Part One: Education Is Fatal

I have long felt that one’s childhood and their education play off of each other--they are never felt or experienced in equal amounts. Our notions of what constitutes “childhood” vary tremendously due to this exact problem. Some might say that childhood constitues being “seen and not heard”, absorbing lessons, biding time until one has developed fully; others insist that childhood is the most free we’ll ever be and our one moment of true innocence. Still others argue that children are merely young adults, capable of almost all (or at least most) of the same thought processes, rationalizations, and ideas.

We can’t settle this by trying to find the “most correct” perspective. Nor can we limit our options and say that it simply doesn’t matter. Not to be dramatic, but understanding how we develop is critical to changing our world. We have managed to create truly staggering societies based on our systems of education, but in a great many ways we have completely missed the point. And these omissions are coming back to haunt us.

Karma

Now that we’ve built up our civilization to such a degree, lessons that once were self-evident have been lost in the inevitable forward march of culture and consciousness. Their lack is coming out in the way we interact with each other, in the way we abuse our natural resources (even in calling them “ours”), and in the way we think and progress. We are sending thousands to die for someone else’s idea. We are raping the Earth. We are increasingly isolated. We are strangers in our own families, deaf to the cries of others.

Now that most of us in the “developed” world no longer worry about our basic survival, we concern ourselves primarily with the movement of valueless paper, creating, in the very fabric of our cultures, an elaborate and infantile system of punishment and reward whose monumental silliness is matched only by the degree to which we believe in it.

Not one of the above is being done by children. It’s only after a few years of exposure that these traits manifest.

Still think our education system is working?

No, children are different. And education is fatal.

Childhood is a state of true wonder, each moment unprecedented, time elastic and arbitrary. This isn’t a matter of having less responsibility-- it’s a totally different way of seeing the world, far beyond both ignorance and innocence. In Zen, the phrase “Beginner’s Mind” encapsulates some of that idea, though hardly doing it justice. No, I think childhood is a wholly separate time of life: one that follows essentially forgotten rules.

Where We’ve Gone Wrong

We have tried so hard to create children who are like us that we have forgotten what it means to actually be a child. To be potential itself, free of constraint or comparison. And because children learn (from us) to inhibit that “original self” as quickly as possible, they are unable to tell us where we have failed them.

As education begins to work its way into our lives, with the resulting notion of “correct” and “incorrect”, a new and more traditional way of seeing comes with it. The problem isn’t with the principle of education: on some level, we all love learning. But something else triggers the dismantling of “Beginner’s Mind”. Like a virus, the effects are almost inperceptible on a day-to-day basis. After several years, however, a change is clearly evident, and it isn’t a positive one.

Assisted Thinking: Or “Relax, We’ll Take It From Here”

When we stop learning for ourselves and start learning for others, even in the earliest stages of our education, we begin a slow slide into what I call “assisted thinking”. When we are graded on how well we absorb preassigned facts or--the worst offender--how well we take a standardized test (here in the States, it’s called the SAT), we give up that initial impulse to actually explore. We become convinced, however gradually, that most things have already been thought of, and condemn ourselves to a life of nitpicking. It becomes seductive to simply leapfrog over others’ ideas, cherry-picking the ones we agree with and the ones we choose to argue with, and returning to the initial problem with a quick redefinition. A terrifying amount of academic work amounts, essentially, to this-- a simple agreement or disagreement with preexisting statements, occasionally backed up with testimony provided by others who similarly agree. Rarely is forward momentum achieved--rarer still is the scholar or educator who realizes how cyclical this process is.

Doesn’t this seem like a complete waste of time? Why, then, are we contributing to it?

Assisted thinking leads, at its worst, to a strange series of rationalizations where we draw conclusions based on the past rather than the present. What others have thought or done becomes a framework for future action, regardless of its wisdom (or more commonly, its lack of wisdom). We regurgitate what we have been taught, even in areas where our teaching clearly no longer applies. Religions are a great example of this, in that whatever we are taught and retaught with conviction over the duration of childhood, becomes a virtually unshakable belief in our consciousness--simply because someone else told us. Someone else’s idea motivates us to live our lives. Someone else’s idea motivates us to hate. Someone else’s idea motivates us to kill. There’s nothing wrong with religion (and, in fact, it serves a great purpose), but there is something wrong with an unquestioning belief in anything.

We have to realize that something happens to us as children that permits this kind of thinking. And maybe I’m just weird-- I know I always asked “why?”, and still do. It’s possible that most people simply aren’t as innately curious. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this to begin with.

