by Michael Mendizza

The social engineering goals of American education may have served a specific need at a specific time and in this light may have been "well-intended." The industrial society is gone, however, and so is the need for the kind of human being this system was designed to produce. But the intent imbedded in the original design remains, and like the Sorcerer's Apprentice keeps grinding out the same kind of human being year after year.

Referring to a Carnegie study, Joseph Chilton Pearce points out that only five percent of everything we learn in our lives we learn in school. The remaining ninety-five percent is the result of direct experience. And of this five percent we learn in school most remember only three to five percent for any length of time. Bottom line productivity of three to five percent of five percent may have been adequate to meet the social engineering needs of our emerging industrial society. But not today, not in our brave new future shocked world.

Gordon Moore, an inventor of the integrated circuit, who later went on to run Intel, noted years ago that the surfaces of transistors are shrinking approximately fifty percent every two years. Every two years we get twice the circuitry running at twice the speed for the same price. In human terms the adult brain possesses 100 billion neurons. By most calculations 100 billion bits of RAM will be standard equipment in computers in the next five years. This exponential growth is known as Moore's Law of Accelerating Returns. Merrill-Lynch, feeling the impact of Moore's Law, estimates that "fifty percent of the average employee's skills will be outdated in three to five years." The faster information and technology grow the faster basic assumptions underlying our approach to parenting and education become obsolete.

Traditional parenting and educational models assume that children must be trained in certain skills, embody certain information in order to become productive citizens, which is a nice way of saying, "to get a good job." This translates into curriculum, standards, tests and grades, measurements to insure that the assembly line is producing properly.

Standardized curriculum and "teaching to the tests" create industrialized human beings, which are increasingly out of date in today's fast changing world. Reformers tinker with the conveyor belt, starting children earlier each year. Recess, physical education, art and music have been eliminated, making room for more tests and drills. Despite these efforts the assembly line falls further behind. Large-scale social institutions cannot meet the demand. They can't adapt fast enough.

Visionaries have long proclaimed that the system can't be fixed. Educational reform, like recycling, is a bad idea that looks good. Recycling is a bad idea because it promotes the manufacture, use and disposal of wasteful toxic products. A deeper response would be to create products that are not toxic or wasteful. Reform is not the answer. The time has come for a deeper response to parenting and to education.

Responding deeply calls into question basic assumptions. Educating children, for example, is not the next frontier. Children aren't the problem, never have been. Children are natural learners. The last decade of brain research confirms that human development is experience dependent. The outer environment and the inner world of brain development are two sides of a single complex system. Experience with the environment alters the brains structure, chemistry, and genetic expression, often profoundly throughout life.

Children aren't the problem. We can't fix the system. The environment sculpts the developing brain. All of these point to what Joseph Chilton Pearce refers to as the "model imperative." Reaching and engaging individual adults, moms and dads, families, coaches, their personal networks and communities, now supported by information technologies, is the next great challenge in education. With the speed, passion and whole-systems approach that took us to the Moon we are now challenged to awaken and develop a new and fundamentally different adult model, one that sees through the false hopes and false fears imposed by our current forms of parenting and education. Only such a model can mentor a new generation of children and through them a new intelligent, creative,sustainable culture.

The typical adult mind, however, having been so deeply conditioned by its parenting and educational experiences, has lost the capacity to see beyond the limitations imposed by this conditioning. David Bohm, a world-class physicist, put it this way:

We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought itself.

Bohm describes how the natural intelligence of the mind becomes distorted by its conditioning. Conditioning of past experiences resonates throughout the body and mind as thoughts, images and feelings. Bohm understood that ideas and theories are not the "absolute truth," but rather, provisional proposals to be explored and adapted through examination and play. The brain loses track of the fleeting nature of its own processes. It tends to treat almost everything it "knows" as though it were permanent and "true." In other words, we form beliefs. We don't treat beliefs as proposals. We treat them as facts. Beliefs involve assumptions that operate beneath our awareness. These tacit assumptions build up over time, creating a set of predetermined "knee-jerk" reflexes. Much of what we call thought, parenting and education is based on what Bohm calls the "reflex system." Conditioned reflexes are great for finding our socks or driving the L.A. freeways. There is a catch. Reflexes involve little or no intelligence.

A unique characteristic that distinguishes a brain from other organs is the capacity to create images. Thoughts are mental images. Beliefs are even stronger mental images. The beliefs we have about ourselves, our self-image, predispose us to relate to the world in predictable ways. Compounding our confusion, the brain tends to merge beliefs with our self-image. If someone challenges a deeply held belief about God or contrary, for example, we feel as though our very essence is being attacked. We defend our beliefs as if we are attacked physically. The more deeply the brain is conditioned by beliefs, the more the reflex system is activated. We don't choose our reflexes. They happen mechanically. All of this creates a general state of confusion in the mind. Like a dog chasing its own tail we try to solve the confusion in our lives by using the confused mind that created our confusion. Expecting such a mind to raise healthy, sane and creative children is crazy. We must bring our own house to order before we can model and mentor order for our children.

