What Is the Most Important Goal of Education?

Michael Laitman
3 min read3 days ago

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The most important goal of education is to raise people to positively connect and complement each other, finding genuine happiness through positive relations.

Toward such a goal, we should eliminate scores and ranks because they have a destructive effect. They support placing people on levels of pride, normalizing the idea that taking advantage of others for the sake of individual success is okay, and even respectable in many cases.

As we head into a future of tightening interdependence, we need to realize that the most essential expertise we can acquire is positive connection and mutual complementarity.

We likewise need to redefine success in the process. Instead of its current egoistic definition of one person or group outcompeting or outshining others, success should rather depend on how we create positive human relations. People actually want this. It is not that we destroy the ego by eliminating success over others. On the contrary, success in building positive human relations requires ongoing learning about how to use, control and navigate the ego toward much broader, inclusive and whole benefits.

What Are Some Fun Cooperative Games?

Cooperative football.

It involves having two teams on a football field, as there usually is in football, but no goals or goalkeepers.

Five or six judges look out solely for aspects of cooperation, integrality, positive connection and mutuality. They seek to judge how much everyone enjoys themselves, how much the players seek to involve all players into the game equally and uplift everyone’s spirit on the field. These are the parameters by which the judges award points to each team. There is no scoring of goals, but each team gains points for each significant aspect of prosocial behavior that infuses a greater atmosphere of connection, joy, support and encouragement for all players on the field.

After a defined period of time, the teams gather together and hear about which actions gained points, so that everyone can appreciate and learn from the examples that added to the positive unified spirit.

The point of the game is to connect the players as much as possible: that they work together, coordinate themselves and work out various ways to imbue a spirit of positive connection by means of a few players on two teams with a single ball on a playing field. They need to awaken the scrutiny of how much they work with each other in an integral manner, and how much they really care about generating a harmonious, peaceful and joyous climate while they work out various strategies and tactics of handling the ball among each other.

Playing this game should inspire a feeling of belonging to a greater social whole, a sensation that there are several individuals working with a common will to enliven others in society.

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Michael Laitman

PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah. MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics. Founder and president of Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute.