We Begin
Resources already exist to make an important paradigm shift in education. With little more than additional training and a change in what we believe students need to know, we could prepare our youth for the future that businesses predict. We could fulfill the visions and hopes of great educational philosophers who foresaw education as the portals of the future. We certainly can intensify the quality of time spent on interactional critical thinking, more clearly develop the student perception that learning is a life long joyous pursuit. We can offer assistance with self control and teach responsibility more fully. We can simultaneously develop human sensitivity to fully authenticate self and share self with society.

This focus will allow us to keep all of the effective practices we currently use, to sharpen the tools we have already developed and to gain impetus and excitement for the tasks ahead by realizing how much of current best practice is suited to developmental and human needs of individuals and society.

A Change - Introducing the new "R" - Relationship
It is time to introduce education to the fourth “R” - relationship. The system is already set up for this "R" and in fact, it is currently an underdeveloped part of most learning situations. The current paradigms in psychology and education do not favor the study of relationship, therefore there is little material written about it as a function of education and little research showing its impact in classrooms.

Flanders' (1970) and Galloway's (1970) research are two notable exceptions. They established the importance of a teacher's quality of interaction skills. We have not written much about educational relationship and process (Bruner, 1962; Maslow, 1971) so we have not hypothesized and extensively researched its importance. Until cooperative learning research we had not rigorously tested for community building in the educational setting, not actively recognized its presence or the magnitude of its impact. Nevertheless, it is an omnipresent part of each classroom setting. It is important to note that early teachers and philosophers who wrote about education frequently highlighted the social arenas and relationships inherent in education. Cooperative Learning (Slavin, 1991; Johnson & Johnson, 1987), Community of Learners (Brown, 1988) and Megaskills (Rich, 1988) are examples of the resurgence of interest in teaching the substance and skills of human process and relationship.

There is no attribute of the superior man greater than his helping men to practice virtue. - Mencius

It may be an unwritten presumption that people are "born" with a social sense and social settings are an automatic part of the child's growing experiences, hence relationship need not be taught, or presumed to be unteachable. Certainly in the recent past, social events and opportunities were more present than they appear to be today.
In the past fifty years many factors decreased the number of natural social interactions present as learning opportunities in a child's day. Some of these factors include smaller families with less physical attachment to extended family, the move away from a small interdependent community into a more insulated city atmosphere, a larger percentage of free time spent watching rather than actively participating or being entertained rather than engaging in entertainment.

Given these facts, and assuming that relationship is a vital part of being human, of being educated, how would this emphasis on relationship and process best be integrated into the existing framework of schools? First, it would be important for educators to recognize just how much of the educational day is spent in interaction and thus to develop a more stereoscopic vision of education, by looking at the teaching day from this and several other perspectives.

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