October 8, 2009
Did you start out in life being a carefree, fun-loving kid, kind of like a wild animal with a lot freedom to discover, explore and become the ultimate adventurer? Life was so good when you were three or four years old, and then one day, when you were about five years old, you were swept up by a parent and taken to a big, brick building and left there alone for an entire day; and that was it, life ended as you knew it! Your freedom was turned into a sort of enslavement to a chair tucked under a table, and the rules were repeated by someone you had never met before; a teacher! This stranger called a teacher talked to all of the kids as if you were the same, even though all of you were different. With the same words and same tone, she kept telling you to stay in your chair until she gave you permission to move to a new location, where you were instructed to stay until she told you to move again.
She sang the rules, the calendar, the numbers and even the alphabet! You got to play until she told you it was time to go back to your chair where you had to sit again until the bell rang and even then you couldn’t go until the stranger, the teacher, told you to go! You went into shock because one day you were an explorer and the next you were captured by strangers and put in a strange place where expectations were immediately put upon you that you didn’t understand. You asked, “Why can’t I be an explorer, why can’t I discover, why can’t I be the ultimate adventurer anymore? Now I have to learn what they want me to learn, in their time, sitting in their chair tucked under their table.” Your parents told you, along with the stranger, that this was life and everyone has to follow the rules to make it in life! So you started believing in this rule that mysteriously appeared but is not really written down anywhere. You noticed that all of the adults submitted to this unwritten rule and their kids submitted to this rule because their parents said so, but the small voice inside you still wanted to be the free thinking explorer that you knew you could be.
Soon every waking day of your life began to look like every waking day, and the rule that you learned when you were five never leaves you alone to be that explorer or that ultimate adventurer. You look like the teacher and your parents, obeying the unwritten rule as was expected of you and that you never questioned!
Throughout your life you have noticed that every time you try to break out of your every waking day routine, and come up with an idea, the unwritten rule is constantly hovering over you along with all of your now grown classmates telling you that you are not following the rule and you won’t make it without the unwritten rule. They remind you that, to make it in life you must obey the rule! Unless someone directs you, you wait and wait, and life goes by and you’re still sitting in the chair tucked under the desk!
Teachers can’t help it! They all learn from the same teachers, and the cycle never ends, never improves, and never allows the teachers to be free to inspire. They can only teach by the rule and keep the herd mentality alive, never allowing the students to break away from the chair tucked under the desk, because this environment is safe, and turns out safe followers who don’t cause problems and are manageable! God forbid, if someone was to break out of this environment and question the rule and have an interest. What would a teacher do? The teachers have not had the training to deal with a real explorer or a real adventurer; they have been taught to call them trouble-makers and to call the parents to remind them of the rule, and the cycle starts over again!
When will we realize that all of our kids start out as passionate entrepreneurs, explorers, and adventurers who teach themselves how to walk and talk? What makes us believe that they are not capable of discovering education at its finest without the written rule that our teachers have been unknowingly harnessed with and have brought into America’s classrooms because they are from a long line of teachers who have been taught by the same rule forever and ever.
We owe it to our future to free our children’s spirits to become leaders, patriots, entrepreneurs, explorers and ultimate adventurers so that our great country can have new fearless, principled and authentic leadership! Somehow teachers have been an authority in all of our lives, and they themselves don’t know that they have been trained to teach the rule without question, and so the dumbing down of America’s children takes on a life of its own. Question everything and everyone, beginning with teachers. Some of them will step outside their boxes and learn to un-teach their students and inspire them to be explorers and adventurers, discovering a world of freedom from the rule!
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