Property and education

In The Constitution and Human Values: The Unfinished Agenda, professor Vine Deloria Jr. raised an interesting proposition about property: “that the most valuable property is human personality because it constantly creates new uses for nature.” It naturally follows that “[s]ince the creation of property depends upon individual minds looking at nature in new and unsuspected ways, the proper and primary role of the social contract should be education, creating the conditions under which the maximum number of minds and personalities can be developed most completely.”

What peaked my interest is the striking resemblance between professor Deloria philosophical claim and Confucius’s life long struggle to promote civil education for a harmonious society over two thousand years ago. At the dawn of feudal China, before sovereignty became the divine right inherited through royal lineage, the seven kingdoms were held together by patronage to warlords who held property of the land. Confucius wanted to create a systematic and harmonious society by way of educating the masses and giving the poor a sense of ownership of their own destiny and accomplishments. He wondered through the kingdoms an expatriate, but that mattered little to him because the artificial identification of his citizenship was insignificant when compared to his desire to create the “conditions under which the maximum number of minds and personalities can be developed most completely.”

What is disheartening, however, is the fact that China has since lost the philosophical base of Confucius’s motivation and is now primarily focused on education as a mean to acquire property in a superficial sense – to simply be better off than thy neighbor and to be socially superior than others. That aside, I see the same depressing separation from the true ideals of education here in the States: much of it is a matter of deconstruction of the society and nature that surrounds us for the benefit of our proposed social and economical progress. In the midst of these educational pursuits, we forget the holistic nature of a truly harmonious civilization and we abandon the likes of continental philosophy and humanistic psychology in favor for a few more gadgets. The consequence of this separation is, as I understand it to be, a separation of the true meaning of property as a method of harmonizing society by our labors and our interactions with one another. But then again, I am only beginning to learn of this complex issue and what I understand at this moment is incomplete and at most false assumptions on incomplete knowledge.  

As a philosophy student in the 90s, I’ve always felt an exclusion from mainstream academia because of my affection for eastern philosophy, traditional Chinese medicine, and existentialism. I left that behind because I felt almost oppressed in some ways because of the underlying assumptions in the structures of analytical philosophy. As a law student in 2010, I still feel a similar kind of exclusion: from my mother land – China, from my adopted country – the US, from my studies, and from my daily interactions with others. Perhaps Professor Wilson is right, that someone like me will perhaps never truly fit in, or buy in, to the programs of the time...

Just needed to vent after reading The Constitution and Human Values: The Unfinished Agenda, that’s all... the best I can do is keep on trucking and keep on hoping.