Teaching our Kids

When our kids go to school, what do they learn? They learn from two levels, one level is from the schools curricula, the other from their peers, but it's not so much what they learn, but how they learn to learn.

Learning “what” involves remembering what happened yesterday. We don't have to create a new writing system every year, we can use the one developed years ago. In the same manner, we learn how to become engineers, doctors, and attorneys. This is one level of necessary learning; by memorizing the past.

There is another level of learning, however, a level that in many ways is far more important than any other – a level of insight. Insight is another way of saying spontaneous discovery without books or lectures; a discovery about ourselves and about life.

At this level of insight, a student might be studying about world wars, which would be about yesterday. Then, suddenly, the student might spontaneously question the whole concept of war itself. He or she might even come to a conclusion that war is caused by individuals, the microcosms of countries that fight with each other. This might in turn challenge the student to discover a solution, within each individual, to mankind's Achilles Heal; the wars that tear humanity apart.

This type of insight and inquiry is quite removed from dreary memorization, so mundane, yet admittedly necessary in education. This insight is the life that is missing in education, and why students are dropping out in droves. The spontaneity of life, the adventure, and discovery of life is missing, and we search for ways to instill this passion that students so need and deserve.

So, how do we promote this spontaneity among our students? How do we encourage them to think for themselves instead of conform to a failed system that turns its back on life's realities and continues to promote illusions through dry concepts and dated ideology? It all begins with each teacher letting go of his or her past.

The kids want to know why we are struggling to make so much money, why things have become more important than people. Is it because we are fearful that we don't have enough? The dress codes of our kids, the old, ragged, baggy clothes, are a dead give away of their feelings. They are mocking our values.

Who will instill in our kids the passion of discovery, the challenge of the inward journey so that things can change? What religious institution is teaching this instead of indoctrinating their youth with stale ideals and rote dogma? Who has the courage to forge a new, brave world?

Who will teach our kids to awaken themselves and discover their real potential, not the potential to be a successful businessman, but to be a human being, a potential that lies dormant? How do we teach our kids to be visionaries, fearless and unencumbered to change a world that is on the verge of self-destruction? We need visionaries, not robots.

Teaching our kids begins with teaching ourselves anew, in radical ways that we have never before considered. It takes warriors.