”When children are demonized, they are often described as feral. But feral is what children should be: it means released from captivity or domestication.” – George Monbiot. ”
From the moment a child is born it is expected to assimilate to the culture and society surrounding it, to make its norms and traditions its own. It is a war waged with life as a natural expression, where the goal is to break down the child until it surrenders its natural instincts and accepts its domestication. This process is unnatural and it is not without bloodshed. Screaming, conflicts and violence ensues when the child tries to fight tooth and nail to express itself in a way that comes natural to it and not succumb to the assimilation process. It almost never works. And when it does, the child is labeled with one of the increasingly pervasive diagnoses that we hide behind to not have to take responsibility for our creation; the invention of a society and a culture that breaks down life before it had even had a chance to grow. We call it ADD, ADHD, hyperactive disorder, child depression or simply: ‘bad seeds’.
Let me give you an example: We expect children to sit down and sit still and stay put and only be active in their mind with focus on exercising abstract cognition. We think: “Well what’s the problem? I love sitting still, I can sit and work a whole day without getting fidgety so surely a child should be able to do the same.” We say that “the child is acting out” or “it is misbehaving” or “the child doesn’t follow the instructions.” But have we really considered what it is like for a child to have to sit still all day? Have we considered that we too are the result of this brutal process where our natural expression has been broken down and suppressed until nothing was left but a docile thinking-machine that can’t even feel, let alone consider itself as a living, breathing physical organism?
A couple of days ago I read an article where veteran teacher, Alex Wiggins describe what she realized after following two students around for an entire day. She would do the work they did, sit with them during class and basically experience everything that a student goes through on a daily basis.
What she found was heartbreaking and alarming to say the least:
“In every class for four long blocks, the expectation was for us to come in, take our seats, and sit down for the duration of the time. By the end of the day, I could not stop yawning and I was desperate to move or stretch. I couldn’t believe how alert my host student was, because it took a lot of conscious effort for me not to get up and start doing jumping jacks in the middle of Science just to keep my mind and body from slipping into oblivion after so many hours of sitting passively…”
“High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes.”
“In eight periods of high school classes, my host students rarely spoke. Sometimes it was because the teacher was lecturing; sometimes it was because another student was presenting; sometimes it was because another student was called to the board to solve a difficult equation; and sometimes it was because the period was spent taking a test.”
“It was not just the sitting that was draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.”
“I asked my tenth-grade host, Cindy, if she felt like she made important contributions to class or if, when she was absent, the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions, and she laughed and said no.”
“…it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard…”
“You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.”
”I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day. It’s really hard to do, and not something we ask adults to do day in and out. Think back to a multi-day conference or long PD day you had and remember that feeling by the end of the day – that need to just disconnect, break free, go for a run, chat with a friend, or surf the web and catch up on emails. That is how students often feel in our classes, not because we are boring per se but because they have been sitting and listening most of the day already. They have had enough.”
“In addition, there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students and I recognized, uncomfortably, how much I myself have engaged in this kind of communication…Of course it feels ridiculous to have to explain the same thing five times, but suddenly, when I was the one taking the tests, I was stressed. I was anxious. I had questions. And if the person teaching answered those questions by rolling their eyes at me, I would never want to ask another question again. I feel a great deal more empathy for students after shadowing, and I realize that sarcasm, impatience, and annoyance are a way of creating a barrier between me and them. They do not help learning“.
What this teacher describes is in complete alignment with what I see in schools on a daily basis. Teachers are stressed; the educational environment is artificial and ironically not designed to optimize learning. There are too many children in one class and while everyone has specific individual needs, they’re expected to follow (and the teacher must teach according to) a standardized ‘one-size-fits-all’ lesson plan. It is no wonder that most of us leave school with a question mark across our face asking ourselves if we ever really learned anything?
In my work as a teacher I obviously also come across children that ‘act out’ and that can’t sit still, and I do get frustrated. But what I refuse to do is to blame the children and if I do it anyway in the silence of my own mind, I make sure that I investigate how I can stop blaming the child and instead look for solutions through which I can change the situation.
I had a class where the students were continuously goofing around and laughing. As it kept happening and it made it difficult for me to teach, I became more and more frustrated. I tried talking to the kids about it, explaining to them how it was difficult to teach when they were goofing around all the time. I even agreed with them that they could have a portion of the lesson to goof around if they promised to pay attention the rest of the time. Nothing seemed to work. So eventually I decided to take another look at the situation and see if there were dimensions missing that I hadn’t considered.
I then began looking at how I could solve the point and I eventually came up with the idea that it was me who was being too restrictive because I had an idea about how the lessons were supposed to go. I realized that within my need to control the lesson and how it played out there was actually a fear in terms of my own role as a teacher, what the children are ‘supposed to learn’ and fearing how others would see me as a teacher, not following ‘the norm’.
As is obvious, I too am a product of the exact same school system that perpetuates an unnatural learning environment, not optimized for learning but for producing docile and complacent individuals.
So from all of this I decided to let go of my control. I decided to let them do what they do and more see if I can instead join with them and support them. So I did and it was very interesting.
What I started to realize is that the students primarily need interactive exercises that’s not just about reading and writing while they sit still. They need to feel, touch and hear. They need to use their hands, being creative and create a connection between themselves on a physical level and whatever it is they are learning about. Because as we’ve seen, learning as it is constructed now is based on the premise that the child must disconnect from its physical body and literally ‘plug out’ or go into a vegetative state, while the mind is supposed to be the only active tool that the child use, honoring ‘inner imagination’ and all that. By doing that we are cutting the child off from its life force, from its creativity, its passion and from itself. This is why they are so passive, why they don’t participate, why they don’t feel an ownership for what they learn; because essentially it has nothing to do with them. Their bodies and minds belongs to the school, to society and the whole purpose of going to school is to assimilate children just enough for them to be functional members of society who will work and consume and consume and work in an endless cycle like little cogs in a wheel.
