Below are some excerpts from "Educating for Mission, Meaning, and Compassion" by Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., a chapter in The Heart of Learning. From pages 35-38:
Shadow is the wound that a culture inflicts on its people: a diminishing of innate wholeness through a collective judgment or disapproval. Every culture diminishes wholeness in its own way. All people born into a culture find approval for certain aspects of their own wholeness and suffer judgment for certain other aspects. It is only human to trade our wholeness for approval, and share in the collective wound. Some of us are more deeply wounded than others, but no one escapes.
Recovering compassion requires us to confront the shadow of our culture directly. While relatively few people carry a gun, we all [in the United States] carry with us the values of the frontier, such values as self-sufficiency, competence, independence, and mastery. These are core values of our culture. We are a culture that values mastery and control. But in the shadow of these values lies a profound sense of isolation from our human wholeness. As individuals and as a culture we have developed a contempt for anything in ourselves and in others that has needs, and is capable of suffering. In our isolation, we also tend to develop a suspicion of anything beyond ourselves, anything that falls outside of our control. So we become separated, both horizontally and vertically.
Of all the contemporary cultural institutions, education holds the greatest promise for healing the wounds of the cultural shadow. ...
Now, as educators, we cannot heal the shadow of our culture by educating people to succeed in society as it is. We must have the courage to educate people to heal this world into what it might become. ...
Healing the shadow of a culture may require the formation of a subculture of credible people who value that which has been devalued by the dominant culture. This subculture confers on its participants permission for a greater wholeness that heals them.
