Three Recommendations Based on My Definition of Education

There are three practical recommendations for teachers (meaning everyone who is interested in catalyzing learning in their students or children and not just delivering units) on this site.

First, teach kids attitude first.

Second, use an adaptive curriculum to make sure that whatever situation you find yourself in will anticipate the needs of your students.
Third, utilize every resource you have to immerse your students in being respectful of each other as they learn to govern their own and other people’s behavior.
The first and the third are actually unavoidable.
You are teaching attitude first and immersing your students in some form of governance, even if you don’t think you are.
What I am suggesting is that you stop doing it on accident and start doing it on purpose.




If you happen to be a classroom teacher in a mainstream school then you may be reluctant to acknowledge out loud the nearly absolute power over students that you are supposed to have.
I know that I was immersed as a student in public school classroom cultures of just this kind.
I was well schooled for 18 years, with 13 of those years in five different K-12 public schools.
The attitude I learned from it is a revulsion of the tyranny combined with a heavy dose of resignation that it is inevitable and therefore a shameful thing to point out.
For those in traditional classroom settings it is this necessary shift towards the transparency of power relations that I expect to be most uncomfortable.




The second recommendation for the adaptive curriculum may be the key to making that transition easier.
The adaptive curriculum can be used as a tool for collectively examining the reality of your situation.
If you can be honest enough to acknowledge that your concepts about reality are not reality, then the adaptive curriculum is an ideal method for working with others to truly discover what is really going on.




Education is Free With This Definition
The wonderful irony of real education is that it is essentially free.
My definition of education is the mapping of access to optimal states of mind.
The result is an educated person, a person who is able to perceive accurately, think clearly, and act effectively on self-selected goals and aspirations.
The process of becoming educated requires a practice of persistent disillusionment, a consistent method for having an on-going dialog between the world and your mind to constantly revise your concepts of what is really going on.
There are three roles that we all play in our own and other people’s education, the learning agent, the learning catalyst, and the learning context.
Our moral responsibility as educators is to align the bio-, psycho-, communo-, socio- and eco-spheres as best we can to assist our students (and ourselves) with this on-going mapping project.




Everything about this process has been available to human kind as long as we have been human.
Only recently have we become aware that this is true.

There is not a single technology high or low that is necessary to accomplish this, but just about every technology both high and low can help us educate ourselves and everyone of our students, if we use them with the right attitude.