“ The clear and logically coherent push by UNESCO for a time-space, form-content and functional integration (that is, intersection or connection and separation) of both forms of knowledge, namely, traditional and scientific, in the management of natural disasters is surely a move in the right direction.
But, the ideologically-led, subjectively-driven rationalistic divide between traditional and scientific knowledge, where the former is taken to be of a lower status than the latter (or, for that matter, the latter as having a higher status over the former), when they are, in fact, merely different forms of knowledge about the-one-and-only-level-of-reality, must be done away with before there is hope for this temporal-formal, spatial-substantial and functional integration / intersection to take place in the process, both theoretically and practically.
In the final analysis, both forms of knowledge are subject to more or less the same test, beginning with experimentation and ending with verification, via the good and age-old theoretical and practical process of trial-and-error. The use of the laboratory in the production of scientific knowledge basically involves a contraction of both time and space as opposed to leaving it to human experience,, where knowledge (and skills deriving from knowledge) is empirically refined over an elongation of time-space.
In Tongan thought and praxis, however, education engages a time-space, form-content and functional transformation of the human mind (and thinking) from ignorance to knowledge to skills, that is, from the epistemic or intellectual to the pragmatic or technical, in that logical but circular and dialectical order of precedence.
For example, it is one thing to theoretically know that the entities of wind and sound are two different forms of energy and it is quite another to have the skills of beating empty tins, drums, bells and shouting out loud as way of activating sound energy as means of weakening tornadoes, twisters or whirlwinds as a form of energy of motion.
Should UNESCO, then, revise its position by now saying: "Knowledge and skills save lives," which is more total and complete an approach and that by saying: "Knowledge saves lives" is quite simply an approach that is partial and incomplete, both theoretically and practically. ”