What is education? What does a Matriculant need?
Submitted by Mike.
on 2010-03-02 10:10 AM.
I had the privilege of an afternoon with the staff of one of Cape Town’s leading boys schools as they were preparing for their annual strategy day. “What does a boy need most?” I found myself wandering. “What will equip him best to make it in the world he is about to enter?”
Is it a Matric pass at superior level? Surely not. I understand that in the near future the universities will insist on their own entrance exam with their own criteria. And anyway, admission to a university doesn’t seem to guarantee a life that will be well lived.
Oscar Wilde said something that focussed my life for me “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist, that is all”.
The boys who are to leave school at the end of this year will be going into a world in which the total intelligence of the planet, that is what every living thing knows about everything else, may well be doubling every 100 days or less.
It is a world in which there is a camera that can take 8 million photographs a second; a 47 year old Scottish singer in her village church choir can sell 461,000 albums on the day of its release; and a potato farmer in KwaZulu can attract 220,000 men to spend a weekend on his farm listening to a message that is 2,000 years old.
It is a world in which humans discover how really smart nature is and how stupid we are as humans.
It is a world that has consistently abused and wasted linear resources such as water and air as if they were infinite. And it is a world that has treated infinite resources such as love, honesty and respect as if they were worthless things that don’t deserve attention. How wrong.
The young people are going out into a Quantum World that was always there but it hasn’t make itself known of felt with the extraordinary impact that it has now unleashed upon a linear and largely Left Brain world.
What do they need most? The capacity to use their Right Brains and to think “out of the box”. And what we now know is that we all have good exciting Right Brains. Some of us just don’t switch them on.
Why not? Because we don’t have the energy! High energy people use their full Right Brain capacity, or most of it. Low energy individuals have only enough voltage to drive their Left Brain requirements.
So if we are able to master our own energy on a sustainable basis we have all the security and familiarity of a good reliable Left Brain AND loads of access and capacity to imagine and create and grasp the opportunities of a Quantum World.
Yes, they will need literacy and numeracy skills (and a whole lot more) but most of all they will need an understanding of how their personal energy works and how to keep it working.
