The Global Conversation

Tag: education

  • An educational pep talk

    What specific word will spur a child to a life of discovery? What influence, person or otherwise, will cement the ideas by which a child will formulate his or her worldview? What subject in school will lead a child to be a “success?” By what standard do we measure success?

    The meanings of questions change as we become more aware of our individual spiritual purpose, our reason for Being. Conversations with God encourages us to embrace a new way of measuring success. In the Old Cultural Story, success was measured by how much stuff you accumulated, often at the expense of another. Scarcity was used as a motivational factor and competition was encouraged.

    In the New Spirituality, we learn that Our purpose is to recreate ourselves anew every day in the next grandest version of the greatest vision we ever held about ourselves. Instead of glorifying the scarcity and “do anything to get ahead” mentality, we come to understand that There is enough, Human beings do not have to struggle with each other to get what they want, and The wonderful ways to be are truthful, aware and responsible. In fact, Conversations with God even says that No human being is superior to another. And this is just a retelling of just a few of the core concepts from the CwG body of work.

    I recently watched an enlightened young man, Logan LaPlante’s, TEDx University Talk about his ideas about home school education. You can watch it here: http://youtu.be/h11u3vtcpaY

    Logan’s parents have allowed him, to a certain degree, to direct his own education based on his interests. When asked what he wants to be when he grows up, his answer is simple: He wants to be happy.

    He says adults ask the wrong questions. He is unsure what career he will pursue, although he is leaning toward designing outdoors sports and recreation equipment. He thinks focusing on what to be or do in the future is a mistake. He is, instead, choosing to focus on what to be and do now.  He believes that the only way to have a fulfilled life is to start by having a happy and fulfilled childhood. So he pursues his interests now, focusing on being happy and learning the things that are interesting. He calls this “hacking” his education.

    While I watched, I couldn’t help but see similarities between his ideas about growing up, his education, and his ideas about the future and people on a spiritual path. (That’s not to say that I assume he has read CwG or would agree with its messages.) It shows that children, when allowed to have some self-direction will flourish; that once we remove the walls and restrictions their own ideas and creativity can flourish. This, contrary to old ideas, will not lead to uncontrolled hedonism, it actually leads to growth.

    After watching Logan and really listening to what he had to say, I reevaluated my own approach to my daughter’s homeschooling. I noticed that I had gotten into a rut, and honestly, taken some of the fun out of our schooling because I felt pressure to get through and finish tasks. Logan’s enthusiasm, courage and innovative ideas inspired me. I have rededicated myself to giving her more control in directing her education because I know that she will enjoy, and thereby learn, more. It will also, allow her to Be Happy now, rather than waiting for her to become something in the future.

    Children like Logan know the answers to the questions above about success, inspiration and discovery can be answered in many ways. They don’t have to be tied to how many good grades a child gets, if they get into certain colleges, or how much money they make. They can be about enjoyment, finding inspiration and value in things that make them happy, lead them to think, and give them a reason to feel passionate about a subject.

    Thank you for the pep talk, Logan!

    (Emily A. Filmore is the Creative Co-Director of www.cwgforparents.com. She is also the author/illustrator of the “With My Child” Series of books about bonding with your child through everyday activities.  Her books are available at www.withmychildseries.com. To contact Emily, please email her at Emily@cwgforparents.com.)

  • You can’t talk about G-O-D in school…or can you?

    Did you know that there are approximately 30 high schools located in the U.S. whose mission it is to enroll students committed to being abstinent from alcohol and other drugs and working a program of recovery?  These recovery high schools understand that in order to create and sustain long-lasting positive change in these young adults’ lives, their recovery process must be supported by an environment which nurtures those choices and continues to provide ongoing peer mentoring and social acceptance.

    Did you know there is an entire educational movement called Unschooling?  According to Allen Ellis, 23, a former Unschooling attendee, “Unschooling is an exciting alternative to contemporary schooling that empowers students to create their own education. Much like homeschooling, families are free to explore opportunities outside of the public school system, and even outside of the curriculums that many homeschoolers use. Unschoolers pursue their interest of the moment, and in the process find their passions of a lifetime.  Conversations with God, Book II talks about a new education system which is based on the values of awareness, honesty, and responsibility; a system that teaches the student to think critically, come to their own conclusions, and gives them a sense of “unlimitedness.” Unschoolers have been doing this for decades in our modern era, and humanity has been doing this in a sense for our entire history. Babies “unschool” themselves in learning how to talk and walk: Unschooling families simply let their children unschool the rest of life, too.”

