Educating to love

By Obrillant Damus
Dec. 20, 2020 at 10:00am EST

Nothing is more hopeless than not finding a new reason to be reborn in this world. Nothing is more hopeless than not finding a new reason to be reborn in a country that was the center of the world. Nothing is more hopeless than not finding a new reason to conjugate the verb hope in the present tense. Nothing is more hopeless than the loss of individual and collective hopes in our country. One of the goals of educating to love (love of self and love of others) is to fight against harshness on ourselves, which can make us indifferent to the suffering of our neighbors. One of the goals of educating to love is to fight against negative feelings (feelings of hatred and jealousy) and dangerous illusions (for instance, the illusion of invulnerability or omnipotence of “anthropolyticians “).

When educating to love and peace achieves its goals and purposes in our societies, then we can boast of our belonging to the human species. Humanity is an ideal. We are human beings in the making. Educating to love is available to everyone because we have all been loved. However, there is a galaxy of factors that can help or hinder its development. It can be postulated that educating to love begins in intraplacental life: human fetuses are very sensitive to environmental stimuli. The future of this education is linked to a double ecological and genetic determinism. Educating to love must be one of the constituent disciplines of education. Its aims are tolerance, peace, solidarity, forgiveness, mutual aid, the precautionary principle, the principle of non-violence, the sense of responsibility, the abolition of war, the fight against the injustices of all kinds, the struggle for human rights, disarmament, respect for others (their beliefs, their faith, their cosmovision, their culture…) etc. It must be omnipresent: it must be practiced and taught by families, communities, churches, faith-based organizations, the mass media, print media, etc. Because of the potential for human harm (homo violens), the success of educating to love within the family, community and society will always be relative. The man “in love” can display violent and self-violent behavior because he is not absolutely possessed by love. If we recognize our animality, we will better control our destructive and self-destructive impulses.