I'm back in Denver after visiting Oregon and attending a Process Work seminar with Arny and Amy Mindell. Besides the deep experiential learning, there was lots of refreshing weather--pouring rain, sleet, snow and hail, gale-force winds, and barely a patch of blue sky in 5 days. And now it's snowing again in Denver. Personally, I'm ready for March to come in like a lamb, not a lion.
I have always been interested in educational transformation. For me, educational transformation involves learning how to learn, learning from the heart, following your curiosity to unfold new realizations, and making life-affirming choices from a broad knowledge base.
At a deeper essence level, learning is about discovering what you naturally know. Arny Mindell expresses this knowingness as “earth-based psychology,” finding the path of awareness of least action and most heart. This awareness path utilizes our day and night dreams, feelings, body symptoms, words, sounds, gestures, signals and whatever draws our attention in the moment.
The new TV show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” beautifully illustrates how adults who are not regularly around children have lost a significant amount of basic elementary school knowledge. The adult contestants that appeared on last night's show haven’t had to use much of what they learned as a schoolchild and needed the help of a fifth grader to answer most of the questions. This suggests that what was learned often took place without a sense of personal value and meaning. Naturally, therefore, there is not much carry-over into daily adult life, as the show clearly portrays. So, why should we bother with all the pressure and stress of mandatory public schooling and ever-increasing testing?
We all need reading, writing and arithmetic, (and nowadays, I propose, touch-typing). Showing proficiency in those areas is important for our life work. Critical thinking skills are also valuable for developing dream projects and finding solutions to problems. General knowledge and world issues helps you to fit into society and feel like you belong to something bigger than just your body. How can our educational system make these priorities more meaningful, rather than tests and regurgitation of facts? In one word, make it FUN! True learning brings smiles to yearning faces.
Stay tuned for more...
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