Layer 404 . . . Taoism, Yin Yang, In Our Time, Young People, Spiritual Intelligence, and Discovering The Way

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Young People

You have to feel sorry for young people today. How are they supposed to make sense of a world so complex, so raucous, so treacherous?

There are something like 500 TV channels in the UK alone. Millions of books, hundreds of magazines, and a billion websites. How do they make sense of any of that? Where to start?

How do they figure out who they are, what they should do, what's worth aiming for? Whose voices are worth listening to? Where is there a reliable compass, and a decent map?

Is it worth going anywhere at all?

Taoism

In Our Time   -   Radio 4

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wlgbg

From the IOT website -

An ancient Chinese tradition of philosophy and religious belief, Daoism first appeared more than two thousand years ago. For centuries it was the most popular religion in China; in the West its religious aspects are not as well known as its practices, which include meditation and Feng Shui, and for its most celebrated text, the Daodejing. (Tao Te Ching)

 http://www.thebigview.com/download/tao-te-ching-illustrated.pdf

http://www.beatrice.com/TAO.pdf

The central aim in Daoism is to follow the 'Dao', a word which roughly translates as 'The Way'. Daoists believe in following life in its natural flow, what they refer to as an 'effortless action'. This transcendence can be linked to Buddhism, the Indian religion that came to China in the 2nd century BC and influenced Daoism - an exchange which went both ways. Daoism is closely related to, but has also at times conflicted with, the religion of the Chinese Imperial court, Confucianism.

The spirit world is of great significance in Daoism, and its hierarchy and power often take precedence over events and people in real life. But how did this ancient and complex religion come to be so influential?

From the programme:

Lao Tzu is the great sage of Taoism, and the author of the key text - the Tao Te Ching

Yin-yang is a key concept.

Taoism is a complex philosophy – not a religion

The Tao includes several concepts in one word:

    * the source of creation
    * the ultimate
    * the inexpressible and indefinable
    * the unnameable
    * the natural universe as a whole
    * the way of nature as a whole

The Tao means The Way, The Path.
The Way of Heaven, The Way of Nature, The Way the Universe operates.
It's more than just a moral code.
The fundamental pattern and harmony of the universe.

Taoism is known as The Watercourse Way since water moves from the heavens to earth, and then flows naturally across landscapes until it becomes part of the great ocean, and prepares to rise again to the heavens as vapour. At least that's MY take on it.

Actionless action is seen as the ideal way of living.

This final point, about 'actionless action', seems to me to be the key and the best test as to whether  'experts', like the guests involved in this programme, really do see through to the essence of Taoism and the notion of 'actionless action'.  The people on this programme failed to convey adequately the idea that it's all about discovering the true essence of oneself and then living in accord with it - which the true self can do instinctively, which is the real meaning of actionless action. Instinctive intelligence allows us to do things without conscious thought and action. But it can take a lot of hard work to develop instinctive intelligence if our upbringing has filled our head with a lot of rubbish that needs to be identified, discarded, and replaced with ideas and ways of living that are more appropriate and more enlightened.

Another key point, I believe, is that we can't act spontaneously and instinctively if we're living lives that are shackled by inappropriate professions and occupations, inappropriate religious beliefs, inappropriate fears and anxieties about punishments by 'gods', inappropriate relationships, inappropriate expectations of ourselves, etc. Finding our true, individual Tao is therefore essential to discovering the path that's appropriate for us as individuals - no matter how deviant, bizarre, off the wall, etc, that path might seem to others.

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Previous blogs concerning Taoism, Zen and yin-yang philosophy:

Layer 138   http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/03/layer-138-class-unhealthy.html

Layer 139  http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2009/03/layer-139-wabi-sabi-yin-yang-and.html


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These extracts are from elsewhere on the BBC website:

Taoism at a glance

Taoism is an ancient tradition of philosophy and religious belief that is deeply rooted in Chinese customs and worldview.

Taoism is also referred to as Daoism, which is a more accurate way of representing in English the sound of the Chinese word.

