Scholé news September 2018

Dear friends of Scholé, because I had no internet connection at our country house, the August news unfortunately did not appear – and some of you apparently even missed it, as I was delighted to hear :-))

At the European Forum Alpbach this year I again met many new interested people and found that it is getting easier every year to talk about the need for educational freedom.

This is made possible above all by the increasingly obvious shortcomings of the conventional school system: an excellent summary, for example, is a commentary by the special-needs teacher Elisabeth Groihofer-Steidl, published in Der Standard on 4 September under the title “Schule – ein Armutszeugnis und viele Fragen” (School – a damning verdict and many questions). Incidentally, there was also a seminar on education in Alpbach attended by Teach for Austria candidates. It bore the telling title “Mission to Mars”! I don’t have much time for Mars, the god of war, whom our teaching system, based as it is on rivalry and competition, does indeed suit very well… :-)

READ THE ARTICLE IN DER STANDARD (German)

So I preferred to join the group campaigning for “mindfulness in education” and walked with them, slowly and deliberately, along a meditation path beside the stream through the glorious landscape. The guest of honour that day was a British MP, a white-haired Welshman with a boyish face and laughing blue eyes called Chris Ruane. He told us that he himself had tried mindfulness exercises with great success at a young age. Later, as a primary school teacher, he encouraged his pupils to do them too, and their parents were amazed at the beneficial effect of these simple exercises.

In 2012 Chris Ruane had the idea of sending a circular email to his 600 stressed fellow MPs, inviting them to sign up for a mindfulness course that a highly respected professor from the University of Oxford (which has its own Mindfulness Centre) was willing to hold. No fewer than 45 of his colleagues showed interest straight away. Together with others who have joined since, they meet every week for silent meditation, with representatives of all kinds of parties sitting peacefully side by side. The project seems to be a great success, because it has since been taken up by 40 parliaments in various countries around the world!

The aim of all mindfulness exercises is to reconcile people with their original nature. Anyone who manages to resonate with themselves without any distraction can gradually hear their inner voice again, sense their real wishes and needs, and perceive their connection with all life. This makes them independent of outside influence, makes them aware of their strengths and lets them see their goals clearly.

“If every 8-year-old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation,”

the Dalai Lama once said. On 12 December 2002 the Dalai Lama’s brain frequency was measured: it was constantly around 5 hertz (5 oscillations per second), which corresponds exactly to the brain frequency of a small child. That of a “normal” adult is around 11 hertz. Adults only reach 5 hertz in deep sleep or in meditation.

In small children, as in people meditating, both halves of the brain also oscillate in the same rhythm, which produces an astonishing capacity for perception. This is what small children’s brilliant ability to learn rests on, though they are not aware of it. Adults, on the other hand, can consciously experience the state of meditative concentration in which feeling, logic, experience, archaic knowledge and intuitive approaches are in constant exchange with one another. This explains why a nervous system synchronised in this way works a million times faster than a computer, even though modern computers have connections that are millions of times faster! And why a computer may process or even produce vast amounts of knowledge, yet could never make wise decisions, however much its performance were optimised…

Wouldn’t it be interesting to compare the brain frequency of freely learning children, who grow up feeling secure and whose natural learning processes are not disturbed, with that of primary school pupils of the same age from laptop classes? Perhaps we will manage to initiate such an experiment, because we will soon be needing scientific results:

Before the summer, some unschooling parents received a ruling that custody of their children was being withdrawn because the children had not taken the prescribed annual exams. A shock that is hard to cope with for these brave parents! But perhaps this was the prelude to an unexpected solution. When one of the mothers concerned rang the youth welfare office and asked how she was supposed to imagine this ruling being carried out, the official in charge reacted indignantly. Her anger was directed not at the families concerned – youth welfare staff rarely get to see such happy, well-cared-for children, sadly – but at the court. Why had the youth welfare office, which is responsible for custody matters, not even been consulted? And on what legal basis were the officials now supposed to act? After all, they were not responsible for school matters but for the WELFARE OF THE CHILD, and there was nothing to object to in these unschooling families!

Conclusion: The youth welfare office sent a request to the Supreme Court asking it to clarify whether self-directed education in itself can be defined as endangering the welfare of the child. The court cannot ignore such a request! Incidentally, the second lawyers’ congress on the subject takes place at the University of Giessen on 19 October (https://fsg-kolloquium.de, German). So there is reason to hope that a supreme court will FINALLY order scientific research into this self-directed form of education, which in some English-speaking countries is now even supported by the state because the results of the long-term studies are so positive. If these studies continue not to be recognised in Austria because they are “foreign” studies – a more than strange argument when it comes to educational questions! – Austrian studies will probably have to be commissioned. The unschoolers are looking forward to this, because they have been trying in vain for years to get such research done, so that the absurd insinuations in various media can at last be countered with solid scientific findings!

With very hopeful 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. Order your own copy on the GAIA marketplace, with a 10 % discount for members. The book is in German.

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