There Are Two Educations

It seems to me that the whole education industry is focussed on how to earn a living and not being too successful, it seems, if one looks at the levels of joblessness; the number of unfilled jobs; and the number of people who are unhappy in their jobs.

…….. and if Oscar Wilde is right when he says, “To live is the rarest thing in the world – most people just exist, that is all” - …….. and if it is true that somewhat more than 80% of all humans are only existing – not because of poverty or illness or joblessness but because they don’t know how to live fully - …….. then it seems that we aren’t doing at all well with the second education.  We aren’t teaching people to live.

People who are living fully have discovered or worked out how to generate large amounts of real sustainable energy and then how to use it to spiral it up further, rather than to waste it in negative experiences.  Such people, we could call them leaders, have a natural capacity to create high energy networks around themselves – in businesses, in churches, in civil society, in communities and in schools.

Such people, if they are teachers, create high energy classrooms and they get amazing results.  And if we have had the unique privilege of such teachers and such classrooms in our own school experience, we remember and treasure those memories.

Such people, if they are principals, create high energy staffrooms of high energy teachers so that all their classrooms have a special energy which makes a high energy high performance school – in academics, in sport and in the community.

There are such schools led by such leaders but tragically there are few outside the private school and erstwhile Model C domain.

It seems so obvious that you can’t expect to be able to teach how to live fully in a classroom that is not alive.

Equally obvious is the futility of teaching people how to earn a living if they don’t know how to live.  Then a job becomes “death without dignity” as Dylan Thomas observed.

The real challenge is to teach the School Management Teams how to create sustainably high energy schools.  We call that skill leadership - we believe it is a learned, learnable and, in turn, teachable skill and it is what we do best.


COLIN HALL
15 January 2007

*Note: It appears that James Truslow Adams (an American writer and historian 1878-1949) and John Adams (an American President 1735-1826) are both credited with having said “There are two educations.  One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live”.