Moore's Law of Accelerating Returns compounds this challenge. Historically information and beliefs had a long shelf life, hundreds or even thousands of years. Knowledge was power. Not any more. Our beliefs are being challenged as the world speeds up, becomes more abstract, smaller and more complex. The exponential rate of change is challenging not just particular beliefs but the entire belief system. The inflation of information devalues its meaning. We are pushed closer and closer to Bohm's position of treating what we know as temporary tools, to be used when appropriate, rather than as absolute truths. Our identification with knowledge and belief, with its implicit defensiveness, is eroding. The good news is that this frees energy and attention to access and express other states, creative intelligence for example. Joseph Chilton Pearce tackles this basic issue in his latest book, The Biology of Transcendence. Transcendence is defined as "moving beyond limitation and constraint." And what is it that must be transcended?

First it is the limitations of one's present and earlier stages of development as new stages open and unfold, physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. Second and intimately interwoven with the first, we must transcend the limitations imposed by culture. Culture is the particular set of beliefs, customs, and expectations, the accepted self-world view of the group we develop in - how every good little girl and boy, and later every good parent "should" behave.

Implied in Bohm's work and that of Pearce are two fundamentally different "states of mind," the conditioned mind, educated, filled with content and reflexive, and the unconditioned, natural or original mind, pure potential, the innate capacity to learn and therefore to transcend the limitations and constraints imposed by our conditioning, self-image and beliefs. The conditioned state focuses on content, the past, what has been learned. The unconditioned state gives attention to the present, to capacity, possibility, what new discovery might be made now and the excitement this possibility brings.

Ashley Montagu, in his book Growing Young, referrers to this original unconditioned state of mind as the "genius of childhood," bursting with curiosity, imaginativeness, playfulness, open-mindedness, willingness to experiment, flexibility, humor, energy, receptiveness to new ideas, honesty, eagerness to learn and love. None of these qualities refer to specific content, knowledge or experience. They describe the natural and therefore optimum state of mind to meet, explore and be transformed by its interaction with a dynamic changing world.

Our traditional factory-conditioning model of education values content and asks: "Did we get it right? What is our score?" Every evaluation implies a degree of failure. This potential failure is implicit in every learning experience. The very structure of factory model implies anxiety, a relative degree of defensiveness as we approach each new challenge. Failure is built into the system, which cripples learning and performance.

The next frontier in education and parenting shifts attention from "what is" to what "may be," to the natural unconditioned state of the mind and its limitless capacity to learn. From this perspective we would never ask: "Did you win?" Our only concern would be: "What did you learn and did you enjoy the experience?" No failure is implied in these questions. There is no anxiety. The new frontier is called "state specific learning and performance." Pearce summarized this emerging model years ago in his book Magical Child. "Play on the surface and the work takes place beneath our conscious awareness."

State specific learning means that the "state" of our body and mind as it meets a challenge shapes our response to that challenge, it shapes our performance. Performance and learning are "state specific." Specific skills and content emerge from specific learning states. Optimum states express as optimum performance, optimum learning.

In optimum states we access the genius of childhood, the full spectrum of our potential is active, alert, ready to meet any challenge fully and completely. Athletes call optimum states the Zone, researchers call it Flow, and children call it Play.

Children are not the problem. The system was flawed from the beginning and can't be fixed. Current brain research and Moores Law of Accelerating Returns points to the environment, what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls the "model imperative," as the dominant force that shapes the future of humanity. The next frontier in parenting and education challenges individual adults to become adaptive agile learners just like the children they are mentoring.

We are at the threshold. Attention is shifting from child development to adult development. Education and parenting strategies are shifting from content-driven conditioning to the cultivation and development of optimum learning states.

Only by following intelligent, adaptive, creative, learning adults, something our present systems discourages, will our children develop the capacity to lead humanity into a sustainable future. Developing competent adult learners, passionate individuals who are learning explosively right alongside the children they love, this is the next frontier.

To be continued.

Copyright (c) Michael Mendizza, Touch The Future

About the Author

Michael Mendizza is an educational and documentary filmmaker; writer, photographer and co-founder of Touch The Future.

Two New CD Audio Programs with Michael Mendizza:

1. Transcendent Mentoring of This and Future Generations
   Parenting and education as a spiritual transformative journey for adults.
   
2. Seven Ways to Optimize the Adult-Child Relationship
   

Daily activities that can transform your relationship with children at any age, in any activity.

Recorded live. Curious? Send Michael an email and he will reserve your copy.

michael@ttfuture.org
www.ttfuture.org/services

Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem.

First, we must transcend the limitations imposed by culture.

Developing competent adult learners, passionate individuals who are learning explosively right alongside the children they love, this is the next frontier.