If it serves as a useful resource for learning and teaching the moral path of disillusionment then stick with it, otherwise ditch it.
Do not unquestioningly accept school people’s word for the value of schooling, they have a vested interest in the illusion that schooling is synonymous with, and the exclusive path to, education.
Schools are a tool that can be used to acquire an education, but they are certainly not necessary, and they can sometimes be a hindrance.
School people who know this try their best to be helpful and not hurtful.
So, why is education important?
Because when we understand it properly as our uniquely human opportunity to establish a regular practice of disillusionment, then it serves as the true path of nurturing moral behavior that enables a child to live a fulfilling life and withstand adversity, plus it might just save our species from extinction.
I have to make a clear distinction between schooling and education, like I did between a job and work.
Becoming an educated person means you have access to optimal states of mind regardless of the situation you are in.
You are able to perceive accurately, think clearly and act effectively to achieve self-selected goals and aspirations.
(On my definition of education page I address the inadequacy of the dominant conception of education as the delivery of knowledge, skills and information.)
Schooling, on the other hand, mostly consists of jumping through the hoops of instructional accounting to get symbolic rewards like test scores, grades, diplomas, degrees, etc.
If the goal is only to get a job, then schooling is important.
But if the goal is to find your work and become educated, then schooling may not be important, it depends on what your work is.
There are three fears that arise from being made to do schoolwork:
- the apparent absurdity of school rituals and/or the irrelevance of the "work,"
- the fear that what students are made to do is truly a meaningless waste of time, and
- the global context that makes it all seem pointless.
Given my distinction between schooling and education, then I take these fears very seriously.
If the child is correct that school rituals are absurd, the work irrelevant, that their time is truly being wasted, and the world situation makes it all pointless, then there is a serious problem.
But as I said before, we have to consider the deeper possibility that they are under the spell of illusions, rather than observing reality.
The trite answers that the parent voice in all our heads provide in answer to the phrase, "Why do I have to…" is, "Because I said so!"
This is a power struggle in the making, of course.
That obvious answer is rarely stated, however, because given a choice we adults like to invoke a more pervasive power on our side so the slightly cleverer answer is, "Because that's the law (or the rules)!"
Of course, even the clever answer is trite because it begs the question of why the law or the rules say so.
The parent voice defends the rules by explaining the necessity of getting a job.
The story is that you have to have a diploma and/or degree(s) to get a good job so you can act responsible by supporting yourself and your family when you become an adult.
This answer is trite because by "job" we usually mean getting a paycheck and if that's what it's all about then it is an insult to the value of human lives.
We certainly need to find our work in this world, but we are not on this earth to have a job.
We are human beings who are supposed to make a meaningful contribution to the well-being of all that we are a part: from our global ecologies; to our society; to our families, circles of friends, and organizations; to our individual body/mind; even down to the cells that make us up.
If a job is just a paycheck, then work is doing what really needs to be done in service to goodness, truth, beauty, unity, and joy (which might come with a paycheck sometimes, too.)
Having a job is less important than being a good person with meaningful work to do.
The foundation of this approach is that we don't really know what is actually going on except in fragments.
This is true of everything in our lives; our world, our relationships, and our own minds.
We feel and sometimes think we know, but our minds have evolved exquisite methods of generating a myriad of unconscious assumptions that fool us into believing we have a true and correct knowledge of our world, our relationships, and our own minds when the truth is we don't.
If we assume that our knowledge is mostly an illusion, then we have to have a practice of disillusionment to figure out what is really going on.
This is not the extreme position of positing that there is only illusion, but the moderate position that we are inherently prone to illusion and the wise course in emotionally charged or high stakes situations is to verify our shared understandings to ensure our actions serve the well being of all and align with our moral values.
Your child's complaint and the underlying concerns are, therefore, most likely arising from an illusion.
Since we are also assuming that your illusions are just as pervasive as your child's illusions, then your best bet is to gather reliable evidence of what is really going on and then go from there.
I have included several visual illusions on this page to remind you of how we can be fooled by our own minds.
These illusions are all caused by our minds automatically filling in information or unconsciously interpreting it.
Our minds do exactly those two things all the time in everything we do without our even knowing that it happened.
That's why we need to collect a lot of evidence and find where it converges to know what is really going on.
Why is education important?
That is the question behind the actual words of complaint when school has the audacity to impose upon a child's time and attention.
You know the scene:
Imagine your most beloved child is before you in full complaint mode.
S/he is whining about memorizing times tables or the futility of algebra or the monotony of history.
S/he is pleading for your sympathy with that pouting face that irks you just so or is simply defiant with arms crossed or hands on hips.
The complaint will probably include, "Why do I have to…"
Part of you sympathizes but the parent voice in your head is telling you to do your job as the parent and not give in to mere sympathy.
Playing out your parent role means they have to get over it and do what needs to be done.
I challenge you to answer their actual concerns, not their stated questions.
But to do that you need to gauge the true depth of those concerns.
If you can approach their concerns rather than answer their questions, then you have the opportunity to offer both sympathy AND strategies to get over it and do what needs to be done.
The benefit of the following approach is that it does not require your child to know their real concern or it's depth.
You don't even have to know yourself, you just have to be willing to go through the process and pay close attention to how your child reacts.
If you can stay with it long enough, your child will either move on or you will be clear that you need more help. Either way you have something of value
There are other definitions of education that use other metaphors.
The core values that are important to me in defining education are providing a safe and empowering environment for children that nurtures them with opportunities for fulfillment. (See my curriculum page for the difference between opportunities for fulfillment versus judgment.)
The result of this set of priorities is the development of strong kids who are optimally capable of living a life that contributes to their family and community as well as being very resilient in the face of adversity.
This is a contrast with the values of some who believe that while an educational environment obviously needs to be safe the environment should make strengthening children's will and ability to withstand adversity a higher priority than nurturance.
The important test of whether a definition of education is one that is acceptable to me is how it is used to express the core values of safety and nurturance.
There are a variety of metaphors, such as education as gardening or a factory, and the test of their appropriateness is whether they can express the values I hold dear.
The factory metaphor definition of education inherently undermines the nurturance that is so important.
Education defined using a gardening metaphor is ambiguous since the majority cultivation of the plants today occurs on factory farms, but if the metaphor is painted as a personal relationship between the gardener and the plant, then it might work.
My definition of education reflects my values and my particular way of understanding education from the experiences I have had with both learning and teaching.
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.
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.
