Reading the daily issues of Bangladesh newspapers reveals interesting facts regarding the Bangladeshi nation and the Interim Government's recommendations for reform of the new Bangladesh. Among these some important ones noted are the groundwork of educational policy reform, constitutional reform, law-and-order reform, and the six worthy commissions established by IG for organizing the way toward comprehensive reform. Yet this author finds that a most foundationally epistemic essential remains unheard of, and conspicuously absent in the endless list of generalized and detailed recommendations on reform of new Bangladesh.
This is the foundational role of consciousness in the architecture of knowledge and educational reform that should span the substantive meaning to the comprehensive social, economic, and scientific outlook upon which the cherished aspirations of social justice, fairness, equality, freedom, development, and in all the objective of wellbeing of the nation in its entirety, would rest. The Bangladeshi people's revolution against the fascist rule of Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League junta following upon the clandestine heritage of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Bangladesh, dispelled the last fifteen years of dismal slate of a decadent nation.
A comprehensive sustainable reform is called for to awaken new Bangladesh to a new national order, and thus become a beacon of a resilient people in the global scene. The seed of such a comprehensive reform architecture lives and prospers on the epistemic foundation of consciousness, feeding into the instruments of the knowledge and educational policy in a practicum of the new nation's wellbeing objective embracing a new holistic social contract and sustainable development outlook.
What is the nature and logic of the architecture of consciousness in the following holistic reform scenario? Namely, consciousness embedding knowledge; knowledge embedding educational program; inclusive educational program as a grand learning worldview spanning the generality and details of every sector of new Bangladesh; and continuing along the ensuing affirming pathway. This can be referred to as the way of conscious continuum. Indeed, this congruence between consciousness, knowledge, and the practicum of education would chart the comprehensively holistic socio-scientific development reform program of new Bangladesh.
Consciousness is a complex though inevitable precept of the soul, mind, and matter space, extending beyond the mere spacetime domain of a limited scope of socio-scientific thought; and therefore, nation building under human and other ecological relations. The scientists condescend to this vista of res extensa and res cogitans domains of new scientific quest. In our comprehensive prescription of national reform, consciousness can be defined as the criterion of differentiating truth from falsehood. It is inborn in human and other entities to enable knowledge and thereby reflect upon the endless possibility of expression of this criterion in terms of attaining the potentiality of a participative, coexisting, and complementary worldview of unity of knowledge.
Unity of knowledge is explained by this very nature of 'me and other' through the organic interrelations of the reflective world-system. Consciousness is the inborn essence of actualizing knowledge; and thereby actualizing: From knowledge on to educational as an evolutionary learning process of socio-scientific reflection and articulation.
The resulting universal and uniquely pervasive architecture of complementarity in and between everything is like an endless process of biological symbiosis via evolutionary learning in the organic unity of knowledge of being and becoming. In the case of the model of reform of new Bangladesh, this socio-scientific model is encapsulated as the path of conscious continuum: Consciousness to Knowledge to Instruments of Education into 'everything' of organic relations across sectors and unifying relations of 'me and other'.
The primacy of Consciousness, followed by its embedding in Knowledge, and the resulting Consciousness-centered Knowledge-induced educational program as evolutionary learning in the model of unity of knowledge, would flow across all sectors of new Bangladesh reform. In such an epistemic worldview of soul-mind-matter crystallization of practicum, educational instrumentation cannot be the be-all and end-all of reform.
That is because, as well-documented by the annals of social change, education is not necessary a medium of equality and values, rather than being of specialization that feeds exclusively in the capitalist demeaning machinery of elitism. Neither democracy nor tyranny of the elitist powerful world, can resolve the inequality and valueless flight of human ego in the exclusive educational system that we embrace.
Yet the model of unity of knowledge can be driven by reform into participative democracy, multi-sectoral organic interrelationship as an evolutionary learning towards attaining wellbeing. Socio-economic development along with growth and efficiency, poverty alleviation, moral-material complementarity in socio-scientific futures, sectoral relationship by the instrumentation of education as a carrier of consciousness-centered knowledge, define the morally inclusive educational good. These attributes can then be understood and practiced as the epistemic value of unity of knowledge in everything,
The epistemic foundation of unity of knowledge embedded by consciousness and crystallizing as the resulting inclusive educational program spanning all sectors of reform, would lead into the comprehensive reform. Without the epistemic realization of value-laden inclusiveness, educational reform independently and its impact on independent sectoral reforms would neither yield the practicum of reform nor will the reform be sustainable. The very first essential need for participatory unity by dialogue and inclusiveness across all sectors will be thwarted by the short-run fracture of human unity upon which the new Bangladesh dawned.
The consciousness-centered and knowledge-induced foundation of a socio-scientific possibility of inclusive educational will be thwarted. The great values of social justice, freedom, equity, empowerment, and preparation into a participatory outlook of 'me and other' will not lay the foundation of comprehensive sectoral reform for the common good of wellbeing. Consequently, the reform of law-and-order; and thereby, of the legal authority, and the IG-political party consultations; and constitutional and institutional reforms would all be incomplete and ineffective. Discursive indeed, an Institute of Consciousness in New Bangladesh Reform ought to be established under the able leadership of Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus.
The writer is retired Professor of Economics, Cape Breton University
