Scholé news May 2018

Dear friends of Scholé, over the past few weeks I have talked with many people about EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM.

Although I made a real effort to be clear and the people I talked to were all open-minded and well-meaning, with most of them I still had the feeling that their “schooled mind” partly resisted what I was saying.

I believe this is mainly because the demand for educational freedom really does presuppose a much broader image of humanity than the one on which our current education system is based. Where education is no longer defined as a right but as a duty, freedom has no place, for freedom is a child of leisure!

As you know, I am convinced that our best teachers are the highly sensitive children of the new age. I have experienced this myself again and again, but never as directly and overwhelmingly as when I met Christina von Dreien! At just 16, this girl, born and raised in Switzerland and endowed with a multidimensional consciousness, began last year to carry her wisdom and astonishing knowledge out into the world. She gives talks throughout the German-speaking world; every fortnight there is a one-hour TV programme with her called “Time to be” (available at any time on YouTube); and Govinda Verlag has already published two books in which her mother Bernadette sums up some of the insights and knowledge with which her daughter surprised her from early childhood. Here is an extract from the second volume, “Die Vision des Guten” (The vision of the good), page 288 ff., which deals with the necessary change in the education system:

Learning in schools and universities today is one-sidedly dominated by the rational mind of the left hemisphere of the brain, while the thinking of the right hemisphere – complex, emotional and intuitive – is neglected. As a result, an immense mental potential lies fallow and unused in most people. The thought patterns of the one-sidedly rational mind, which tend towards rigidity, are easier to programme and manipulate through alien, unenlightened influences, which probably explains why the prevailing system promotes this part exclusively.

As long as the education system and the sciences set themselves such limits, it will be very difficult for positive, visionary ideas and innovations to prevail. If we manage to stop limiting ourselves through our conditioning and our outdated concepts, strategies and moral ideas, then we will become truly creative and open to all possibilities – just like a spontaneous, carefree and trusting child.

Christina explains:

“In our body, every cell has the exact information about which highly complex function it is to perform. We find the same behaviour in every plant and every animal. They live according to their nature, without teachers and without learning targets. Everything seems to be harmoniously organised and works through their own consciousness. Why shouldn’t we as human beings be able to do that too? Basically, we are all highly gifted by nature.”

WEBSITE: CHRISTINA VON DREIEN (German)

There are by now plenty of examples of people who never attended a conventional school and yet reveal and live great talents. They read, write, speak foreign languages and know an above-average amount about some field that corresponds to their vocation and their potential. Learning researchers have long recognised that real learning happens at the moment when the person concerned is involved heart and soul and fully motivated. It follows that there is little point in formulating uniform learning targets for a whole group of people, such as a school class or a training group. For a group always consists of individuals, and every individual is unique and one of a kind. If you try to lump them all together, in the end you will most probably do justice to none of them.

The key to meaningful learning in the future is to follow one’s soul plan and intuition and in doing so to unfold one’s full potential. If a child (or an adult) is given this individually tailored framework for development, it will joyfully learn exactly what it wants to learn and what it feels a spontaneous, natural motivation for. It will also learn when it wants to, and in the way that suits it. Anyone who can learn without outside coercion and pressure and unfold harmoniously according to their soul plan will become a happy, fulfilled, creative and valuable member of human society. Such people are the bearers of hope for the future, because through their own example they show new perspectives that are not based on artificial, unenlightened systems of dependency but on the liberating universal laws of light.

In this promising time of upheaval, then, it is a matter of recognising what an immense potential of knowledge and talent exists in every human being. It is a matter of letting this potential unfold as freely as possible, because as soon as that happens, society will change fundamentally and lastingly for the better. Every person longs to be perceived as valuable in their uniqueness. Every person longs to follow their calling and live their talents. If they are allowed to do so, the whole destructive competitive struggle and the desperate fight for attention and recognition fall away…

In Christina’s vision of a future school, it will no longer be the case that a teacher stands in authority before his pupils and “instructs” them one-sidedly with the knowledge he has acquired. Rather, schools will be places of harmonious living together and of shared, mutual learning between teachers and pupils… Christina explains: “All of life means learning, because learning is not a process that is ever finished. In learning there is also no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, because learning is fundamentally individual and independent of place and person. You can learn anytime and anywhere, and you don’t need school buildings or teachers to do it.”

Whitsun, the feast of the Holy Spirit, seems to me the right moment to share with you all the confidence I have felt ever since I learned that educational freedom now has an advocate like Christina: all “unenlightened” powers and forces will have to bow to this delicate girl, even the seemingly invincible power of habit :-)

With radiant greetings, Alexandra

Book tip – “Lernen ist wie Atmen” (Learning is like breathing)

Together with two unschooling mothers, Gudrun Totschnig and Sigrid Haubenberger, we published it ourselves.

We all feel that the time is ripe for this many-voiced account of how unschooling can be lived in practice. Let the reading sample inspire you, or order your own copy on the GAIA marketplace, with a 10 % discount for members. The book is in German.

Reading sample (German) BUY THE BOOK