“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
~Albert Einstein



The   E = pc ²   of Education Reform:
Or Why More $ Isn’t the Solution.

When most teachers call the roll in the classroom each morning, (if they still do that), Nature is always absent. “Nature! Has anybody seen Nature this morning?” (Of course, this assumes that a smart teacher is actually looking for her.)

Without nature, communication and, subsequently, information remain conventional, dry, unimaginative, soulless. Find a way to convey information as an act of nature, on a wavelength that the young are innately tuned to, using tools that captivate the imagination…and you possess the key that opens the door to solving a host of major challenges facing Education.

Nature in the classroom? How is nature brought into the equation? Albert Einstein (who was no Einstein in School) was a natural at solving problems like this.

Einstein knew that if you could figure out the nature part of learning, then you would have something perhaps even more important to contribute to human well being than a theory of space, time, and relativity. He believed that the imagination was more important than knowledge. In his mind, at age 16, he imagined what it would be like to travel on a beam of light. We know now what the results were of that self-navigated field trip.

Many parents and educators often seize on Einstein as an example of the academic equivalent to God. Unfortunately, these apparent advocates of high standards and testing are misguided and blind. How hypocritical they are to link the creative brilliance of the great scientist with their authoritarian belief in academic perfection and performance in the classroom!

Einstein's personal interest in education was the subject of his very first public statement to a large audience on a nonscientific subject. In the middle of World War I, he wrote an emotional appeal to the German education establishment to stop forcing children to take the difficult final exam required for high school graduation. Einstein stood up to the bully of standardized learning.

Einstein did not pursue the problem of Education, but he probably would not have rejected ideas that addressed the Nature problem.

Like this one: which states that the key to the Nature problem is Communication.

Proposition One/3: E=pc ²
Education = play x communication²

The central active core and pathway in Education is communication. The physical makeup of communication, in a given space, say, the classroom, is the prime factor that determines the nature and robustness of information exchange. Find a way to ‘charm’ and energize information and communication in the classroom, and you have the means to reverse the polarity of conventional communication patterns, that is to say, from inert to fully ‘charged.’ When you alter communication—particularly in context of space in the classroom—you possess the means to systemically alter the physical pathway of a classroom’s learning culture.

When you alter the chemical makeup of communication, you change everything that heretofore has been largely impervious to change, namely the three biggies--the most change-resistant areas of the learning culture: communication, behavior, and information.

What’s missing in our classrooms is a love of wonder for, and the care and feeding of, dreams. In a word, education has been clueless as to how to romance the minds of children--and teachers. To truly love children, a teacher must know how to connect with children. Generally speaking, the task of emotional connection is left to entertainment--to good movies we watch with affection and devotion, but the lessons of which barely stick. Cupid’s arrow is aimed at romance, but not at young minds. Teachers, parents, and kids are bound by control, authority, and a perception of learning mandated by the factory learning culture.

How do you change that? How do you get past the culture--to transform it? Play is the way. Play is the solution to transforming the learning culture in both micro and macro dimensions. Play is a form of energy that we merely tinker with; and so play energy must be harnessed.

If these ideas seem outlandish or overstated, consider this: Einstein’s famous handwritten paper on Relativity might easily have been overlooked or ignored by its initial reader. Even young Albert could have thought his idea just another daydream, and shrugged it off—his own idea under appreciated and thrown into a wastebasket and gone forever. The point is that a culture that cannot appreciate and cultivate the power of imagination is one already declining.

Every time we consign child to a label or put blinders on him or her, as we do to race horses, to keep him focused on all but test answers, downplay and discourage the importance of her dreams and ideas, or force him out as a failure, we kill a part of our future and possibilities for the common good. We have not yet learned to harvest the resource of children’s capacity for dreaming and imagination.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, wrote Winston Churchill, “ but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
Your apartment’s doorman may glimpse a great truth.
A wise man can see more from the bottom of the well than a fool sees from a mountaintop.
The child is the father to the man---or the mother to the woman

The dreams and ideas of youth are more than personal aspirations and the individual pursuit of happiness; they are the key to the greater reach of human enlightenment and empowerment

Instead of the noisome plague of tech toys that dominate and distract our culture, a reinvented Education must become the true gift that America bestows on the world, The gift of a country where Education has never gone before. The gift of an education re-made in the image of children. The gift of opportunity for every child to learn to love learning. The gift of mastering skills without having to learn in lockstep or at academic gunpoint. The gift for kids to become full participant-citizens of the world of ideas (of which America, their nation, was once--and yet still may be--a great historic example.)

The training of Service (Seeing Eye) Dogs provides a glimpse into what’s missing in the classroom between teachers and kids. A Service Dog is trained for compatibility to serve its prospective owner. By contrast, teachers, myopically focused on the delivery of content, could learn ‘communication compatibility’ skills to engage and guide the inherent nature of children to play. To suggest seeing eye dogs—or any dog, for that matter--are better trained than teachers at reaching and serving their ‘owners’ may seem insulting, but we are talking about man’s best friend here—and the dog’s capacity for unconditional love.

Our process of reaching and engaging young minds should be unconditional and founded on a kind of unconditional love and acceptance. Some would call it play.


Jeffrey L. Peyton, Founder
The Play Tectonics Movement

Proud Supporter of YesAcrossAmerica.com - Helping Kids Succeed Since 1995

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