Sponsored by The Century Foundation, Center for American Progress
Debate takes place at:
1333 H Street, NW
10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005
Time: November 12, 2009, 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Dear Marlene,
I’m unable to attend your School Turnaround Strategies meeting but I would like to contribute some ideas anyway. It is my belief that if we don’t make the promise of education relevant to every student, if we don’t make it fun and exciting, we lose before we begin. If the days of using education to sift the chaff from the wheat are not over, they should be. Everyone has something unique to offer others and it should be the primary goal of education to help each student figure out what that is so he or she can start developing it. Assuming we’re basically good and want to get better will go a long way to make education fun and relevant for everyone. When our primary goal is to be the person we love to be, doing the things we love to do, we become driven by natural passion and automatically take responsibility for our own development. The benefit of this to the individual and society cannot be overestimated.
It’s not only education that needs to change; our whole system needs to change. It does no good to cultivate one set of values in school while society operates by a different set of values. In business and in life, whether we like what we’re doing or get paid to do it, we must ask ourselves: is what I’m doing, good? Does it improve the quality of life or undermine it? Does it increase humanity’s chances for survival or threaten it?
Educators, and those who would undertake to change education, need to look inside themselves first. They need to ask themselves: what’s going to work best for ALL of us – in personal terms, and in terms of business, education, the environment and peace. Everyone should be asking themselves these questions because we’re all connected. To think otherwise is to perpetuate imbalance. Responsibility (response-ability or personal accountability and self-development) is the price of freedom, peace and long-term human survival.
Are children blank slates to be written on; chattel to be commanded, manipulated and controlled? Or, are we something more than that as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin thinks: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience”? Who are we? What’s reality? What’s the purpose of life? Until we’re certain we know the answers to these questions, we should err on the side of optimism. We should learn and teach a loving, playful and empowering form of reality creation instead of creating assembly lines to pump out angry, dissatisfied, unimaginative, preditory souls who can’t think critically for themselves, souls who will do anything for a buck, up to and including, killing others for it.
We open up and blossom in the presence of love. In the presence of uncompromising, “do-it-or-else authority”, we either become obedient, domineering or alienated and angry. I hated school when I was young because I felt like I didn’t matter, that no one (with a few rare exceptions) cared about what I wanted. As a result, I put out the energy of anger, fear, resentment and contempt. It was my Emotional Signature, my Feeling Tone! It wasn’t until my mid forties that I was able to develop a large enough picture of reality to forgive myself and others for the fear, guilt and anxiety I suffered from. So badly inhibited, in the Air Force, alcohol became my savior. Instead of acquiescing to an educational system that stifled free choice and imagination, that seemed to care not one wit about what the individual wanted, I got angry! Many people still react this way because little, if anything, has been done to change the idea of public education since it was first conceived.
I recently wrote an article entitled: Change the World for the Better with Love – a Reality Creation Project. The experience I describe in this article graphically illustrates the difference between how I (we?) react in the presence of conditional love (limitation, value judgment, carrot and stick) and unconditional love (unconditional acceptance). It’s the difference between night and day!
Regarding the meeting announcement, the use of the word “Debate” in the title implies a contest, not a solution. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we ”debate” more often to determine who’s right or wrong, good or bad, smart or stupid, strong or weak than to find solutions. It’s the byproduct of a belief in separation, scarcity and competition – Law-of-the-Jungle concepts meant to serve the individual, not the whole. Egotism (emphasis on separation, service-to-self values) is one of the primary reasons we continue to recycle tired old ideas that don’t work. We don’t want them to! Until we acknowledge our oneness as well as our individuality and ask what’s going to work best for ALL of us, true service to others is not possible. Egocentric core beliefs are to the idea of service-to-others as matter is to antimatter. Meaningful change in education and society will only come after we remove limiting and conflicting root beliefs that blind us from seeing beyond Darwinism. We’re both one AND separate and we need to recognize that. Also, we’re not only the product of creation; we are creation itself!
As we think, we create. Change what we think and we change what we create!
Many of us use life-in-the-jungle as our primary model or template for thought and action while some of us intuitively use the body as our primary model or template. This model, our body, survives by recognizing that all cells are both one AND separate. Over a trillion strong in a single human body, every cell knows it must share resources for all to remain strong and healthy in support of the other. As the Three Musketeers say, “it’s all for one and one for all!” Shouldn’t we, as thinking beings capable of processing ideas, be as wise? As someone once observed, “United we stand, divided we fall.”
Good luck with your Turnaround Strategy meeting.
Regards,
Pete, http://realtalkworld.com
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
We create our own reality from what we choose to believe about ourselves, and the world around us.
If we do not CONSCIOUSLY choose our own beliefs, we UNCONSCIOUSLY absorb them from our surroundings.
If we are accountable (responsible) for our actions, how can we afford NOT to question our beliefs?
How you define yourself, and the world around you, forms your intent, which, in turn, forms your reality. – Seth
Only when we improve the way we think about ourselves will we improve the way we treat ourselves, and the world.
Change the world for the better with Philosophy On T-Shirts! (POTS)
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