Breaking the Cycle

I’ll break from that oh-so-wonderful tradition of regurgitating old ideas for a second. Stand back. This idea may be half-formed, not entirely polished, and maybe even --gasp!--brand new.

Let’s use our educational system as a way to actually give back to the world.

Imagine a world without facts or one-size-fits-all requirements (that would all come, depending on career choice, later in life). Instead, just think of how meaningful a classroom could be if it actually taught us how to find ourselves. Not in order to slide quietly into yet another mold, another career path, another college; no, in this ideal school we focus our attention on a student’s own wish to help--and the tools that allow them to best realize that dream.

The American Dream?

Kids love helping out. Yet we come from a scarcity mentality, one that says that there are not enough jobs, enough people, enough time to learn what will give us an edge in this “new world economy”. So we work--mentally, physically, emotionally-- to give ourselves “success”. We stress and strain to “get ahead”, sacrificing our deeper passions and wishes in order to provide the lifestyle we want for ourselves and our families. Most of us don’t even know what those deeper passions really are, having repeatedly had them culled out of us, year after crushing year. Why do you think there’s such a big self-help boom going on now that the internet has given us a faster way to communicate (and therefore more time for introspection)?

Abundance-based thinking, on the other hand, starts at the earliest age--in childhood, where anything is still possible. We forget this awareness later in life, becoming self-absorbed and caught up in endless cycles, chasing what we decide is rightfully ours, fearing loss, fearing anything that might get in our way.

What we mistake for happiness is all too often simple survival, with reduced anxiety-- we think we’re “ahead”, happy, fulfilled because for a few moments we have what we need and aren’t struggling to maintain them. We even have anxiety pills, easily available from a doctor, which can make us content with wherever we fit in the hierarchy. But real happiness, real joy (beyond mere material & professional contentment), is something we’ve totally given up on. In fact, the people we meet who have such happiness are often viewed as simpleminded, less-than, inferior.

Childlike.

“No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.”

— Emma Goldman, Lithuanian-American writer, lecturer and activist (1869-1940)

One of the most intelligent people I have ever met dresses like a bum, somewhat out of necessity, and is one of the best guitarists I have ever heard. Every day to him is an adventure: he talks to anyone, does anything at a moment’s notice, and makes a halfway-decent living off of tips and short-term gigs. Now, I’m sure that he will find a great future in music, due to his skill, but in that same future there will be suits who look at him with disdain even as they’re listening (without even realizing it) to his music at night, wishing they could be as free. He, more than anyone I know, is living the real American dream, that subtler, more elemental, intensely-masculine wish for total freedom. No amount of money can buy it, just as no job can give it. It is innate. And it comes from seeing the world as a place of true abundance.

I won’t speak for him, but it seems to me that most of his anxiety and stress in this life has to do with the fact that he is not “right” for the working world, and is therefore condemned to a certain type of lifestyle--one he enjoys, certainly, but one I’m sure he’d like to change if given the chance. We’d all like to have lots of money--for many people, the problem has nothing to do with the level of hard work and everything to do with the type of work. There are millions of unemployed or barely employed people all across the developed world who don’t “fit the mold” and are therefore barely getting by. Is it their lack of education (adherence to arbitrary standards)? Is it their lack of intelligence? If they asked you why with three jobs and eighteen hours a day of hard work they were unable to make as much as a bus driver or the barely-sentient technician you just hired, would you be able to explain it to them?

Our economy is based on one truism: the further away from manual labor, the more you make. True laborers are often exploited completely, and not paid at all. Others are paid to sit and “think”--their minds are that valuable. But how did they get there?

Imagine if self-inquiry was as highly regarded as external influence--if our own discoveries mattered as much to others as what we were taught. Imagine all learning being prized, irrespective of the specific information that was imparted, because we trust (due to an abundance mindset) that such learning will be of value later in life. We do not try to cram ourselves into a definition. We do not try to cut off our possibilities as quickly as possible. We simply learn, at the rapid rate of one who actually cares. This is what it means to live in abundance.

“But that’s preposterous,” you say. “We need to learn certain kinds of information, even if we don’t like it. We must be prepared for the future.”

Ahh, but therein lies the very problem…

Freedom of Expression

The drive to truly express ourselves does rear up one last time after schooling begins--as that intriguing mess of hormones and emotions, the Teenager. Typically it’s here that one rebels from the societal norms, in order to gain acceptance and to find what makes them unique. What’s really interesting is the way these very qualities are quickly squashed. We are taught--some catch on faster than others!--that the “only way” to succeed in life is to make yourself presentable on paper. If you can’t do this properly, you’re condemned to a different kind of life, one where your personality can come forward beyond the confines of a suit. And while these jobs may lead to higher satisfaction, they are usually on the opposite end of the income scale.

