galileo, Newton, Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead, Einstein, are the fruits of their exhaustive explorations of Infinity. They are the Art forms of Science.

What all of this Art and Science has in common, what attracted me as a child and has held me ever since, was not the blackboards full of equations that delight mathematicians. That is a language I have not mastered in this incarnation, but I am sure that those equations are as revealing, beautiful, and inspiring as is say, John Donne’s,

“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

What held me and holds me is what is revealed through the Ageless Wisdom of Art and Science about the depths of being Human and our role in the Plan. It is this unstoppable striving of the Artists and Scientists forever among us to find out what’s going on and to reveal that Truth and Beauty. The Scientists/Artists are the revealers of our hearts and Souls. They present us with Equations, Metaphors, or Entryways into the mysteries of the energy of Cosmic Dignity, and of human Courage, of Love, and Triumph.

It is a simple scientific fact observable by anyone that there is no separation anywhere in nature. There is only One Planet, only One Humanity. Through all of history even, and in fact, often, at the cost of life in the face of seemingly insuperable odds, the Ageless Wisdom, through the Science and Art of Humanity has triumphed over the bleak pathetic nightmares of the Retrogressors. Inevitable Triumph is what radiates from the Ageless Wisdom of the millions and millions of revealers in both the tiny little acts of Courage and Kindness and the global moving acts of our many, many heroes of Truth and Beauty or the Consciousness of the Heart.

From the beginning, there has been an evolutionary Plan. There is no plan for devolution, only a pathetic and sad illusion. There is no Way in all of evolution that leads to the past. There is only the Future, without which there would be no past. The Ancient Wisdom, which is what we call the Liberal Arts, has, since the beginning, been Humanity’s Light on that Path. It is an essential. Why else would the Retrogressors bother to attack it?

Let the Ageless Wisdom live. It will ultimately be our salvation as Human Brings from the trap of our rapidly unfolding technology.

Lots of love

-tom