Taoism is about the Tao. This is usually translated as the Way. But it's hard to say exactly what this means. The Tao is the ultimate creative principle of the universe. All things are unified and connected in the Tao.

* Taoism originated in China 2000 years ago

* It is a religion of unity and opposites; Yin and Yang. The principle of Yin Yang sees the world as filled with complementary forces - action and non-action, light and dark, hot and cold, and so on

* The Tao is not God and is not worshipped. Taoism includes many deities, that are worshipped in Taoist temples, they are part of the universe and depend, like everything, on the Tao

 * Taoism promotes:
          o achieving harmony or union with nature
          o the pursuit of spiritual immortality
          o being 'virtuous' (but not ostentatiously so)
          o self-development
    * Taoist practices include:
          o meditation
          o feng shui
          o fortune telling (I Ching)
          o reading and chanting of scriptures

Before the Communist revolution fifty years ago, Taoism was one of the strongest religions in China. After a campaign to destroy non-Communist religion, however, the numbers significantly reduced, and it has become difficult to assess the statistical popularity of Taoism in the world.

The 2001 census recorded 3,500 Taoists in England and Wales.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/taoism/ataglance/glance.shtml

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This is also from the BBC website:

There is something fundamentally honest and psychologically healthy in being oneself and striding forward with one's vision facing directly ahead, instead of trying at every turn to satisfy abstract standards of goodness established by a reigning orthodoxy. This is what te/de is all about.    -         Professor Victor Mair

The One

The One is the essence of Tao, the essential energy of life, the possession of which enables things and beings to be truly themselves and in accord with the Tao.

Tzu Jan

Tzu Jan is usually translated naturalness or spontaneity, but this is rather misleading.

One writer suggests using the phrase 'that which is naturally so', meaning the condition that something will be in if it is permitted to exist and develop naturally and without interference or conflict.

The Taoist ideal is to fulfil that which is naturally so, and the way to do this is Wu Wei.

Wu Wei

The method of following the Tao is called Wu Wei. This can be translated as uncontrived action or natural non-intervention.

Wu Wei is sometimes translated as non-action, but this wrongly implies that nothing at all gets done. The Tao Te Ching says:

    When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

    Tao Te Ching

Wu Wei means living by or going along with the true nature of the world - or at least without obstructing the Tao - letting things take their natural course.

So Taoists live lives of balance and harmony. They find their way through life in the same way that a river flowing through the countryside finds its natural course.

    The world is a spiritual vessel, and one cannot act upon it;
    one who acts upon it destroys it.

    Tao Te Ching

This doesn't stop a person living a proactive life but their activities should fit into the natural pattern of the universe, and therefore need to be completely detached and disinterested and not ego-driven.

Perfect activity leaves no track behind it; perfect speech is like a jade worker whose tool leaves no mark.

    Tao Te Ching

And certainly pure Taoism requires individuals to live on the basis that the world is working properly, and that they therefore should not interfere with it.

Yin Yang

Yin Yang is the principle of natural and complementary forces, patterns and things that depend on one another and do not make sense on their own.

These may be masculine and feminine, but they could be darkness and light (which is closer to the original meaning of the dark and light sides of a hill), wet and dry or action and inaction.

These are opposites that fit together seamlessly and work in perfect harmony. You can see this by looking at the yin yang symbol.

The yin yang concept is not the same as Western dualism, because the two opposites are not at war, but in harmony.

This can be seen very clearly in the symbol: the dark area contains a spot of light, and vice versa, and the two opposites are intertwined and bound together within the unifying circle.

Yin and yang are not static, the balance ebbs and flows between them - this is implied in the flowing curve where they meet.

Ch'i

Ch'i or qi is the cosmic vital energy that enables beings to survive and links them to the universe as a whole.

