The Challenge: Accept Students as they Are

The purpose of authentic education is to help students awaken to their own innate intelligence and purpose so that they can become integrated human beings. This is only possible when both teachers and students focus on “what is now” rather than how students must gain abstract knowledge now in order to be prepared for the future. By openly dealing with what one experiences in the present moment, students penetrate their own nature and wake up to their own intelligence.

`“Compulsory education” that attempts to mold children to some preconceived ideal form has no interest in understanding students as they are, except to label or categorize them in order to allow the system to more efficiently and effectively fix them. Because of its assumption that children are dumb wax waiting to be molded according to the will of the society, this “education” is blind to the possibility that all children possess innate genius. Even a lowly acorn possesses within itself the intelligence to become a magnificent tree if is not compelled to become an efficient toaster.

Whenever children are forced to conform to a system, the system is supreme and the individuality of children is deemed irrelevant, even dangerous. Systems, methods, fixed curricula, ideologies --- all are extremely effective ways to produce conformity. But all are inimical to individual intelligence and deadly to the process of creating healthy, integrated people who can think and act independently out of their own understanding.

The word “compulsory” is illuminating because it reveals the system is based on intimidation and control. Anything “compulsory” is about conditioning and mind control, not educating. Compulsory education is like labeling a class in canine obedience “dog education.” Compulsory education that trains children to pass tests, whether they be tests in simple arithmetic or the heralded college boards, has more in common with circus acts of lions jumping through flaming hoops than with intelligent, independent thinking.

For significant learning to take place we must give up our preconceived ideas about manipulating children to be what we want them to be, and accept them as they are, warts, idiosyncrasies, intelligence and all.