Vinaire's Blog

August 21, 2014

This issue is now obsolete. For latest references please see: KHTK Self-Learning. The specific reference that updates this issue is Counseling Procedure for Self-Learning.

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Here is a procedure that may be used by Self-Learning Centers to rehabilitate self-learning.

1. An unwanted condition exists quite commonly in relation to education. If the person is interested in addressing that area, the education counselor may discuss,

   “Is there something you wanted from education that you failed to get?”

   Identify the unwanted condition in the area of education that the person has been struggling with.

2. The counselor may then establish the occasion when that unwanted condition began. To locate that occasion he may bracket the earliest time in the person’s life when that condition was there, and an earlier time when the condition was not there. To pinpoint that beginning one may discuss the persons, places, incidents, situations, etc., connected with his education in that period.

3. Once that occasion is found, the counselor discusses any confusion at the time of that occasion, which is still present in the person’s mind. The counselor gets the person to look at the things that did not go as expected at that time and that interrupted his interest in education.

4. The counselor then have the person examine that occasion for any drastic shift in his outlook toward education. if so, then the counselor discusses the person’s outlook before and after the shift and how it changed at that occasion.

5. The counselor probes for possible shocking experience that the person went through that triggered that shift in his outlook. The counselor does not discuss the experience but lets the person look at it carefully. The counselor simply provides any help needed by the person to realize how his difficulties with education start.

6. The counselor then informs the person of the following policies of the “self-learning” center, and lets him get on with it.

   • This center believes that a person is capable of learning by oneself from childhood.

   • This center supports “Self-learning”.

   • This center does not allow indoctrination.

   • This center does not allow tests other than for diagnostic purposes.

   • This center believes in guiding a learner toward best resources.

   • This center believes that the best learning takes place when it is hands on and involves all the senses.

   • This center believes that one should feel free to make mistakes and learn from them.

   • The counselors of this center are there to help remove confusions through discussion.

   • The discussion policy follows the guidelines of Discussions and what needs to be avoided.

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Reference: Subject: Education

You may read the transcript here.

Here are the main points from this talk (May 2010):

(1) Currently, there is a crisis of human resources. We make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. But there are also those who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. But such people are in a minority.

(2) You might imagine education would be the way to create the circumstances where natural talents show themselves, but too often it’s not. Education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. What we need is not evolution, but a revolution in education.

(3) One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education, but we are still hypnotized by the ideas that were formed to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. Those ideas do not meet the circumstances of this century but we take them for granted and find it difficult to overcome them. For example, in education, we are obsessed with getting people to college because we take it for granted that it is the only way to get set up for the rest of our life. But life is not linear; it is organic.

(4) At the heart of our challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us.

(5) We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, where everything is standardized and not customized to local circumstances. It is impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

(6) Human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. It’s about passion and what excites our spirit and our energy. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn’t feed their spirit, it doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.

(7) We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people, to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture, which recognizes that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, and that it is an organic process. You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

(8) It’s about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you’re actually teaching. It is not about scaling a new solution; it’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.

(9) Today’s extraordinary resources in business, multimedia, and the Internet, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. Every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly.

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