For my weekly writing spot on this site, see the One-Minute Mystic, with a new meditation posted every Monday. Also see The Village, the story of Misty Longings, England's most beautiful village, posted episode by episode earlier this year.       There's a 7th year student, Billy, dallying in the playground, between classes. He's wondering if it's worth going to his next class – and I think I understand his fresh-faced despair. Pupils often go backwards in the seventh year of our educational system. Children with good records in Primary school, bright, optimistic and hopeful – they suddenly find their understanding in terminal decline; their intelligence apparently wilting. Little do they realise that they are surrounded by the quiet murder of knowledge, committed by teachers who are specialists in their field. The first six years of Billy's education worked with the model that knowledge is one. Yes, literacy and maths were primus inter pares, but with a good class teacher, there's a sense that everything relates to everything else. Some call it the oneness of all things, but in education-speak, it's cross-curricular themed learning. Come secondary school, however, there is a change of wind. Billy struggles, having just come from one lesson where they did maths, and now on his way to another lesson, in another place, where he will do history, after which he will travel again to yet another setting, for religious knowledge. The mutilation of truth has begun; a dull turf war between disciplines. Each subject has become its own little god in its own little shrine – and as Billy is learning, he must bow separately to each, or be cast into the flames. If our school were offered El Greco's picture, "The View of Toledo," we could hang it in the library, and during art, happily promote literacy by considering the geography of its hilly contours; the maths of its shapes and angles; the science behind both the paint used and the buildings; the historical circumstances of Toledo at the time; the religious longing in the flash of lightning – and of course there's the fascinating debate as to what music would best complement such a scene? That's one thing we could do. The other thing we could do is find a sharp knife, hack the canvass up into small pieces, and then allow each school department to take away their scrap, and specialise in it. This is the science bit! This is the history bit! Etc No wonder Billy is depressed – somewhere inside him he senses the mutilation. Beyond the loss of innocence is the loss of wholeness; the loss of relationship between things and the advent of bigotry. Anthony de Mello defined spirituality as "the art of making connections". Good – but let's go further. Intelligence is the art of making connections – of which spirituality is a part. Rooney makes football connections; Gandhi made religious and social connections; osteopaths make connections with sinew, muscle and bone. And all are one, for knowledge is one. Knowledge is not a collection of separate stones, but one stone – a diamond, which glistens and sparkles in many different ways, depending on how it's held. No more shall Billy wander though the playground wondering if it's maths or French or ICT. It's all of them – always. More writings © Simon Parke