Research Paper By Cecile Chevereau
(Life Coach, GERMANY)
Education …. What a fascinating word! But what does it mean exactly?
If we look at the roots of the word “education”, we can distinguish three Latin words:
- Educare which means to nourish, to bring up
- Educere which stands for to lead froth, to draw out
- and Educatum – may be the most singular root of all three:
the “E” represents a movement from inward to outward and the word “DUCO” means developing and progressing.
From this “root” perspective, it seems that education – at home and at school – seeks to nourish the good qualities of a human being and draw out the best in every individual. It shows a movement from inward to outward.
How is it then that we barely find those aspects in our modern education, no matter the country?
How is it that millions of children become alienated by their education, not being aware of their strengths and of their talents, losing along the way their innate curiosity and innate creativity?
By studying this subject “education”, I realized that Education and Health are highly related. As a matter of fact, education impacts largely the health of children and that from a very young age.
More and more I was connecting the dots between those two fields, especially after studying the work of Dr.Shefali about what she calls “Conscious Parenting” or also the research of Brené Brown about vulnerability, and of course of Sir Ken Robinson, or of Pasi Sahlbergto name just a few.
Many educationals experts, pediatricians, psychologists, scientists, and spiritual leaders, agree that the real keys to transforming education are the quality of the educator’s attitude and inner state, and even more crucially between the age of 2/3 years old and 7/8 years old.*
In this context, the work of Dr. Shafali is so relevant as she points out the importance of being a
“conscious parent” with its children, including its own inner child. “Conscious parent” could be extended to “conscious educator” which includes parents AND teachers.The way we parent our inner child is crucial in the way we educate children. The more we are able to connect with ourselves, and with our inner child, the more we are on our own journey to consciousness, the more we will be able to connect with the children we are educating, and therefore create the right conditions to let them grow – no matter if it is at home or at school.
The aim of education as described by Sir Ken Robinson is
to enable children to understand the world around them and to be aware and develop the talents within them, so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.
Education is definitely an organic process that can be best compared to agriculture. Like the gardeners do, the educators’ task is to create the best environment/climate possible to the plants i.e children so that they can fully blossom. Only under fertile conditions can this organic process happen. That is where the profession of educator becomes an art. The art of being able to inspire and to nurture the growth of a child properly, the art of seeing the child for who he/she truly is and let him/her be.
In this process, we can recognize that each child is unique, and therefore needs a personalized education according to its own strengths, to its own talents.
In 2019, Dalai Laima also said:
At kindergarten level, we teach about physical hygiene, usually. That’s important. Now, we must include the hygiene of emotions from Kindergarten level up to university level. Otherwise now, we notice there are many problems we are facing, that are essentially our own creation. Besides natural disasters, many problems are our own creation. Why? Basically, as I mentioned earlier, we have a more compassionate nature and everyone wants a happy life. Why, then, do human beings create a lot of problems? Because of our education, I feel, our existing education, is not adequate. Our existing education is oriented towards material values. At a young age, children, say 5, 6, 7 year old children, they don’t care about nationality, about religious faith, so long as they play together, smile together, they feel they are the same. Once they join school, then, the school doesn’t teach much about the importance of our emotions or of inner peace, just material values. Then highlighting differences, on the basis of nationality, religious faith … then creates problem, that creates strong problem of “us” and “them”. That is also a problem.
In this perspective, the work and research of Brené Brown on vulnerability and shame are also extremely relevant when she does the link between vulnerability and our ability to truly connect with other people:
Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness. But it appears that it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love.”Or when she says “Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, change.- Brene Brown
In his last book “Let the children play” (2019), Pasi Sahlberg writes:
Success should be best judged by outcomes that nurture happy, healthy, thinking, caring and social children who will become collaborative, creative, competent and responsible citizens. With very few exceptions, nations are preparing children to do well on tests that are not predictive of life success.
In 2016, The World Economic Forum, a global non-profit organization of business leaders and policymakers, surveyed 350 executives across 9 industries in 15 of the world’s biggest economies to determine what skills would be the most sought after in the year 2020. The top 10 skills were:
- Complex Problem-solving
- Critical thinking
- Creativity
- People Management
- Coordinating with others
- Emotional intelligence
- Judgment and Decision-making
- Service Orientation
- Negotiation
- Cognitive flexibility.
In our today’s societies, educators are challenged to introduce a new aspect in their learning: The learning of the inner world, which includes emotional intelligence, discovering and development of the inner strengths, talents, and creativity, in order for those children to become more and more conscious and fulfilled people i.e adults.
This change requires that it begins within the educators themselves.
