-- *Mar*Here’s a revised and polished version first—tightened for clarity, flow, and coherence, while preserving your voice, imagery, and philosophical core. After that, I’ll add my own reflections. ------------------------------ *Real Education vs. Economic Education*
*Edited and Improved Version* Real education is experience. It arises through participation in nature, as nature. Lessons are not merely taught; they are felt. One partners with nature as a limb of nature itself. The freer, healthier, and more luxuriant the flora and fauna, the richer and deeper the educational experience. Every organism acts, reacts, and interacts with every other organism—including the human—filling the troposphere with lesson-laden air. Our five senses, our *Panchangams*, coordinate with nature, joining its flow and becoming inseparable parts of the great macro-process of education. A limb requires every other limb to be healthy, active, and responsive. Likewise, as a limb of nature, one requires free and healthy nature in order to experience true education. When both the limb and the larger body are healthy, perception and understanding become automatic, reflexive, and effortless. Suppose your eyes could see everything—atoms, particles, molecules, their interactions and participations—truly witnessing the microcosm in motion. You would then enter the foundational arena of quantum physics, ultimately encountering the emergence of diverse forms of consciousness. At that point, it becomes difficult to locate yourself as a fixed “you,” as overlapping experiences dissolve rigid identity. You encounter yourself not as an entity, but as a process. Now imagine a university establishing a “Free Nature Park,” untouched and untampered with, granting total freedom to nature. Suppose a few students, overcoming urban fear of wildness and acknowledging nature’s fundamental right to freedom, enter this forest. The university, however, does not entirely release them; they remain bound to courses rooted in Cartesian thinking and economic orientation. Today, nearly every course in every university is designed for economic fitness—training students to be employable within business or industry. Yet every economic activity, in some way, harms nature. Despite carrying the long rope of economics-oriented curricula around their necks, these students find a different education evolving within them—an education arising directly from free nature. This natural education comes into direct conflict with the very courses for which they enrolled. Freedom for nature begins to integrate into their internal hormonal and neurological systems; education from nature enters their bloodstream. They experience a profound conflict between economics and ecology. The economics-oriented curriculum demands that they become Mr. Hyde, while nature patiently trains them to be Dr. Jekyll. They realize they must confront a majority composed of Hydes. The Jekylls possess one advantage: nature partners with them. They know how to exist as limbs of nature. The Hydes, severed from nature by economic obsession, are forced into what may be called Darwinian Socialism—relentless competition masked as progress. Within the students, the ecologist Dr. Jekyll battles the economic Mr. Hyde: two personalities occupying a single physical body. If the Jekylls prevail, nature survives. If the Hydes prevail, nature dies—and the Hydes perish along with it. In truth, the Hydes are already participating in a slow mass suicide through economics. — *Y. M. Sarma* ------------------------------ *My Reflections and Views* Your essay strikes at a deep and uncomfortable truth: modern education has largely abandoned wisdom in favor of utility. What you call “economic education” is not merely about earning livelihoods—it is a worldview that reduces life, land, and even human beings into resources. In contrast, “real education,” as you describe it, is not something that prepares us *for* life; it immerses us *in* life. I especially resonate with your idea that education from nature enters the bloodstream. Neuroscience increasingly confirms what indigenous traditions have long known: prolonged contact with healthy ecosystems rewires cognition, emotional regulation, and ethical sensitivity. Nature does not just teach *about* interdependence—it trains us to *feel* it. The Jekyll–Hyde metaphor is powerful because it avoids moral simplicity. You are not saying that people are inherently evil; rather, the same individual is torn between two operating systems. One is relational, ecological, and participatory. The other is extractive, competitive, and dissociative. Modern institutions systematically reward Hyde behavior while quietly pathologizing Jekyll sensibilities as “unproductive” or “idealistic.” Where I would gently extend your argument is this: economics itself is not the enemy—*disembodied* economics is. An economics re-rooted in ecology, limits, reciprocity, and regeneration could become an ally of real education rather than its executioner. The tragedy is that our current systems refuse to evolve fast enough to integrate this truth. Your essay is ultimately a warning—but also an invitation. It asks whether we wish to be technicians of a dying system or participants in a living planet. And it reminds us that the choice is not abstract. It is physiological, psychological, and existential—made daily, within the same body, by the same person. In that sense, your work is not just philosophical. It is diagnostic. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CACDCHCJ9rMUdggpnOjovZtXgEa%2BOJAZCtFHNx%3DAkyLonBbeVmQ%40mail.gmail.com.
