
“We handicap and hobble and put a heavy lid on the immense innate learning potential of the human mind that is in everyone. Education has become a conspiracy between parents and governments to control children. Every child is institutionalised at the age of five or six and sentenced to at least ten years hard time until so-called graduation. Children serve time by law and I call it a conspiracy because their parents consent to it and the government enforces it. So children become prison inmates – except unlike prison inmates they do not have a voice with which to protest, or advocates to protect their rights. Children don’t have anybody. They have to serve their time unconditionally”
“After such an experience many naturally feel that they have had enough of education and learning. They have no wish to continue. School is over and done with – learning is finished. From childhood on we are conditioned to associate learning with tension, effort, concentration and study. In essence learning equals pain. The educational experience has been a painful one and has capped the immense learning potential of each child. This is a tragedy. Conventional teaching closes rather than opens the mind and cripples even the best students, blocking the subconscious because of the tension it creates”
“Why not make use the full potential of the human mind, by combining the conscious and subconscious? You can only tap into it if someone is in a relaxed and pleasant frame of mind. It is important to eliminate anxiety and tension. Then and only then is a person completely receptive to learning. People do not want to expose themselves to more pain, or face what they think are their own inadequacies. Yet these are the very people who become most excited when they see that they can absorb and progress quickly and easily”
The article really resonates with my beliefs about learning. The question is how do we move these ideas forward against a political back drop of learning as an ability to recall what is expected to meet a standard?
Thanks Dave and great question Mike. We can’t change the overall system. We can however “yes and” the political backdrop of retrieval learning and offer another more vital and engaging way of learning
Great post John, thanks for sharing.
This topic has been bothering me for some time and even more so since reading Seth Godin’s manifesto on this topic
http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams
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