Think back to when you began your school years. Did you wake up eager and ready for the learning and relationship challenges that were there each day? Were you a social butterfly or more prone to stand on the sidelines? Were you an academic star or just muddled through?
There is lots of conflicting research about what really matters in the process to educate children. It leads to so many deep philosophical questions about what really matters in life. After little ones step out beyond their first organization, the family, they are all required to enter the school organization.
They, as we did, bring with them the patterns of behavior learned for security and survival. Each family has its own history and legacies that are filtered from generation to generation. So it is with all organizations. The patterns of learning in most schools come from our European roots. The training we get is partly also a residual of the Industrial Revolution.
Where is it written that standardized tests really tell us who has a keen mind and who does not? It tells us more about who has harnessed the learning style that standardized tests indicate is a key to success; maybe, maybe not.
In the past schools were geared for boys to become the men who would lead our society into the future. Girls were to become the mothers and housekeepers for our men. Then Betty Freidan wrote “the Feminine Mystique” and women heard the call for a new order of relating to men, to the world.
We know how to do peaceful revolutions and I believe we must become more vocal now for the sake of the children. Education is not bringing forth from the core of the young the ability to learn and discern. Mostly kids are still being taught the way it was to get workers ready for working in mills; where there time cards to show when we got to work and when we left, and bells ringing for shifts to change.
I recently received this fascinating and clear view of how we are robbing our young of exciting educations because we are stuck in an old paradigm. In “Don’t Bring it to Work” I discuss how patterns from the past can keep us stuck and ways to transform them. Please let me know what you think of the following video.
Click this link to view Brene Brown video on YouTube.
We can and need to take part in the larger dialogue about education whether we have biological children or not. This is a revolution that is part of the female DNA, to gently, yet forcefully to ask the questions and make change our priority for the good of everyone.
Sylvia Lafair
Sylvia Lafair, PhD, is President of CEO – Creative Energy Options, Inc., a global consulting company focused on optimizing workplace relationships through her exclusive PatternAware™ Leadership Model. Dr. Lafair is the author of Don’t Bring It to Work: Breaking the Family Patterns That Limit Success published by Jossey-Bass. As an executive coach and leadership educator, she has more than 30 years of experience with all levels of management from leading corporate officers of global companies to executives of non-profits and owners of leading family-owned businesses. She is now offering GUTSY Women Weekends, giving women the opportunity to dialogue and clarify next steps.
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