The Nitty-Gritty of an Education Rebirth (Part 4)

I have outlined the fundamental paradigm shift that needs to happen in order to rebirth a more responsive, proactive and constructive education system. The shift in focus would be one from conformity and materialism to one of creativity and humanity. Indeed, it is a shift from logical, left-brain dominant thinking to the more esoteric, right-brain thinking. We see the necessity for this as we watch the burgeoning numbers of neurodiverse beings coming through the system today. With the relatively recent development in medical imaging, there is irrefutable evidence that neurodiversity is inextricably linked to right-brain dominance. Previous thinking that neurodiverse students lacked sensitivity and are besieged by deficits is fast becoming redundant. Indeed, neurodiversity brings with it hypersensitivity and many “superpowers” that are misunderstood at best, and feared at worst, by those who consider themselves neurotypical. I personally think that everyone falls in the category of neurodiverse as we’re all unique in our processing of this world, making for an ultimate diversity! Therefore, should we cater for the “neurodiverse”, we cater for all. Those that advocate for Universal Design for Learning (UDL) will wholeheartedly agree with me and quote many studies confirming this thinking.

So what does it look like to begin to cater for the fast growing number of right-brainers? It does not mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater! We all use both sides of our brain or else we’d never function. However, the System has been built on left-brain dominance and has changed very little since its inception. For the last two hundred or so years, the world has broken down into component systems and siloes. The focus has been very much on sequential, logical and scientific/mathematical thinking. Although the Arts have never quite died completely, they are very much considered second cousins to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. It is relatively recently that the Arts have been included in the acronym to make it into STEAM. However, my experience as a teacher has been that the Arts are included as an add-on rather than an integral part of the curriculum. Why are the Arts so important? Well, the Arts are pure creativity. Creativity is born of curiosity, presence and connection. Without creativity we don’t have the sciences nor innovation. Creativity is the seat of all learning and is the beginning point of all that is. Our innate ability to create is what drives our lives. We are creators. Whether we are conscious or unconscious about how and what we create does not affect our ability to create. We create our reality. This innate super-power is operationalised by the right hemisphere in our brain. Are you connecting the dots yet? Being so geared towards left-brain thinking, the System is failing so many of our right-brain dominant learners who are coming through today.

Right-brain thinkers tend to be “big picture” thinkers and find the siloed, compartmentalised tendencies of the present paradigm difficult to navigate. This is not to say that detail isn’t important nor that right-brainers cannot process detail - it simply means that when learning these learners prefer to be presented with the big picture and to fill in the detail themselves. This is diametrically opposite to most teaching programmes and curricula, which use sequential, compartmentalised details to eventually build the bigger picture. It is little wonder that there are increasingly difficult behaviours being dealt with in the formal learning environments and so much disengagement.

Until very recently, curiosity and discovery were obsolete in the systemic indoctrination of formal education. Play Based and Project Based learning have gained some traction in recent years, although not as a paradigm as such, but rather as a trend. Trends do not last. Soon other trends come along and everyone jumps on that bandwagon, dumping and leaving behind the last trend without ceremony. This is because the foundations that the system is built upon are not able to sustain the burden of anything other than what they were originally designed to support. As I’ve repeated time and again, our present foundations are based on the industrial revolution and  Neoliberal values generated in the 1980s  - those of profitability, compliance, control and hedonism. In order to maintain these values we’ve ended up with a system that is determined to put learners in boxes and slam the lid shut firmly. Diversity and humanity is paid lip service to in an attempt to quell a mass uprising, but the problems of inauthenticity are now becoming way too large to hide under that rug. 

Between 2006 and 2018, I was privileged to work with some absolutely remarkable young people. I taught in and led a couple of  teams in an intermediate school (years 7 and 8, 10 - 13 year-olds) that was bang in the middle of one of the lowest socio-economic areas in New Zealand. Gang culture dominated much of the contributing community, as well as poverty, drugs and disillusionment. I was tasked to lead a team and to teach a group of learners who had fared the worst at primary school. The criteria for being included in this class was being at least two years below the expected literacy and/ or numeracy levels. An entire classroom (we had nearly 40 students at its height) filled with learners who had “failed” for six years before coming to us and who were very obviously neurodiverse. Talk about a challenge. This class faced tremendous challenges both academically and personally. Indeed we were dubbed “the cabbage” class. Along with this “failure” and stigma came massive behavioural anomalies. The first six weeks were always chaotic and what I used to describe as “hell on wheels”. I would smile at my team as they came to me at the end of every day begging me to go back to convention, resort to the punitive and give up on the worst behaved children. Admittedly, that smile did often mask a huge temptation to relent, but I always knew that remaining steadfast in my paradigm would yield results in the end. My paradigm was based on my deep knowing that everyone of these (and every) young humans had limitless potential and were capable of connecting, creating and communicating. After six weeks or so of relentless modeling, talking about and practicing what I knew to be true, invariably, the class would seemingly miraculously transform. Some years our students would graduate into accelerated classes at highschool having previously been relegated to the “too hard basket” two years previously. Very few students “fell off the bus” and all made tremendous progress both academically and personally, even those who were non-verbal or labeled mentally/physically disabled. How? Through love. Love is the highest energetic frequency. We learned to connect with ourselves first through meditation, the arts and much time spent in nature. We learned to connect to each other through collaboration, challenges and developing a genuine, safe and supportive community among ourselves. We learned to connect to the Earth through our community garden and spending hours in nature walking, tending, learning and laughing together. Through this our learners began to realise their own potential and personal power to create something different in their reality, even in the most dire of situations. I am humbled and honoured to call many of these young people my friends to this day. I know that this paradigm shift works. I’ve lived it.

We have to put humanity back into the foundations. The past few years have highlighted, with some devastating effects, how humanity has been systematically separated from the truth of our potential and our power. A new paradigm has to acknowledge and embrace the essentially esoteric nature of the meaning of our existence. Science itself is returning to this cradle with the burgeoning discoveries of quantum physics and the nature of the quantum field. We have come full circle. I am not talking about human constructs of culture and religion, which have become mechanisms of separation, I am talking about the esoteric, but essential, truth that everything is energy and in essence there is no separation between anyone or anything. The maxim of “treat others as you would like to be treated” takes on new meaning in the light of this perspective. When you connect and interact with anything or anyone you are interacting with yourself. This smashes the idea of hierarchy and embraces diversity in an authentically inclusive way - from this paradigm our differences are redundant at the most fundamental level. We’re all expressions of the same thing. We all matter. We all have endless potential. We all have the ability to create - express an energetic frequency - by changing our energetic frequencies. Therefore, we all have responsibility for how we perceive our reality. 

In contemplating this paradigm shift, it becomes clear that should we collectively choose to recognise and follow this path, our education values and structures will need a major overhaul. There are already ideas and “alternative” programmes out there which can be looked at and incorporated into a rebirth of education. In the next part I will outline possible changes in structures and begin to look at the alternatives that could be put in place.