    Did you know that there are approximately 1,000 schools located throughout 60 countries in the world which operate under the Waldorf Education model?   This program is an extraordinarily unique educational experience which, according to their website, “Is based on a profound understanding of human development; provides a detailed, richly artistic curriculum that responds to and enhances the child’s developmental phases, from early childhood through high school; cultivates social and emotional intelligence; connects children to nature; ignites passion for lifelong learning; and is the fastest growing educational movement in the world.  For the Waldorf student, music, dance, and theater, writing, literature, legends and myths are not simply subjects to be read about, ingested and tested. They are experienced. Through these experiences, Waldorf students cultivate a lifelong love of learning as well as the intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual capacities to be individuals certain of their paths and to be of service to the world.”

    Of course, these three examples are only a handful of some of forward-thinking, mold-breaking, sameness-shattering groups of people on our planet who are no longer accepting status quo as good enough for the youth in our world.  It’s not difficult to follow the dotted lines and grasp the idea that each next generation becomes humanity’s next decision-makers.  So if we want to keep seeing more of what we have now, I guess it makes perfect sense to continue siphoning our children through the same narrow educational funnel that we currently filter them through.  But if we are expecting different results, if we are looking to experience some truly significant changes not only in the way our society functions, but in the way it thrives, isn’t it time to at least consider a different approach to our educational system?

    But what does that different approach look like?  What kind of educational system will the masses embrace if it doesn’t sustain itself on a platform of students memorizing dates and achieving 4.00 grade point averages and sitting in overcrowded classrooms and filling their heads with arbitrary facts in order to pass “standardized tests” which are taught by underpaid teachers?

    The news is saturated with daunting stories of bullying, teen suicide, school shootings, teen pregnancy, rampant drug use, eating disorders, drinking, depression, and social anxiety.  Aren’t these painful symptoms enough for us to collectively stand up and declare that the way we are currently doing this clearly isn’t working?  How many more bricks do we need to hit us in the head before we are finally willing to try something different?

    Will there ever be a day when the God of each individual person’s understanding will be allowed in school?  Will discussions about spirituality ever be as commonplace as saying the Pledge of Allegiance?  Will students ever be able to engage in the kinds of conversations we here on The Global Conversation enjoy, conversations about God, about Life, about Who We Really Are?  Could this be the biggest missing piece of the puzzle, the freedom and opportunity for our children to express their deepest thoughts and to hear, really hear, the deepest thoughts of their peers in an environment which creates the space for them to do so?  Can we imagine a framework which operates not in the spirit of obtaining sameness or achieving conformity, but in the spirit of developing spiritual awareness and experiencing love without conditions, a system which creates real choices and true freedom?

    Could this ever work?  

    Are we willing to even try?

    (Lisa McCormack is a Feature Editor at The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)

  • Let’s get to the root of the problem, shall we?

    According to UNICEF, only 58% of secondary-aged children world-wide regularly attend school. In highly industrialized areas, like North America and Europe, that percentage rises to 92%. But in areas like Africa, those numbers fall to less than 30%. Two thirds of the world’s illiterate are woman. In some countries, it is even illegal for young girls to receive an education.

    The lack of education has a cascading effect on the level of poverty. Consider these facts:

    – Women in impoverished nations who have a secondary education have an average of 3 children. Those with less education have an average of 7.

    – In developing countries, an additional year of education has the potential to increase yearly earnings by 10%.

    – Women with a primary education level are 13% more likely to understand that condom use can help prevent the spread of HIV.

    The level of poverty has a domino effect on the health and well being of the world’s population.

    – More than 6 million children a year die from completely preventable causes like diarrhea and malaria. Most of these children are in impoverished nations with limited access to health care and clean drinking water.

    – Another 6 million children under the age of five die every year from malnutrition.

    – Almost 39% of the world’s population survives on less than $2 a day. More than 1 billion of those survive on less than $1 a day. To put that in perspective, someone in the US who is paying $589/month for a car loan for their gas-guzzling Hummer is paying every month almost twice what some people earn in an entire year.

    In this day and age, numbers like this are almost unfathomable. Perhaps a better word would be unconscionable. Yet this is the very real situation for more than a third of the world’s population. And the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is getting larger, even in industrialized and prosperous nations like the US. A 2013 report by the ALF-CIO places the average salary of a CEO in a US company at 364 times that of the average worker.  Even in Poland, a CEO makes 28 times what the average worker earns in one year.