Qi is the basic material of all that exists. It animates life and furnishes functional power of events. Qi is the root of the human body; its quality and movement determine human health. Qi can be discussed in terms of quantity, since having more means stronger metabolic function. This, however, does not mean that health is a byproduct of storing large quantities of qi. Rather, there is a normal or healthy amount of qi in every person, and health manifests in its balance and harmony, its moderation and smoothness of flow. This flow is envisioned in the texts as a complex system of waterways with the "Ocean of Qi" in the abdomen; rivers of qi flowing through the upper torso, arms, and legs; springs of qi reaching to the wrists and ankles; and wells of qi found in the fingers and toes. Even a small spot in this complex system can thus influence the whole, so that overall balance and smoothness are the general goal.

Human life is the accumulation of qi; death is its dispersal. After receiving a core potential of primordial qi at birth, people throughout life need to sustain it. They do so by drawing postnatal qi into the body from air and food, as well as from other people through sexual, emotional, and social interaction. But they also lose qi through breathing bad air, overburdening their bodies with food and drink, and getting involved in negative emotions and excessive sexual or social interactions.

  -  Livia Kohn, Health and Long Life: The Chinese Way

Immortality

Immortality doesn't mean living for ever in the present physical body.

The idea is that as the Taoist draws closer and closer to nature throughout their life, death is just the final step in achieving complete unity with the universe.

Spiritual immortality, the goal of Daoism, raises the practices to a yet higher level. To attain it, people have to transform all their qi into primordial qi and proceed to refine it to subtler levels. This finer qi will eventually turn into pure spirit, with which practitioners increasingly identify to become transcendent spirit-people. The path that leads there involves intensive meditation and trance training as well as more radical forms of diet and other longevity practices. Immortality implies the overcoming of the natural tendencies of the body and its transformation into a different kind of qi-constellation. The result is a bypassing of death, so that the end of the body has no impact on the continuation of the spirit-person. In addition, practitioners attain supersensory powers and eventually gain residence in wondrous otherworldly paradises.

   - Livia Kohn, Health and Long Life: The Chinese Way

Knowledge and relativity

Human knowledge is always partial and affected by the standpoint of the person claiming that knowledge. There can never be a single true knowledge, merely the aggregate of uncountable different viewpoints.

Because the universe is always changing, so knowledge is always changing.

The closest a human being can get to this is knowledge that is consistent with the Tao. But this is a trap because the Tao that can be known is not the Tao. True knowledge cannot be known - but perhaps it can be understood or lived.

So there. They don't teach you this stuff in school.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/taoism/beliefs/concepts.shtml

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Layer 138 The Class, Unhealthy Preoccupations, Outbreaks of Common Sense, and Wabi Sabi.

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Entre Les Murs

The Class (Between The Walls) takes place within the claustrophobic confines of a Parisian multi-cultural secondary school. It examines the dynamics within a very mixed ability class of 14 - 15 year olds, and their French language teacher, Francois, played by the author of the piece, based on his own experiences as a teacher. It also shows the dynamics within the staff of the school, including the school’s director.

It’s incredibly well written, acted, directed and edited, and won the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Apparently the actors are all real teachers and pupils, not actors and drama students.

It’s a compelling account of what it’s really like to work with such adolescents, with their attitudes, issues and challenges. It’s a pretty overwhelming task - one that most of us are ill-equipped to take on.

The kids, for example, can’t see the point of being forced to learn the refined and grammatically correct versions, the ‘standard’ forms, of the French language, since they themselves don’t need them, use them, or even aspire to using them.

The kids and their families have backgrounds that include Algeria, Morocco, Mali, Ivory Coast, the Caribbean, China, Vietnam, and so on. The tensions between the groups are brought out through their support for the football teams of their ‘home’ countries, and indeed France.

Questions of identity, loyalty, self-image, culture clash and conflict are seriously explored.

The film raises serious questions about the purposes and methods of education. They’re essentially decent kids, but tough, hard-bitten and streetwise, and they resent a world that pays scant respect to them, or to their culture and community.

The teachers are portrayed as decent and sometimes heroic figures, though also with their limits - their weaknesses and biases.

There are also interesting explorations of the sanctions available to schools and teachers, and how they are applied. The sense of hopelessness and helplessness of some of the kids, and their parents, is palpable.

