You could say that I was shut down by the built-in biases of an accreditation infrastructure based wholly on the positivist idea that truth about ourselves can be verified only in what can be observed by those outside of us.

From my point of view, unconscious adherence to an expert-driven, empirical bias is the source of nearly all psychological, social, racial, political, economic, and ecological problems facing the world today.

Key to the progress of the nation, behaviorists believed, was the conversion of public education from a means for individual self-fulfillment to a system for channeling the energies of children toward societal goals. Rather than adapting the environment to the needs of individuals, behaviorist education would change human nature to better fit its e

Most of the institutions that you or I interact with have deeply internalized the belief that, to be legitimate, knowledge must be gathered empirically and verified by an expert. We have become collectively dependent on third-party, professional expertise, and in the process, our basic human capacities for self-reflection, creative intuition, and s

The dominant contemporary theory of thinking in the United States assumes that it is possible to build knowledge over time, along with the answers and certainty that it provides. From this point of view, everything about the world can be known, and our job is to acquire enough of this information to establish a working relationship with things as t

We develop the ability to be an evolutionary instrument in an evolving world when we dedicate our will to serve the potential of the larger wholes that seek to express themselves through us. This is what it means to be a living expression of life on the planet. It is an ancient spiritual insight that a person becomes truly themself, and therefore s

Over time, when people are not allowed to make meaningful choices or are given meaningless choices to make, their ability to choose well atrophies, along with their ability to think for themselves and to discern what is best to do in a situation. They may even lose the ability to distinguish for themselves what is true or false.

Behaviorism presents a double impediment to this development. It substitutes conditioning for genuine self-management, and it uses an array of rewards and punishments to elicit the desired behavior, most of which have as their subtext the implied threat of nonbelonging. The need to belong to coherent social groups is a core driver of human behavior

My premise about change is that building people’s independent thinking capacity is, in and of itself, a social responsibility, one that will have more far-reaching and enduring consequences than any targeted effort to change material conditions.