In essence, we reward those who spent time learning to present themselves, rather than those who continue to spend time learning on their own. Though we think we are rewarding actual skill, we are in fact rewarding those who are best at “pretending”.

Educate Yourself First

The single most important thing I can impart to anyone (beyond, perhaps, that “this moment is all we have”) is that we need to educate ourselves first.

We need to keep learning. We need to find out what makes us truly excited. There is something out there, even if we’ve lost the tools to look for it. If you aren’t finding your passion, you are living a lie. Simple as that.

We were all instructed that trading our time for money was a perfectly reasonable way to channel our instinct to help. Yet we’re slowly finding that this tradeoff is harmful to our own well-being, detrimental to all but our most basic desires, destructive to original thought and is creating an increasingly stagnant and destructive world. Steve Pavlina wrote a terrific article on deciding how we should be living, and I would encourage you to check it out before the next ten years take away your desire to change. You must discover what you’re living for. You must find opportunities in line with your reasons for being alive.

Education, in this broadest and most important definition, is not the responsibility of a school or a specific teacher. It is not the responsibility of a job. It is yours alone. And real learning comes from being able to fit the pieces of one’s life together, to constantly re-evaluate your thinking in light of new information. It’s about forging new and unusual connections, rather than being hung up on (or worse yet, content with!) repeating the predictable. And this, to me, is what school, and particularly higher education, are for. Not to force us into tiny pathways of established wisdom, but to encourage and develop our ability to discover and communicate on our own. Education is fuel for the fire of creative thought. Uniqueness begets uniqueness.

We cannot create an original idea by analyzing and interpreting existing information. Life is ultimately about the questions, not the canned responses. To believe otherwise is to condemn oneself to a peripheral role, and ultimately, a peripheral existence.

“It takes a long time to grow young.”

-Pablo Picasso

Don’t remain satisfied with “getting through it”. Deep down, you know you aren’t doing enough--even when you’re working hard, you have an excellent resume, you have the house and car everyone wants, and you’re in great shape. You’re still not serving the world, and until you do something about it, that lack and dissatisfaction will make itself heard in one way or another. Look at our world.

We (as a species) truly do want--and need-- to help. But the only way to retain any sense of that earlier life, that wholly free-thinking and compassionate dedication from childhood, is in exploring what really matters to us. Anything else is false: dedicated to false gods of money or prestige, false enthusiasm for projects one couldn’t care less about, false happiness, false hope.

We were never taught these lessons as children; we knew them innately. We’ve simply forgotten.

Show a worker how his contribution matters, and you’re guaranteed to see an increase in productivity for as long as his goals and yours are in line. Make them feel their ideas have real merit, and you’ll have dramatically more enthusiasm--again, as long as their goals and yours are aligned. Treat people like the constantly-growing, endlessly-curious being they once were, and they will seize the opportunity to provide you with real value in unexpected ways. Treat them as enemies, as subjects, as conduits to stuff full of information, and you will end up with today’s world, today’s wars, today’s thinking, today’s scarcity mentality.

The educational system we have put in place is crippling our freedom, our intelligence, and our creativity. After decades of reinforcement by jobs and higher schooling, we emerge without a spark of passion, masters of assisted thinking, pretending whatever we can so as to appear as obedient and subservient as possible to future employers--and spending our free time wondering where we’ve gone wrong.

We need to remember what it is to feel alive. And we need to create educational constructs which help ensure that future generations never lose sight of that feeling. We need passion, courage, and consciousness, and we need them far more than we need unhappy employees and discouraged wage slaves, assisted thinkers and money-hungry litigators. We need original thought, from original minds, and we need it now.

So how can we begin? Stay tuned…

(Part one in a series.)

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Perhaps this is one reason art has risen to become such a jaw-droppingly major part of world history--any attempt at all to communicate these stories acts as a form of validation, both for storyteller and audience.

What makes this realization even more startling is the observation that we seem to perceive ourselves, and those around us, as existing entirely within the confines of a specific moment--that somehow this one instance is “more” real than anything prior. I’ve seen this happen all the time in New York. One encounters such a range of people that their actions in one moment become our entire basis for evaluating their character. Why?

A loud, aggressive panhandler has, for all we know, always been so. A gorgeous woman wakes up every morning looking perfect. The businessman who almost knocked you over on the way to his appointment is simply a rude and disrespectful person, always.

