Letter #43: Your Education Shapes You
Just as the water keeps on flowing, the human should keep on learning
Dear Friend
Education matters
Education, the name of my game and line of work in my life, is the most crucial ingredient in our human world! It will destroy us or it will liberate us. Nothing else that I can think of has quite this psychological and spiritual impact on how we experience life.
In this week’s Letter I’d like to address this topic. After all, it’s my mission to radically transform the way it’s done in schools and all educational arenas. Consider this maxim of mine, which I get every new group of my teacher students to discuss together:
"Today's society is yesterday's classroom, today's classroom is tomorrow's society."
If you have read my ebook you will have seen this quote before. But I think one cannot read and reflect upon it too many times. Central to my mission is to educate the adults, because until the adults have learned how to learn, how can we help and empower the children of our world to learn?? Until we have learned how our own mind and body work, how can we get children to learn this too? Until we have learned how the web of life works (epigenetics, NOT genetics), how can we help our children to learn this?
Thing is, none of this is taught in the schools, unless you were very very lucky and went to a totally non-conventional school. So when we then become the next generation of adults, and become parents and teachers and society leaders, we won’t be teaching the next generation any of it either.
And so it is that humanity has been stuck in an intergenerational vicious cycle of anti-education schooling.
My mission is to break this cycle. The only way to create a virtuous circle instead is to educate the educators - the parents, teachers, home educators, all kinds of leaders, world helpers, activists, natural healers, life coaches, gurus, advocates for change, and all who work with other people, be they children or their fellow adults.
This education will undo the damaging first one we all got as children, and enable us to build a solid foundation to our life, that of key cognitive skills, self-knowledge and self-belief. Specifically I mean 5 Pillars to this foundation:
learning skill >> psychological liberation from emotional enslavement through understanding + self-growth
communication skills >> building strong healthy relationships (the foundation of life for a social animal)
self-leadership skills >> being in charge of our own life, health and destiny and gaining individual sovereignty, starting up new dynamic communities
self-knowledge >> understanding our own mind, body and spirit and our interconnectedness with the web of life
self-belief >> having respect for and confidence in ourselves, banishing self-doubt
From this basis we truly empower ourselves and transform our lives… and then just think how differently we will engage with the children of the world!
I just wrote the following elsewhere, and want to share it with you. As you read, please monitor and be aware of your reactions to what I am saying. Do you agree, disagree, think it important, not important? Does it make you want to do something? Change anything? What can you do? What will you do?
Put fun into it!
As education is my line of work, I've spoken over the years with a very large number of children, parents, and teachers from multiple countries about teaching and learning.
Here is almost a universal response, amazing for how similar the thinking is, regardless of culture and society. It shows to me that humanity and being human is the key culture, not this or that nation's culture. I know this to be true because my classrooms have often been multi-cultural and multinational, yet we all want the same learning environment.
The response typically goes like this…
Children are not satisfied with their schooling at all: boring, irrelevant, and much anxiety about tests, bullying from other children or by the teachers. Their natural curiosity to learn, and creativity to express themselves in their learning, is suppressed.
When I ask them what they think their learning experience should be, just about every single kid says 'fun'. It’s always their first answer. They know very well indeed that they learn best when they are having fun, enjoying the experience. Not just young humans, we can see many baby animals frolicking around and looking for maximum play time!
(In a book on adult motivation, the authors stated that the one thing adults fear most of all is boredom. Well, it’s the same for children!)
Sitting in rows and columns, listening to the teacher for 50 minutes, and having to suppress their bundles of energy is not fun. It's a horror show.
When I ask them what they want from their teachers, they say they want to be motivated, inspired and guided by them, and for them to be kind to all children. They all want to think and work things out for themselves.
Instead, they get teachers who 'drone on', and who don’t give them the opportunities to learn how to think for themselves. In some nations the teacher often yells at the children, making them feel very small in front of their classmates. This is total disrespect by the teacher! In other nations the children discover there’s a heavy price to pay for asking questions, for seeking understanding.
Everywhere the children are controlled, ordered about, compelled to memorise stuff, threatened with failure etc etc.
When I ask parents or teachers, they pretty much all say that having fun means no learning will take place. Fun and games is to be avoided. Learning is a serious thing.
The complete opposite of what children themselves say, and want!
It means adults—parents and teachers—seek to block children from having fun and enjoying their education, the very thing that children (and all human beings) want and need.
The ironical thing, and I know this from my experience, the more fun students are having the more fun the teacher is having, and the more rewarding their job is; the more the students are learning the more the teacher is learning.
My view? It's the teacher's job to inspire children or adult students to love learning by making it interesting, enjoyable and challenging, and this can only happen when the teacher creates an emotionally supportive environment. Without this heart-friendly environment nothing good can happen, and in fact much damage is being created for children's future life as well as during the lesson itself. See my quote at the top.
After all, we are not machines, we are not robots, we are not computers, we are human beings with emotions and a beating heart, and we all want to feel good in life, and to avoid feeling bad.
Are you a parent? Then put FUN into your OWN life! You went through this anti-fun school system yourself, and that's why we adults all, subconsciously, think that real learning is not done by having fun. It's also why most adults live a life almost devoid of fun and enjoyment. I mean, if fun is driven out of our learning, how are we going to have fun in our living? And if learning was so demotivating when we were children, it’s no wonder we don’t really care for it in adulthood, just subconsciously assuming that this is what learning is.
It's a very sad thing for me to witness adults having no fun, often leading miserable lives, and refusing any learning opportunities that come their way.
But if you consciously choose to have fun while teaching and guiding your children, then they are going to have fun and they are going to LEARN LOADS MORE. Co-create their educational experience, give them a big say in what they do... they are much more creative than you!
Really, at the end of the day, all we have to do is get out of their way. We inadvertently get in their way because when we were children the adult world all got in our way. So we just get in our own way our whole life, constantly undermining our own life without realising it. And in that undermining of ourselves, this rubs off on the children.
That's the true damage and devastation the school systems are wreaking on humankind all over the world.
Are you a teacher? Put FUN into your teaching practice. Put the children or your students into small groups with a task sheet and let them get on with their learning. Being in small groups requires them to collaborate and communicate, the most important human skills bar none. In this way you don't need to tell them stuff, they can learn it for themselves.
And they'll have lots of fun.
And your job will be fun.
It's a WIN-WIN thing!
"When you discover the joy of learning you discover the joy of living, when you master the skill of learning you master the skill of living."
~~~~~~~
What do you think? Do you need more fun in your own life?! I promise you, when we are learning things for ourselves, and especially when we are learning and exploring life together with a couple of friends or some classmates, or children or family members, life becomes so much more rewarding.
And fun.
And fun leads to joy, health, happiness, understanding, peace, kinship, camaraderie, and most of all FREEDOM. This is our true human essence, and it’s about time we reclaimed it.
Viva A Spiritual Revolution!
See you next week.