At the end of his speech “How to escape education’s Death Valley?”, Sir Ken Robinson mentioned the quote of Benjamin Franklin:
There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable. People who won’t get it, don’t want to get it, and don’t want to do anything about it. There are people who are movable, people who see the need for a change and are prepared to listen to it, And there are people who move, people who make things happen.
He also added that
if we can encourage more people to move, that will be a movement, and if the movement is strong enough, that’s in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that’s what we need.
More and more around the world, we can observe that people are moving in education and that the movement becomes stronger and stronger, and that is also my dearest wish that one day, the revolution will happen.
*Why is the personality of the educator so important?
The work of the biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton and of Dr. Joe Dispenza, a researcher on brain, mind and human potential, helped me to understand how impactful the behavior of educators – parents and teachers – is, especially when the children are between the age of two and six-eight years old.
Both adults and children display EEG variations – EEG stands for electroencephalograms or “electric head pictures” – that range from low-frequency delta waves to high-frequency beta waves. Researchers have noted that EEG in children reveals, at every developmental stage, the predominance of specific brain waves.
Dr.Rima Laibow in Quantitative EEG and neurofeedback describe the progression of these developmental stages in brain activity. (Laibow 1999 and 2002).
Between birth and two years old of age, the human brain predominantly operates at the lowest EEG frequency, 0.5 to 4 cycles per second (Hz), known as delta waves. This set of brain waves also appears in deep meditation or in the deepest stages of sleep. This is why babies and small children stay awake only for short periods of time.
A child begins to spend more time at a higher level of EEG activity characterized as theta waves (4-8 Hz) between 2 and 6 years of age. Hypnotherapists drop their patients’ brain activity into theta because this low-frequency brain wave puts them into a more suggestible, programmable state.
This gives us an important clue as to how children, whose brains are mostly operating at this frequency through 6 years of age, can download the incredible volume of information they need to thrive in their environment. Young children carefully observe their environment and download the worldly wisdom offered by their surroundings directly into their subconscious mind memory. As a result, their most influential educators’ behavior and beliefs become their own.
The subconscious is an emotionless database of stored programs, whose function is strictly concerned with reading environmental signals and engaging in hardwired behavioral programs, no question asked, no judgments made. The subconscious mind is similar to a programmable “hardwire” into which our life experiences are downloaded. It processes some 20 million environmental stimuli/second vs. 40 environmental stimuli interpreted by the conscious mind, (Norretranders, 1998) and is the most powerful information processor known. It specifically observes both the surrounding world and the body’s internal awareness, reads the environmental cues, and immediately engages previously acquired (learned) behaviors – all without the help, supervision, or even awareness of the conscious mind.
The fundamental behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes we observe as a child during these ages become “hardwired” as synaptic pathways in our subconscious mind. Once programmed into our subconscious mind, they control our biology for the rest of our lives… or at least until we make the effort to reprogram them.
As an educator, through our own conscious realignment, we can help our children to recover.
At around the age of 6, we become less susceptible to outside programming with the increasing appearance of higher frequency alpha waves (8-12 Hz). Alpha waves are equated with states of calm consciousness. This stage is where children pretend, the dream of being firemen or astronauts and doctors, etc.. That is the realm of imagination.
At around 12 years of age, the child’s EEG spectrum begins to show sustained periods of an even higher frequency defined as beta waves (12-35 Hz). Beta brain states are characterized as “active or focused consciousness”.
By the time children reach adolescence, their subconscious minds are chock-full of information.
The subconscious mind is our auto-pilot, the conscious mind is our manual control.
The two minds make a dynamic duo. As an adult, we have the possibility to reprogram our subconscious mind through our conscious mind.
As Bruce Lipton was saying: “What if we had conscious parents and teachers who serve as wonderful life models, always engaging inhumane and win-win relations with everyone in the community? If our subconscious mind were programmed with such healthy behaviors, we could be totally successful in our lives without ever being conscious!”
As help and support, Dr. Joe Dispenza created a meditation set called “The Place where thoughts Become Things” for kids between 4 to 12 years old.
Bibliography
Dr.Shefali, PhD.
The awakened family
Sir Ken Robinson, PhD.
Out of our Minds
Creative Schools
Brené Brown, PhD.
Daring greatly
Dare to lead
Ted Ex Vulnerability
Netflix, Brené Brown
Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle
Let the children play
Bruce Litpon, PhD.
The biology of belief
Dr. Joe Dispenza
Becoming Supernatural
Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu
The book of Joy
School of life: what is education for?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HndV87XpkWg
Animation: Alike ” by Daniel Martínez Lara &Rafa Cano Méndez
https://de.slideshare.net › rdhaker2011 › education-m.
https://www.etymonline.com › word › educate