While listening to Sir Ken Robinson reading his book, "The Element" I was struck many times by the way he saw things in a totally new light, how instead of reforming something that is broken, it is best to transform or evolve into a totally different idea.
He was speaking about education and how it is modeled after the fast food industry, how every thing is standardised…no surprises, everything matches and conforms. Imagine? Our education system has followed the fast food industry, where no imagination or individual passion and ideas are allowed; the main focus is to do well on the standardized test, caring less of the value left inside the child.
And the standardized test making people and industry is booming…while our kid's minds are being bent to do well on their tests…and their natural instinctual abilities are being ignored.
He also compared the school day to that of a factory, where bells ring to end a shift or begin one. Where all like models (made in year 1958) are put together, where each teacher adds one thing to the student, like an assembly line.
Some children do well in this conveyor like system, but there are many others whose passion is completely ignored and not allowed anywhere in the school factory for it doesn't fit into the fast food model.
It seems that the natural talents and abilities, the passions and desires to express what you love to do is being completely overlooked, that the child has to fit into the standardized class, leaving behind the very things that excite him.
You have to leave behind who you are to fit into this system.
He spoke of visionary schools, who are doing education completely different, who are teaching backwards it seems. The teachers take direction from the students…seeing the student, her desires and talents and her interests, and expanding on those…allowing the child to flourish that which is already organically there.
He also gave an example of a Kindergarten Class set in the middle of an Old Aged Home…glass walls that didn't quite reach the ceiling, so the children's voices could be heard. How the elderly walked by with interest for the first few days, and then would stop and ask, what the children were learning. "We are teaching them to read," the teacher said. "Can I help?" the elderly asked, "I know how to read."
The Elderly and Child formed a Reading Buddy System….and the elderly drug intake almost lessened by half. The child left kindergarten reading at a 3rd Grade level. The children learned about death and grief, when their Reading Buddy's passed on. The children also learned about life and history by talking to their Reading Buddy.
Most of us born into these systems are not even aware of the cost of standardized learning…we simply never considered another way. Our own individualize way of being has never been allowed to grow…most don't even know it is there, for it is buried far beneath all that we had to learn and be in order to graduate.
Years worth of standardized lesson piled upon our dreams…Often we hardly even caught a glimpse of our natural excitement, before it was squashed and pushed aside, for it didn't fit in.
Not only do I see the standardized learning, but standardized religion or God learning…spiritual seeking etc. We are taught about this subject, by having to fit into our parent's idea of who God is and what spirituality means. We are not allowed to grow naturally into wonderment, but are instead taught the lay of the God land by weary disenchanted travelers (in my case).
I wasn't taught the wonders of God, but instead his wrath and what would happen if I didn't obey the rules etc.
In my standardized religion there was no room from my questions or wonderment or disagreement…I had to conform into their system.
This leads you to wonder how many other systems do we have in place that were created during the Industrial Age that are broken?
You have to wonder how at one time they believed what was best for us was to all be the same. To learn and believe the same was a good thing…modeling us after what they deemed a perfect being.
When born into an already operational system of conformity, we are naturally made to conform by the folks who have lived on this planet longer than us…we believe the natural way to be is to fit in…and there are awards and ribbons for being a good conformist, and their are punishments or nothing for those who don't.
My way of raising my children began in the industrial era and I have transformed it into a totally free zone.
I now mother to the individual…I no longer have a standardized religion that they have to fit into. In fact, I am trying to unearth their natural talents and dreams that I buried in my broken way of raising them.
What is so striking, is that the systems are broken and oftentimes the parents themselves come with dysfunctional baggage. What a maze our children have to navigate through in order to maintain or hold on to their inner passions.
Imagine the change our world would have if all systems were geared to serve passion, talent and natural abilities, desire, excitement and inner joy, from the seed of individual that is already planted there?
How tragic it is that we have to run through an obstacle course that is set in place to steal this talent away…
So much of the dis ease and un rest is that so many folks are not doing their natural talents, that their seeds are lying dormant undernourished…that they did conform and are fitting into the world, but dying inside.
A very interesting overview of what we are teaching brand new seeds that arrive on the planet…we ignore the Element of who they are.
I certainly hope this next Era is called the Era of Individuality.
I M Perfect lady 