In previous blogs I’ve discussed how important it is for children that whatever they learn is connected to the real world, that it has meaning for them so that school doesn’t just become a mock or simulated version of reality that is entirely disconnected from their own lives. What I hadn’t considered was that one of the ways that education must be real and connected to the child is through the physical. So I realized that I had to connect the lesson material and the topics, the words and the grammar to physical activities. So as I started to incorporate that into my lessons, where the children switch between reading and doing physical exercises or otherwise interact/are creative I was able to teach them a lot easier. They were not disrupting or disturbing and they would happily join in.
So what all this has taught me, is to focus more on checking where the students are, especially if they’re disrupting – because there might be something that I’m not seeing where they need and require a different type of lesson, especially focusing more on being physical and less on sitting still. Overall I’ve discovered that anything interactive is much more enjoyable for them, and even here they can still learn all the things they need to learn – but it can be in a fun and creative way. I learned that when I allow myself to let go of control, lean back and observe, I actually see a lot more and can see solutions that I hadn’t considered before because I was too locked in an idea about how I wanted things to be.
We domesticate children to exist in a world that is anything but civilized, but that is in fact sophisticatedly babaric and savage and we tell them that what is inside them as a natural expression is too wild, too savage and cannot be let out into the open, because ”what if everyone did that?” Well… what if they did?
It is not the children that has to change, that has to behave, sit up, sit straight and shut up. It is us. We have to dare to think out of the box, hell; live out of the box – realizing that we’ve become the box.
Supporting the creation and nurturing of self-aware and self-responsible child is imperative for us to change the current course our world is on. Because it is domestication of children, that we break them down and disconnect them from being active and awake and present in their physical bodies, that we create those zombie-like placated human beings that do not contribute anything of value to our world but perpetuating the cycle of working and consuming.
Because students only learn about the world, the names of the countries, cities and continents as abstract knowledge that they just have to learn to survive without fully understanding why, they are disconnected from seeing themselves as part of the world, as existing in an interdependent and interconnected world. They are unable to place themselves in the shoes of another with compassion, because they have never learned to even be firmly grounded in their own shoes and instead exist in an artificial tension field between virtual reality and their own minds, the body being nothing more than a vessel existing to be used to survive. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Education could be so much more if we would only admit to a desirable example or ourselves that the society we are preparing our children for is NOT optimal to follow. Obviously because the situation is what it is, we also can’t just entice them to rebel and become oppositional because that doesn’t work either. But we can show them both sides of the coin. We can provide them with a holistic perspective that works with a three-dimensional and tangible reality, instead of focusing exclusively on a one-dimensional virtual one. We can stand by them and stand with them as they go through the education system to not allow their life force and expression to be squashed, but to find creative ways to work with the system in the system and slowly but surely prepare the road before us of taking the leap into a different way of co-existing. Just imagine the adults who would come out of such an education system and the potential they would have to create substantial change in this world. One thing is clear: we can’t afford not to.
If you are ready to get involved in a political and economic change of paradigms and thereby also a change of our education systems, I invite you to investigate the Equal Life Foundation’s proposal of a Guaranteed Living Income System. This proposal suggests a groundbreaking change in political paradigms that doesn’t ‘take sides’ but instead presents a completely new approach to solving the problems we are currently facing in this world.
Relevant articles and materials in relation to the subject of domestication of the natural child:
http://missnightmutters.com/2014/11/dear-parent-about-that-kid.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/24/teacher-spends-two-days-as-a-student-and-is-shocked-at-what-she-learned/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/03/critical-exposure-school-to-prison-pipeline_n_6094376.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000010
http://www.edutopia.org/new-teacher-burnout-retention
Re-Educate yourself here:
A couple of months ago I was part of the panel on a Live Google Hangout about the Common Core standards initiative. I definitely recommend watching it.
The Ultimate History Lesson with John Taylor Gatto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQiW_l848t8
PROPAGANDA | FULL ENGLISH VERSION (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NMr2VrhmFI
The Century of the Self
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7EwXmxpExw
Psywar
http://metanoia-films.org/psywar/
The Trap
http://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis_TheTrap
The Power Principle
http://metanoia-films.org/the-power-principle/
Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century
http://metanoia-films.org/human-resources/
The Story of Your Enslavement
http://youtu.be/Xbp6umQT58A
Blind Spot
https://vimeo.com/30559203
Inequality for all documentary:
http://www.putlocker.to/watch-inequality-for-all-online-free-putlocker.html
The Four Horsemen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fbvquHSPJU
On Advertisement and the end of the world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8gM0Q58iP0
Third World America – Chris Hedges
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drZE65_134g
More articles about parenting and education in a Guaranteed Living Income System:
http://livingincomeforall.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/parents-need-a-living-income-now/
https://livingincomeguaranteed.wordpress.com/category/parenting/
http://economistjourneytolife.blogspot.com/2014/01/day-259-living-income-guaranteed-and.html
https://livingincomeguaranteed.wordpress.com/2014/04/04/the-self-perpetuating-cycle-of-homelessness-and-living-income-guaranteed/
Watch the hangout about Education for a New World in Order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlj5wGCRnSU