Culture of Learning and Paradigm Shift: Some Baha'i Experience

REFLECTIONS ON A CULTURE
OF LEARNING AND OF GROWTH

Community and Individual
Paradigm Shifts

A Context and a Personal Text

DEDICATION

This essay is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice in celebration of the forty-fifth anniversary in April 2008 of its first election in April 1963. This essay is also written in commemoration of the memory of my maternal grandfather, Alfred J. Cornfield, whose epic autobiography was an example of the culture of learning with which he was imbued all his life.
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It is my hope that what readers find here in this essay, originally written for the Online Journal of Baha’i Studies will serve as a useful extension of their reflections and understandings regarding the culture of learning and of growth and the paradigmatic shift the Baha’i community is currently going through and has been going through since the mid-1990s, in relation to both learning and growth. If this article or essay functions in only a small way to assist in bringing about a paradigm shift in the lives of some of my fellow believers across the globe, a paradigm shift without which any shift in Baha'i community life will have little meaning to them, this essay will have achieved one of its central purposes. I have found, in writing down my thoughts on this subject, that I have experienced an auspicious beginning to my own reflections on the new paradigm, the new culture of learning and of growth in the life of the Baha’i community that has emerged in the last decade.

Paradigm shifts do not take place easily because they involve a change in basic assumptions within the current and dominant theory of operations and activities in whatever field in which they occur. My hope is that this piece of writing may play one of the thousands of incremental or microcosmic, sensible or insensible parts in a process which is now in its second decade. As Moojan Momen noted in a critical essay which has been instrumental in creating the ongoing dialogue about this new culture of learning, "the tide is turning" to an appreciation of the significance of this new paradigm after some initial and not always moderate criticisms of its context and content.

More than a decade-long process (1996-2008) of capacity building, of a culture of learning and of growth in the size of the community, as well as an accompanying paradigm shift in Bahá’í community life, is flowing into the waters of Baha’i community life with a sometimes strange, often new, sense of life, of systematic learning and teaching, of the extension of individual teaching endeavors, "irrespective of circumstance," to a wider circle of people.

There are many aspects of what is involved in our understanding and experience of this culture of learning and of growth and this essay makes a reflexive, a critical and hopefully a useful exploration of some of these aspects. Hopefully, too, members of the Baha’i community and interested observers will be assisted, in the process, in clarifying their own understandings, their misconceptions and confusions, if they have any. There were certainly an inadequacy of Baha’i perspective and inappropriate attitudes, at least from my point of view, which developed regarding several fundamental issues involved in this new culture of learning. I do not see this essay as correcting these attitudes or even enlarging these perspectives but, rather and simply, contributing to an inevitable and necessary ongoing dialogue on many and any of the questions regarding this process. Such is my lofty aim here in this mediation and meditation on several themes. I do not break any new ground but, rather, just look over a patch in an intellectual garden which has been laid in the last few years. I try to profit from the work of other gardeners and I aim, too, for lucidity and beauty of expression in a process which has been made easier to indulge in over recent years due to technology and affluence.

-Ron Price, "End of Introduction." 2/9/'08--Tasmania Australia