Emotional education

We normalize the things we fear most of all for no reason.

I watched a video of Sir Ken Robinson , Gordon Neufeld , Isaac Asimov, and others last night and this morning, and I was struck by how most of the education lectures basically indicate what is wrong with things, but they do not offer concrete solutions. The more I watched, the more I realized this fact. According to Sir Ken, this situation has been preserved for quite some time. He insists that whenever a formal education system appears, there will always be those who want to change it, because it does not work. And I asked myself, what makes us tie in this feedback loop? Einstein's famous quote comes to mind - “Madness - do the same thing, and expect the same result each time.” I believe that this, from the point of view of both advocates of mass character, is systematized training and criticism of history.

Throughout his lecture for the Heart Series Education for the Dalai Lama on Education, Sir Ken refers to Robert U. Witkin’s 1970 book The Intelligence of Feeling. In this book, Witkin paraphrased Descartes' famous expression “I think, therefore, I exist” in “I feel, therefore, I exist.” He asserts, and quite correctly, that each of us lives in two worlds. The first is the world that existed before our appearance, and will exist after we are gone. The second is a world that we individually perceive through our senses and emotional interaction with the first world. In fact, this is a world without us and a world within us. Further, Uitkin argues that the world inside us begins to exist when a person begins to exist, and ceases to exist when this person dies. This is the world of our personal consciousness. This idea is not new, but its use by Sir Ken to describe what is happening with the education system made me think.

Before I began yesterday to search for a video about education, I watched The Dhamma Brothers, a 2007 documentary about the prison meditation program at the Donaldson Correctional Colony near Bessemer, Alabama. The meditation that was taught to prisoners is Virassana, a practice in which the awareness of breathing is used to recognize the impermanence of all things. One of the main stops along the way is awareness and subsequent control over the effect of general body sensations through the mind. In particular, it consists in stopping the world without us by controlling the world within us. It was this documentary with the lecture by Sir Ken that inspired me to write this article.
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The way we treat the existence and relationship of these two worlds, it seems to me, lies at the very heart of the modern problem of education, and even more, of modern life. The outside world should not dictate the life of the inner world, because if it does, it means that a person can get stuck in the inability to develop, and subsequently she will be unable to develop fresh thoughts. Fresh thought gives impetus to real, real action. Without it, life becomes a mixture of sensations and reactions.

Therefore, I would like to mix the statements of Descartes and Whitkin and formulate my own, that "I feel, therefore I am able to think." I believe that our sensations are a way to connect the outer and inner worlds, and that the feelings that generate such an interaction lead to the emergence of our thoughts. Through sensations, in response to the physical and spiritual world, our brain creates awareness. Awareness of how to act again. I believe that, in essence, the brain is a reaction / action machine. His reaction to any particular experience is designed to create an awareness of what to do if this happens again.

I also believe that this is an emotional process. If the experience is pleasant, the brain will try to repeat it, erecting its own growing awareness, working towards a more complete understanding of the thing that turned out to be pleasant to him, and even more, of the body he controls. The end result of this is what we call the "sense of control." However, since the brain is associated with learning, I believe that despite the experience that made him react / act, in fact, it is a process of self-learning that the brain found pleasant. Therefore, I affirm that our most primary action is this learning process, and that it is the basis of all the meaning of our life. It is the leading and determining force that forms our inner world. Therefore, I believe that the most important thing in our life is what we study. Not what we learned, or what we learn, but the learning process that we are experiencing at the moment. This, in fact, is creativity.

If this is so, it means that education of a person is an independent process, driven by interest and passion, that is, completely natural and the best way to “succeed” is to understand yourself better. Understanding the dynamics of their inner world and its interaction with the outside world, people will be able to play with both, creating value where it was not there before. Its own value.

This is not a completely revolutionary idea, but it seems that it has eluded most educational systems.

I am not trying to theorize how best to correct all the problems that our society faced as a result of a dangerous lack of understanding of the importance of self-awareness. What I want to do is ask, as we, the teachers, embrace the intricate nature of our own emotions and understand this, since we are mostly the product of these most stagnant educational systems, and we are not much ahead of the children we teach, in understanding our inner worlds. This battle for the search for meaning in your own life must be made visible now. So that we begin the journey together with our students into the unknown by realizing that each of us has an emotional life. That these emotional lives are the basis of everything that we do, and that, turning to them and attracting them in search of inspiration, we can be truly creative. That our creative lives should also exist within the field of "formal" education, and not just as a reaction to it.

We need to inspire to discuss the existence of these inner worlds, to promote awareness and normalize what we fearlessly fear most.