Are You Experienced?

The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

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The purpose of education cannot be only to increase the earning power of the individual or to supply workers for the ever-changing slots of the corporate machine. Children, I said, need to be given a sense of the “unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in accordance with conscious purposes and plans.” Learning, I said, must be related to the daily lives of children and must engage the hand and heart as well as the head. Especially in this age of rapid social and technical change, “it is not something you can make people do in their heads” with the perspective that years from now, eventually, they will be able to get a good job and make a lot of money. Some children may accept this regimen. But those who feel most acutely the contradiction between the hopelessness of their daily lives and the abstractness of school “subjects” will create so much turmoil inside and outside the school that teachers can’t teach and no one can learn.

That is why, I said, our schools must be transformed to provide children with ongoing opportunities to exercise “their resourcefulness to solve the real problems of their communities; working together rather than competitively, with younger children emulating older ones and older children teaching younger ones; experiencing the intrinsic consequences of their own actions.” Children will be motivated to learn because their hearts, hands and heads are engaged in improving their daily lives.

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