    How we got to this point would—and does—fill volumes. Countless theses have been written on the causes of poverty and an untold number of studies have been done on how to eradicate it. Unfortunately, none of those efforts will succeed no matter how many times we try, no matter what variations we enact into policy, no matter how strict we make our laws, no matter how many social organizations we form to combat poverty because none of them address the root cause of the problem: the steadfast belief in the absolute truth of the Five Fallacies about Life.

    1. Humans are separate from each other.

    2. There is not enough of what human beings need to be happy.

    3. To get enough of the stuff there is not enough of, human beings must compete with each other.

    4. Some human beings are better than other human beings.

    5. It is appropriate for human beings to resolve severe differences created by all the other fallacies by killing each other.

    Fortunately, the masters down through the ages have given us a very simple way to overcome our beliefs, since we seem so unwilling to change them. It is most commonly called “The Golden Rule” and it was first found in the Vedic tradition of India almost 5000 years ago. Virtually every faith and religion, every philosophical and spiritual practice that man has created has some version of this truly insightful statement. Simply put, “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”

    The reason that following this simple rule would change life as we know it overnight is due to the fact that, at the very root of the matter, every one of us wants to be treated exactly the same way! Every one of us wants to live our life as we see fit, according to the beliefs that we hold dear, without undue interference from others.

    If every one of us followed the Golden Rule, there would be no need for laws, no need for governments, no need for armies, no need for nations. There would be no poverty, no killing, no abuse, no wars, no rape, no discrimination, no wanton destruction of the environment.

    I would not kill you because I would not want to be killed.

    I would not pollute your water supply because I would not want my water supply polluted.

    I would not let you go hungry because I would not want to go hungry.

    I would not interfere with your choice of who to marry because I would not want someone to interfere with my choice.

    I would make sure you had access to all the knowledge you needed to live your life as you saw fit because I want access to all the knowledge I need to live my life as I see fit.

    “But that will never happen!” I can hear the naysayers cry already. “You’ll never get everyone to follow the Golden Rule!”

    You don’t have to.

    The Golden Rule is a unilateral, unconditional command. It does not say “Treat others the way you want to be treated only if they treat you that way first” or “only if they treat you that way in return” or “only if they’re the same color/religion/orientation/socioeconomic level/etc. as you”. It says simply “Treat other people the way you want to be treated.” Period.  End of discussion.

    You are to follow the Golden Rule in spite of how other people treat you. You are not to sit around and wait for someone else to follow the Golden Rule before you begin to follow it.

    When you do this, small miracles happen. People start to like the way you are treating them and they begin to take notice and they begin to imitate how you treat others and they begin to treat others the way you treated them. With Love. Unconditional Love.

    When unconditional Love is given out, it multiplies. It is contagious. It spreads. Because it is healing to be Loved unconditionally. Just as when one cell of your body begins to heal, the cells around it begin to heal, so too will the human race heal when Loved unconditionally.

    Are you willing to be the first cell in your world to heal?

    Shelly(Shelly Strauss is a civil rights activist and speaker.  In addition to becoming an ordained minister, she has written 20+ novels and is the “resident visionary” at One Spirit Project.  Shelly is also a spiritual helper on the ChangingChange website, offering support and guidance to people faced with unexpected and unwelcome change .)

  • Unschooling: learning by the seat of your soul

    After dark on a summer evening, an 8-year-old boy named Allen and his mother sat on the blacktop driveway, which was still warm from the day’s sun, drawing with chalk. But they weren’t drawing daisies and rainbows and other normal-type pictures–they were doing geometry. Why? Because Allen wanted to know how the odometer on his bicycle worked. Why so late at night? Well, when better to learn than right after the question is asked?

    Allen remembers the night as having an exciting quality to it—like being allowed to stay awake to ring in the New Year—and he felt like they were up until midnight measuring the bicycle tires, calculating r2 and discussing the Pythagorean Theorem. In reality it was probably much less than that, but time warps when you’re engaged with something, and even geometry can be exciting to an 8-year-old when it’s applied to real life.

    Our childhood was filled with such time-warped moments; so much so that it was the norm instead of the exception. You see, my younger brother Allen and I didn’t go to school. Our classrooms were chalk on the driveway, the local riding stable, Girl Scouts, museums, beaches, Europe, Australia, caves, libraries, mountains, homemade movies, stage productions, cooking in the kitchen, managing family finances… We were (and are) unschoolers.