Even if we intellectually understand that these things aren’t necessarily true, we act as though we sincerely believe them. Actions taken in a specific moment, under specific circumstances, quickly become “compressed” into our only working representations of others. And while I’m certain this behavior is definitely fueled by an urban environment and the resulting constant influx of new faces, it is no less true anywhere in the world; the need to compress information about others is inherent to the deepest recesses of the human mind. We must constantly make these snap decisions in order to evaluate whom we may trust, whom we must fear, and whom we may befriend.

After visiting a friend in Washington, D.C., I tried to board the bus home to New York, but found there were no more seats as the agency had overbooked the trip. I waited an hour for a second bus, this time guaranteed and similarly almost full, and settled at random in a seat next to a woman on the phone. For roughly 15 minutes, we said nothing to each other, in that strange wordlessness that always seems to occupy travel with strangers, then suddenly started talking--almost impatient for conversation. We ended up chatting for most of the entire 5-hour ride, discovering a tremendous amount of common experience. When the subject turned to books, and in particular to Neil Gaiman, she offered to give me the copy of American Gods she was reading if I let her finish the last few chapters she had left. All this because of our clear interest in creating a more informed image of another person--something beyond a momentary judgment. An interest in communicating, however ineffectively, some small measure of experience; some aspect of the details which have led us to that point, and to our sitting next to each other on one particular bus on one particular day. Had I been on that first bus instead, I might have had a similar experience with an entirely different person. Perhaps I wouldn’t have an experience at all, merely settling with a subset of a personality expressed in a few mumbles of overheard phonecalls. Who knows?

When we discuss something at work or go to parties or eat lunch or meet someone new, we often feel as if those events are entirely self-contained; that our chosen address of the situation is based wholly on the events themselves, devoid of the markings of a past. In reality, every action we take is the result of “who we’ve been”; we are all vehicles for our stories.

Who Am I?

Some of us are black, Chinese, Hispanic, white. Some are men, some are women. We’re rich or poor or somewhere in between. Some of us are illiterate. Some of us are Yale graduates. Some of us have seen a sunrise over the Sahara; some of us have never seen the stars.

Can you live as all these possibilities?

Can you really claim to know anything at all, beyond your severely circumscribed existence?

Though you may think you know everything there is to know about your best friends, lovers, teachers, or relatives, you will never--and can never--know what it feels like to live as them. You might never know what their kindergarden classroom looked like, what their favorite memory is, what they studied their second year in college, or the way their living room looked in their first home. All these things can be asked, of course--and quantities and colors can be detailed readily enough--but it is virtually impossible to provide the actual experience, the actual feeling even of one’s most mundane moments. Eating a tomato at noon on a rainy Tuesday. Waiting for a friend. Wind blowing through a backyard. An ambulance’s siren.

What Is Your Story?

Realize that as you read this, the experiences and events of your life have conspired to make you see the world in a very specific and very personal way; one that allows you to be here in the first place. Even reading these words requires knowledge of English, a worldview that encourages curiosity and self-examination, willpower many do not have, and interest based on other attributes of your past. A dolphin will never be able to experience this moment the way you have; nor will a citizen of a far-flung country or even your next door neighbor. In essence your “story” allows you to be here. Your story is why you’re here.

So just what is that story? Do you hide it from others, or do your actions make it obvious? If your life was a feature film, what would the plot be?

Homework

Take this day--and hopefully every day, if you feel you can--to really delve deeper into the stories of others. Realize that no behaviors are born in isolation; that there is more pulsating beneath the surface of our actions than can ever be expressed. And just as you will never be able to truly experience life from another’s perspective, understand that they will never be able to experience yours.

Relax into this exquisite, insurmountable difference.

The more we are able to communicate about our existence, the more we can help others.

For today, live outside the habit of “compressing” others. Dig deeper. Find more. And reveal something of your own story, so that they are just as unable to “compress” you. Show yourself.

In the moments of our interactions, we can choose to focus solely on the events themselves, cut off from our past, adrift from our stories, or we can choose to make each moment bigger, each sentence grander; in every instant we can choose to proudly note that each of us is so much more than this.

The more we are able to “flip” our perspectives--and the less we are attached to our personal domains of sensory & experiential data--the more we can work together to create great things.

So share some tiny detail today. Recall your fifth birthday, or the clouds the day you first realized you could die. There are no such distinctions as “good” or “bad”--there are only experiences. And even the most mundane of experiences can be meaningful to another.

Why limit yourself to only living one life? There are 6 billion more, and each is made up of a trillion points of thought, ten thousand sparks of memory, a few billion smells and tastes and sounds. How can this not inspire? How can this not amaze?

It is truly an honor to be blessed with memory…

It is truly an honor to be blessed with a past.