Description
Healing of the Divided Brain in a Divided World: Two Pandemics to Integrate
June Gorman (Co-founder of the Transformative Education Forum (TEF-Global), Board Project Director of Outreach for the International Model United Nations Association [IMUNA])
In 2020, the world was hit with two deadly pandemics. The Coronavirus COVID-19 was the biological, scientific one—highly transmissible and extremely dangerous especially to immune-compromised groups particularly including the poor, the worldwide elderly and those with prior health conditions. The other, spreading across the world prior to 2020 but in new places never before considered rationally so vulnerable, was sociological, psychological and most of all, educational.
In a complex, interdependent world we were suddenly exposed to an even more highly transmissible and ultimately ever more dangerous to informed democracy, neoliberal ‘thinking’ disease. One that spread and thrived on misinformation and exposed underlying weak educational immune systems even in, especially in, the ‘wealthiest’ of democratic nations.
Despite top tier educational systems and high historical rates of population attendance in those systems, the US being the clearest example, people still seemed unable to vaccinate against growing provable lies, misstatements of facts and even completely alternative world-views built on emotional diseases of inequity, misogyny, racism and corrupting abuses of power.
The result even in this ‘advanced democracy’ was dangerously divided realities manipulated to increase lower brain-stem confusion and stoke fear, rage and hate of the ‘other’. The social/psychological and emotional diseases that education systems not only refuse to address but indeed often exacerbate have become the far greater danger to the social responsibility that is necessary in a world struggling together for true equity, fairness and peace for all.
That pedagogy is only available by developing understanding across both hemispheres of the human brain. It calls for a transformative, democratic education emotionally value-integrated with, rather than isolated from, the scientific and logical solutions that then can inform and address both types of the dangerous environmental, scientific and societal pandemics currently spreading worldwide.