    Unschooling is an exciting alternative to contemporary schooling that empowers students to create their own education. Much like homeschooling, families are free to explore opportunities outside of the public school system, and even outside of the curriculums that many homeschoolers use. Unschoolers pursue their interest of the moment, and in the process find their passions of a lifetime.

    Conversations with God, Book II talks about a new education system which is based on the values of awareness, honesty, and responsibility; a system that teaches the student to think critically, come to their own conclusions, and gives them a sense of “unlimitedness.” Unschoolers have been doing this for decades in our modern era, and humanity has been doing this in a sense for our entire history. Babies “unschool” themselves in learning how to talk and walk: Unschooling families simply let their children unschool the rest of life, too.

    While the students pursue their interests, the parents create the space for learning: they make sure resources and opportunities are available for their children to follow their interests as deeply as they want and to stumble upon new potential interests. In the process, a fully-rounded education emerges, which includes more than just mathematics, history, and literature. For us, and for the many unschoolers we know, we learned respect for ourselves and others because our parents respected us enough to take control of our own education. We learned to see the world with curiosity and with the awareness of the differences in people’s lives and cultures, and to appreciate those differences as beautiful. We learned personal responsibility in managing our time, making our educational intentions known, and following through with our goals. We didn’t always succeed, and we learned a lot from that, too.

    Love is freedom. We know this from the New Spirituality paradigm, we know this from Christ, and some of us know this from our own experiences. In order to unschool, parents must have the unconditional, unfearing love that gives the child freedom to make their own choices; the freedom to know themselves as individuals and as integral parts of a family unit and larger society; the freedom to hone their strengths and learn how to contribute to help the world move toward the grandest vision that it has for itself.

    In return for this freedom, the child is more likely to respect the parent’s suggestions for how to live a full, safe, expansive life. This is not theoretical: Allen  and I have a wide collective base of unschooled friends and rates of stereotypical teenage rebellion in unschooling families are next to none. For instance, even though I often felt annoyed at the inconvenience, I never fought my parents’ rule that I couldn’t drive a car with passengers without an adult present or express permission until I was 18, because I understood that I was an inexperienced driver and that friends could be distracting. I knew that the rule came from a place of love, wisdom, and experience, so it made sense to follow it.

    Because unschoolers have the fortune to grow up in a family culture of unlimitedness and exploration, they often have an advantage in adult life. They know how to pursue things they’re interested in (which translates to careers), and they’ve often had experience in approaching people and marketing themselves as worthwhile apprentices or employees. They already understand the principle that if you pursue what you love, the rest will follow. Most will not let themselves get caught up in the cultural story of needing to go to college and get a job that they hate so that they can buy nice things that will ultimately “make them happy.” Instead, they write their own story and live it, unafraid of being different and being satisfied with the choices they’ve made.

    Allen and I took vastly different paths as young adults, and we are both largely happy with our lives and our choices–perhaps mostly because we learned early on that our choices are simply that: ours. We have the freedom to choose our life paths, interests, emotions, reactions, thoughts…everything. And because we know that so deeply, it’s much easier to change our choices when we think we need to. My biggest “victimhood” struggle was when I went to college and felt completely imprisoned by the institutional system. I had to remember that college was my choice, and that because I wanted to see it through to the end, I’d have to make the choice to stop feeling imprisoned. After that, college flew by.

    Of course, we’re still figuring things out, we still make mistakes, and we still need guidance, as everyone does, but both of us feel better prepared for life than most of our peers. People from all areas of our lives, with relationships to us from friends to classmates to bosses, have commented on qualities like our maturity, perseverance, ingenuity, and intelligence that we ascribe to our unschooled upbringing.

    Not every parent is ready right now to be an unschooling parent, but the unschooling movement is growing. Since the modern emergence from the public school system in the 1970’s, our numbers have grown to an estimated 100,000 or more students of current school age. However, most of us consider ourselves unschoolers for life, since unschooling is living life, so I expect there are quite a few more of us than that. As our world goes through massive shifts and growing pains, Allen and I think that unschooling is only going to keep rising in popularity, not only because it works as an education system, but because it works as a parenting system and as part of a more coherent and functional cultural story. The unschooling society in the US currently is spread out, but still tight-knit and supportive. We’re not immune to drama and disagreements, but we tend to be creative in the way we solve those disagreements. We tend to quickly remember that freedom (and the love that is inseparable from freedom) is the basis of our unschooling culture, and that is the culture we want to plant, nurture, and grow in our world.

