Reincarnation as educational heuristic

Reincarnation is a built-in education modality. According to reincarnation, individual souls populate the world in successive, incremental incarnations, learning or failing to learn lessons each time. Associated concepts include karma (often translated as fate or destiny), dharma (vocation or purpose), and the ultimate goal is to “graduate” from the system such that one no longer reincarnates.

Within this schema, individual souls can achieve a diversity of ends while co-inhabiting a singular planet. For instance, one person’s karma may entail losing significant quantities of material wealth, thereby coming to appreciate simplicity, while a second person’s karma may entail accruing material wealth, thereby undoing patterns of self-doubt or poverty. Neither karma nor their associated dharmas can be certified as “right” or “wrong,” although they may occur at different locations along the reincarnation chain.

It is my contention that, understood as a metaphor, reincarnation can be applied to educational pathways in order to ameliorate issues such as boredom, unilateral design, and arbitrariness.

For instance, does a particular course have measures in place to “fast-track” students too advanced for that course, or must all students take the same course, in the same way, regardless of where the course meets them in their educational journeys? Within the schema of reincarnation, certain lives facilitate learning certain lessons at an accelerated rate, while other lives proceed more slowly or deliberately with the same lessons; in like fashion, an educational course aware of diverse needs should contain pathways by which students can leapfrog among or even graduate from educational tasks.

Similarly, within reincarnation theory our world already provides a breadth of experience capable of meeting each soul’s individual needs. Does a particular course achieve this, or instead does that course mandate that each student complete the same task in the same way? For example, for some students it may be more relevant to explore a topic through academic writing, and thereby exercise critical and mental faculties, while for other students it may be more relevant to explore the same topic in song, dance, or to explore a different topic altogether; the driving question is what each student needs given their particular background (karma) and aims (dharma), and tasks should be as open-ended as possible in order to honor this richness.

Finally, in just the same way that some souls “graduate” from the planet and thereby cease to reincarnate, all courses should proffer options for students for whom attendance is no longer necessary. This may mean that attendance policies are flexible, and students attend how or when they need, or it may mean that rather than structuring educational programs in linear, accumulating fashion, courses are delivered on an a la carte basis and without interrelated prerequisites. Ultimately, this final recommendation may necessitate doing away with societal expectations such as compulsory schooling and education funneling students into jobs, in order that the soul’s freedom may exercise itself by restoring education to play.

Importantly, the above heuristics do not hinge on a belief in reincarnation. Rather, they can be applied even by secular educators as a means of testing whether their courses provide sufficient customization, freedom, and play, broadening beyond mental, emotional, and bodily needs and gesturing toward needs of the soul. With these modifications, our worldly education system can come to more greatly approximate that which appears to have been designed for us by some extrinsic creator, an education system in which life itself anticipates and structures our karma, dharma, and play.