Categories
- Empowerment - Language - Religion Discourse Knowledge

Releasing the Powers of Junior Youth

National and Regional Training Institutes throughout the world offer a course called Ruhi Book 5, “Releasing the Powers of Junior Youth,” designed for the training of “Animators” who mentor youth between the ages of 11 and 14 years. Ruhi Book 5 builds the capacity of Animators to develop in junior youth the mental structures to weigh the world’s problems in the balance of advanced moral reasoning. It equips them with noble moral principles, together with the linguistic, mathematical, scientific, and social skills requisite for translating them in practice into their community, society, and institutions.

The resulting moral framework developed in the formative years equips junior youth to deconstruct, understand, analyze, and make constructive choices in life’s important decisions. Areas of transformation include: career choices, motivations for profession, reading comprehension and vocabulary,  habits of effective study, mental acuity and mathematical precision, economic theory informed by social justice, engagement in environmental causes and civic service, nutrition and health care practices, dangers of substance addiction, and the potential of positive power through peer groups.

The junior youth program has 4 components: 1) study, 2) service, 3) sports, and 4) arts. The study curriculum has 4 strands: 1) language and expression, 2) living in society, 3) math and science, and 4) spiritual education. Each strand currently contains 2-4 sequential workbooks of increasing difficulty levels. The text of the Animator training course, Ruhi Book 5, contains within it a delicate balance of  theory and practice, as all good training does, imparting knowledge culled from years of systematic experience that focuses the animator-youth relationship on challenging discussions stimulating  novel thoughts in response to theoretical problems in a socially responsible context.

One of the major advantages of the Ruhi system of distance education is its concomitant development of knowledge in tandem with practice, as research study after study have shown that implementing a trade or craft in practice is far more efficacious for the development of skills, knowledge, and overall mastery than mere abstract memorization, for both vocational and professional employment. Training, largely absent from secular institutions of higher learning, generally relies upon official certification and licensing as a prerequisite to engagement in the profession of choice. Efficiency, however, would recommend that knowledge be developed in tandem with practice, and certification be democratized to include an expanding base of population to be available to the labor market and of service to humanity.

Amid the practical study and concomitant Animating of junior youth, a challenging series of economic questions in the context of social justice dilemmas encourages the youth to develop solutions to modernity’s most complex political and economic issues, at the level of policy discourse and their own personal moral choices.

A valuable insight into how this complex style of posing questions elevates the math/science and language curriculum into an advanced discourse on social, political, and economic quandaries can be found in the following article. The author dissects the intersection between the Ruhi Book 5 training course and the culture of consumerism and egoism (together with its historical and economic roots), and the ways challenges are overcome in the field by nurturing the minds and creativity of the next generation to heal the corrupt and disordered world of the 21st century.

http://reflections-on-transformation.blogspot.com/2013/04/selfless-service.html?spref=fb

Junior Youth Group Outdoors

Categories
- Consultation - Education - Empowerment - Governance - Religion Development Discourse Justice Knowledge Power

Spiritual Re-Education and the Power of the Masses

In discourse, thought, reflection and action are intimately interdependent.  Action is coherent only when it is not merely rote but also consultative, that is, when it is not dichotomized from reflection. Reflection, which is essential to action, is implicit in the requirement of explaining to the masses their own action, just as it is implicit in the purpose we attribute to consciously activating the subsequent development of experience.

For us, however, the requirement is seen not in terms of explaining to, but rather dialoguing with the people about their actions.  In any event, no reality transforms itself, and the duty which we ascribe to responsible citizens of explaining to the masses their own action coincides with our affirmation of the need for the critical intervention of the people in reality through praxis.

The democratization of discourse, which is the spiritual re-education of people engaged in the fight for a just world order, has its roots here. And those who recognize, or begin to recognize, themselves as bearing the responsibility to contribute to this transformation must be among the developers of this new education. No world order which is truly just can remain distant from the masses by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the privileged. The masses must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.

The establishment of a just world order, animated by authentic, altruistic generosity, presents itself as a spiritual re-education of humankind. Values which begin with the egoistic interests of the privileged (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the masses the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies injustice. It is an instrument of injustice.

This is why, as we affirmed earlier, the betterment of mankind cannot be developed or practiced by a wealthy minority fixated on 3rd world development. It would be a contradiction in terms for the privileged few to not only defend but actually implement a spiritual revolution. But if the implementation of a new type of spiritual education requires political power and the masses have none, how then is it possible to carry out the re-education of the world without a spiritual revolution?

This is a question of the greatest importance, the reply to which is at least tentatively underway in the system of distance education propounded by the Ruhi Institute. One aspect of the reply is to be found in the distinction between governmental education, which can only be changed by political power, and educational processes, which should be carried out with the masses in the process of organizing them.

Bind ye the broken with the hands of justice, and crush the oppressor who flourisheth with the rod of My commandments.