    And yes, it really is as simple as being willing to use your evening at the drop of a hat to explain to your 8-year-old how his odometer works. The rest will follow.

    Laura Allen(Laura Ellis is 26 years old and lives in Santa Fe, NM. She is enrolled in a Master’s degree program for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine and has a background in writing, Reiki, horseback riding, and social sciences. Allen Ellis is 24 years old and lives in Orlando, FL. He is the Senior Motion Designer at Cybis Communications and has a background in videography, piano, web design, and programming. They can be reached at whyunschool@gmail.com. For more information on unschooling, visit whyunschool.info.)

    (If you would like to contribute an article you have authored to the Guest Column, please submit it to our Managing Editor, Lisa McCormack, for possible publication in this space. Not all submissions can be published, due to the number of submissions and sometimes because of other content considerations, but all are encouraged. Send submissions to Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com. Please label the topic: “Guest Column.”)

  • How big is your child’s dream?

    On October 9, 2012 a teenage girl in Pakistan named MalalaYousufzai was brutally shot by members of the Taliban on her bus ride home from school. Her initial prognosis was not good, yet today she is thriving – walking, reading, and writing. While she still has more medical procedures ahead, the doctors believe she should recover without major neurological damage.

    What possible reason could the Taliban have for wanting her dead?

    They are threatened by her dream that girls receive an equal education to that of boys and her outspoken advocacy for it. She launched herself into the international spotlight a few years ago, at the age of 11, with her blog about girls and education.  She has shown unabashed passion and courage, notwithstanding the threats against her life over the years.  Even in the face of her attack, she has expressed that her intent is to continue her unwavering advocacy for education.  In fact, she is so dedicated to her own school work that, according to CNN, she has already resumed studying for her exams, even as she recovers. The international community has embraced her as a champion, even naming Saturday, November 10th “Malala Day” to honor her dream  (read full story here) .

    Let’s reflect on what parents in the New Spirituality can learn from such a tenacious, brave young girl. I believe her strength and passion, the very same ones that made her a target of the Taliban, are helping her to make this miraculous recovery.  Your child may or may not be fighting for the right to education or to recover from a life-threatening injury; but the lessons we can, collectively learn, from Malala can be applied to many situations.

    One of the Core Concepts of Conversations with God says, “The purpose of your life is to recreate yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.”  What this concept means to me is that children who are encouraged to think for themselves by their parents, whose spirits are nurtured, rather than stifled, can lead very fulfilling lives of passion and become agents of great change! If Malala’s parents had discouraged her passion, the entire world might not be engaged, right now, in this important conversation about equal education.

    It is tragic that chasing her dream caused her to be a target of hatred and violence, but how amazing is it that she has still chosen to be an advocate for conversation and change!  In the New Spirituality, it is incomprehensible that violence is used as an attempt to settle disagreements in the modern world; and further, it seems extreme that it took such a terrible act of violence against a child to draw attention to the plight of education.  But all it takes to begin change is a dream…an idea…a person brave enough to stand for something.  Malala is a beacon of hope and a steward of dreams!

    I have wondered, in light of her attack, if her parents regret that they “allowed” her to be so outspoken; but I think her father’s speaking on her behalf about her continued passion shows that they do not. Or at least they appear to understand that this is something she feels compelled to do and that trying to stop her would be futile; that her advocacy is part of her purpose to recreate herself anew in the next grandest version of herself.

    You may wish to think about Malala the next time your child has a seemingly crazy idea in which he says he will invent healthful, non-toxic food that is inexpensive to produce, plentiful enough to feed the world, and easy to share. Or the next time she says she can invent cars that can be given away for free and use no gas.  He or she may be just the one to accomplish it!  How parents react to their children’s aspirations and solutions to life’s problems, no matter how outlandish or impossible they may seem, directly affects how “big” the child feels it is okay to dream.  And how big children feel allowed to dream directly affects how society progresses.

    How big do you wish for your child to dream? 

    (Emily A. Filmore is the Creative Co-Director of www.cwgforparents.com. She is also the author/illustrator of the “With My Child” Series of books about bonding with your child through everyday activities.  Her books are available at www.withmychildseries.com. To contact Emily, please email her at Emily@cwgforparents.com.)