You can get a taster of the film through the trailers on the film’s website:

http://www.theclassmovie.co.uk/

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A Buddhist Thought for Today - on Radio 4 today.

This is maybe worth repeating - from my recollection and my notes, with apologies to the Buddhist gentleman who offered this thought - for forgetting his name:

Mr Brown now says the era of laissez-faire capitalism is at an end. Inequality has now been shown to be a major factor in human happiness and the breakdown of social cohesion.

Social policy is very important for wellbeing, and social policies that reduce equality between individuals have been shown to be necessary and important for everyone’s wellbeing - not just the less well-off.

Gaining self worth from comparisons with others seems to be endemic in humans.
It’s hard to be immune from such things. Human competitiveness and drive for ‘status’, wanting to keep up with the successes of others, seems to be pervasive.

But is this in any case a sound basis for our sense of self worth? We should consciously avoid comparing ourselves with others.

We need to focus on our inner dimension of heart & mind - not look externally for feelings of self-worth.

We need to discover our inner dimensions of honest communication, love of nature, love of music, and so on. This is where real happiness and self-worth are to be found.

Through a process of calm reflection and meditation we can cultivate patience, generosity and compassion.

We need to learn to love ourselves first. If we find ourselves unlovely, then we should reflect on how we can change in order to be more pleasing to ourselves.

We also need to respond to ourselves with greater kindness. We must cultivate an inner abundance that others can share.

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An Unhealthy Preoccupation?

This week there was a Scots woman on Radio 4’s Today going on about what she sees as an unhealthy preoccupation in our schools with children’s ‘feelings’. She’s against using the ‘SEAL’ programme’s materials, (social & emotional aspects of learning), some of which try to cultivate ‘emotional literacy’ and the ability to identify ‘feeling states’. She thinks children whose feelings are ‘hurt’ should be told to pull themselves together and ‘just get on with it’. Very Scots. Very Presbyterian.

The woman’s a complete idiot, of course. The SEAL materials can be very badly used, and used in ways that simply create boredom and frustration because they’re dealt with in an almost academic way.

But it’s absolutely crucial that teachers, teaching assistants, heads of year, pupil mentors and headteachers use every opportunity that presents itself to help children develop a better understanding of human conflict, its causes and effects, and remedies. For heaven’s sake - the negative things that take place in schools are learning experiences, if they’re properly handled.

There’s no better time to learn individually about feelings and about real social and emotional intelligence than when someone’s personally or tangentially involved in some sort of crisis or conflict. Of course we must also ensure that children consider as whole classes, in the context of a planned curriculum, things like human values, anger management, loving kindness and non violence. But we must also use real-life situations to the full in order to help children learn better, more deeply and more quickly.

Giving angry, sad, aggressive, vengeful, frightened and tearful children opportunities to calm down and calmly reflect on whatever’s happened, and a chance to think about what went wrong, and what should happen next, are vital if children are to develop high levels of social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, which should be a priority in all our schools. This should be so bleeding obvious it’s unbelievable that anyone should need to say these things.

The lady in question is unhappy that schools take on this work, which she sees as an attempt to “supplant the family”. What an idiot. How can she not see that it’s vital that schools supplement the learning that goes on in families, not supplant it? How can she not see that precious little of such learning takes place within many families, even the materially well-off ones, and that the learning must therefore take place in schools, from Nursery onward, or else it won’t take place at all?

If skilled Nursery and Early Years practitioners fail to involve themselves is such learning then many children wouldn’t even be able to access the rest of the curriculum - the academic and intellectual core. Classrooms would be simply chaotic and totally unruly, unless she’s just proposing to expel children who don’t immediately conform to expectations, and to use that draconian form of punishment to frighten the rest into ‘good behaviour’. In which case you have a system of externally imposed classroom discipline which breaks down elsewhere, on the streets and in real life, because no-one has learnt the need for, and the skills of, self-discipline.

