Teaching 'A Sense of Collective Identity': An Urgent Educative Imperative

In this article, the authors will first make the case that, though humans is rife with division, evidence suggests that in fact, they are all pretty much the same, and that therefore there are grounds for perceiving the pursuit of a collective identity as genuinely legitimate. They will then explore the many factors that have helped to "normalize" the particular forms of divisiveness that humans are experiencing today. These include: (1) the necessity to divide the world between good and bad that is the forerunner of the emergence of self-consciousness (Mead, 1965); (2) the tribalism that served as the evolutionary force for our increasing capacity for cooperation (Greene, 2014); (3) an economic system that divides us as competitors, and (4) a virtual reality that has created a new economy of binary status.