Process Education: A Humanistic Response to Fundamentalism‪.‬

ONE OF THE MOST PROMINENT causal factors of the seemingly rebounding addiction to supernaturalism as an explanation of the world and justification for action is surely the dramatic rate of social and technological change, which often forces people to abandon tradition in order to adapt to entirely new situations. In our grandparents' day--or even our parents'--what we learned in school was reasonably expected to provide us with useful information for a lifetime. No more. It has been said that information is doubling every five years. With such an exponential curve, how can anyone expect to learn it all and cope with its ramifications? This incredible rate of change quite naturally drives many people to cling to traditional approaches as they struggle to slow the process to a more comfortable pace. As a result, fundamentalism often becomes the order of the day. Not merely Islamic fundamentalism or Jewish or Christian fundamentalism but, rather, the basic fundamentalism of "I have the answers. Don't bother me with more questions"--a fundamentalism of "stay the course" rigidity rather than nuanced thinking and flexibility as new situations arise and new data become available.