It’s also a simple fact that many families teach their children to be aggressive, to be selfish and to be bullies in order to get what they want in life. In which case schools do indeed need to supplant the learning that happens in those families. And in those cases it’s not helpful for the long run to simply suppress bullying and aggression. Children do indeed need to learn why these things damage themselves as well as others, and to change what’s in their hearts, their souls and their minds.

Learning to be patient, generous and compassionate, learning to cultivate an abundance that can be shared with others, is a long, long journey, especially for those who are already spiritually lame, crippled and blinded. As the Buddhist teacher would no doubt agree.

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Wabi Sabi

As I was saying the other day, there was an interesting documentary on BBC4 about the elusive concept of wabi sabi. The presenter, a certain faux naïf called Theroux (Louis’s Brother?) was pretty irritating - but no matter. Better to consider wabi sabi in this imperfect way than not at all. After all, according to him, wabi sabi is the beauty of imperfect things.

As far as I can see, wabi sabi is an attitude or state of mind that’s engendered by an awareness of the impermanence of things, not their ‘imperfection’. From this comes an attitude, a Zen attitude, which can be characterised as ‘non-attachment’. Through living with this attitude we can more readily accept that everything is impermanent, and everything changes. Impermanence is neither good nor bad. It just IS.

My feeling is that the origins of this philosophy can be traced back to Taoism and the ancient Taoist book, the I Ching - the Book of Changes. The way of the Tao is described in the other classic text - the Tao Te Ching. Zen grew from Buddhism, which was assimilated into Taoist China from its origins in India. Discovery of The Way and one’s individual Tao, and following one’s proper course through life is essential to becoming the best we can be.

Attention to nature, and to the cultivation of gardens, shows us that everything has its season. A time to live and a time to die. A time to blossom and a time to bear fruit. A time for germination and a time to wither and disappear. Everything happens in cycles.

A life based on Zen and wabi sabi seeks simplicity and authenticity. Manifestations of this ideal can be found in pottery, music and gardens. The best examples of such art can arouse in us feelings of serene melancholy and spiritual fulfilment, or satori.

Having just listened to an hour and a half of David Gilmour and Rick Wright and co on Sky Arts 1, Remember That Night, performing Pink Floyd classics such as High Hopes and Comfortably Numb, cranked up loud through the hi fi, I’m Zenned and blissed out, and I’m off to bed. It’s been an incredibly beautiful Spring day, sunny and warm from start to end, with blossom and daffodils everywhere. Life doesn’t get any better than this. Remember That Day.

http://nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_sabi

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi

You can watch the BBC programme on iPlayer at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00j8bkc/In_Search_of_Wabi_Sabi_with_Marcel_Theroux/

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An Outbreak of Common Sense

Robert Peston reports that the Financial Services Authority is now proposing we abandon the prevailing dogma that the market always knows best and that the market should be left to regulate itself. The FSA now wants bank lending to be limited to avoid taking on too much risk, and wants banks to hold more liquidity in case money markets shrink or dry up.

The words stable, bolted, door, closing, after and horse come to mind.

Also stating, obvious, the and bleeding.
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Layer 68 Zen, Tao, the Olympics, Warfare and the Zone.

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There was a superb documentary on TV recently about the planning and construction of the Great Wall of China. First there was the programme about two guys riding motorbikes right across Mongolia, and then this very informative look at how the Chinese determined to prevent the Mongols from attacking and plundering Beijing and the rest of China.

It’s interesting how chains of thought originate. Thinking about the Chinese approach to warfare sent me off on a quick skim in my copy of an ancient book, Sun Tzu’s Art of War. You can read what Wikipedia says about the book at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War , but I think I’ll try to add something to the entry since it fails to emphasise the book’s roots in Taoist thought and practice. It also fails to emphasise the book’s relevance to our overall attitude and approach to life in general, even though it mentions its applicability to business and sporting environments.

In general we in the West are ignorant of Taoist thought and practice, and its importance as philosophy and spiritual guidance. We also fail to recognise that Zen developed out of not only Chinese Buddhism but also ancient Chinese Taoist thinking and beliefs. In essence Zen and Tao are identical.

Wikipedia tells us that Sun Tzu “taught that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through a to-do list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a competitive environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.”

The essence of Zen and Taoist thought is that in order to prepare oneself for living well we need to train ourselves, through meditation and other practices, to focus our minds at all times in the present, so that we can respond “quickly and appropriately” (i.e. spontaneously) to whatever “unexpected situations” we may find ourselves in. By all means allow yourself to dream and your mind to wander, to imagine and to create, and reflect on past experiences, but the time to do that is during ‘meditation’ or during conversation with friends. But don’t engage with the world unless your mind is focused and very much in the present.

In order to combat those who would exploit us or do us harm, and in order to protect and nurture those for whom we are responsible, as would a Samurai, for example, we need to be fully aware and living in the moment, with our minds, our instincts and our intuitive faculties clear, calm and ready to respond with speed and precision. This is what people taking part in sports have come to call being “in the zone”.

It’s also what the “positive psychology” movement calls “Flow”.
[ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) ]
“Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields. Colloquial terms for this or similar mental states include: to be on the ball, in the zone, or in the groove.”

Wikipedia continues with the following:

Components of flow

Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following as accompanying an experience of flow:

* Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).
* Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
* A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
* Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.
* Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
* Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
* A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
* The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
* People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.”

Wikipedia then adds:

"Religion and spirituality

Csíkszentmihályi may have been the first to describe this concept in Western psychology, but as he himself readily acknowledges he was most certainly not the first to quantify the concept of Flow or develop applications based on the concept.

For millennia, practitioners of Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Taoism have honed the discipline of overcoming the duality of self and object as a central feature of spiritual development. Eastern spiritual practitioners have developed a very thorough and holistic set of theories around overcoming duality of self and object, tested and refined through spiritual practice instead of the systematic rigor and controls of modern science.
The phrase "being at one with things" is a metaphor of Csíkszentmihályi's Flow concept. Practitioners of the varied schools of Zen Buddhism apply concepts similar to Flow to aid their mastery of art forms, including, in the case of Japanese Zen Buddhism, Aikido, Kendo and Ikebana."

In any kind of sport being “in the zone” is what ultimately matters, assuming one has already developed to a high level the skills one needs to employ in the endeavor. In cricket a batsman can’t hope to prosper unless he’s “in the zone”, and everything “flows”. A bowler can only be successful if he’s “in the zone”.

And it’s the same in life. It’s important to be driven by passion, but it’s crucial to be able to direct one’s passion and one’s instincts from a basis of quiet, calm and confident awareness of whatever situation we may find ourselves in. Gung-ho aggression will probably lead you directly into your own little Valley of Death, especially against a smart opponent, whilst the heat of the moment is not the time to be asking ourselves “what should I do here?”, either.

Instincts will basically cause us to react with “fight, flight or freeze”, and are pretty useless when what’s required is consistent application of effort and engagement in a continuing process.

Ultimately one may decide to retreat, for instance, but it’s not the same as fleeing in panic. The 33rd hexagram in the I Ching is called Retreat, and the Wilhelm translation has this to say about it:

“Retreat is not to be confused with flight. Flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength. We must be careful not to miss the right moment while we are in full possession of power and position. Then we shall be able to interpret the signs of the time before it is too late and to prepare for provisional retreat instead of being drawn into a desperate life-and-death struggle. Thus we do not simple abandon the field to the opponent; we make it difficult for him to advance by showing perseverance in single acts of resistance. In this way we prepare, while retreating, for the counter-movement. Understanding the laws of a constructive retreat of this sort is not easy. The meaning that lies hidden in such a time is important.”

http://www2.unipr.it/~deyoung/I_Ching_Wilhelm_Translation.html

It’s not difficult to see how Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, the Art of War, Zen and ‘positive psychology’ are connected. Neither should it be difficult to see how all of these apply to everyday life. But do we offer these insights to our pupils in schools and colleges? And if so, where’s it happening? Not in the National Curriculum, that’s for sure.
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