Confident

{I wrote this as an email reply to my brother while where I asked regarding his children and the Steiner schooling they received.}

Hi Anthony

For many months we’ve asked and re-asked ourselves the questions such as “What do we want her to learn”, “What do we hope to impart?”, “What’s the benefit of her having us as parents?” and “What are the true skills, knowledges and abilities we’d want her to have (starting from scratch, as if there was no school concept)?”

As well as asking what we wanted her to have, we reviewed our experiences of school and asked ourselves what we don’t want her to have.

Keep in mind that for a traditional school concept, we both think the private school idea – St Peters, Ipswich Girls Grammar – is better than average state schools in UK and Brisbane… Yes, they push a child to becoming an academic professor, or if they drop out of academia along the way, then the child is to become a mental factory worker. For what they do however, these schools do it well.

From a school view, it’s worth noting Mel also did well at school by their standards – dux of her year, numerous awards, etc.

Of course, as you know, I’ve not wholeheartedly followed the traditional path of school, uni, job, death that most of us are steered toward (…by design? / … by lack of awareness?). For that reason it’s been easier for Mel and I to discuss the functional requirements of what we believe is necessary for a person to learn to fully experience the amazingness, fun, love and joy of this life.

These experiences and abilities go beyond the attributes I believe all people should hold and aim for. From the life coaching I did, I developed a simple system of life improvement by becoming

healthy,

rich,

related,

confident and

serene.

Beyond this list however are the abilities I’d want our child to have so she can enjoy the love of life from day 1 – day last, without having to un-learn negative attitudes and beliefs that hold SOO many people back.

To that end, we’ve come up with a list of abstract abilities and life skills that are believed to be needed for a child to learn. These are skills we’d teach her if we can’t find anyone better qualified to do so.

Investor Ability – we can teach her properties

Work Ethic – doing a good job for her own sake, not just the minimum she can get away with.

Doing maths in her head.

Read at least one language.

Able and happy to sell in many mediums (voice, face-to-face, writing)

Art Appreciation – in

Artistic expression – out

Ability to teach others

Personal strength of character

Joy of life

Spirituality (aware and growing)

Benevolent universe paradigm

Celebrating success

Physical attributes: coordinated, strong, agile, toned, belief in her own ability.

Self defence

So the burden of teaching these other attributes doesn’t solely fall to Mel and me,

I want a community of people expressing these abilities around her for constant positive re-enforcement. Ideally an organisation I’m not yet aware of exists to teach her this learning list.

Unfortunately, only reading, maths and art in&out would be learned at traditional private schools. Do Montessori and Steiner’s offer more?

When it comes to traditional Western schooling, I’ve seen a mix of intentions. Many consider it to be just a location to train for money acquisition – primarily by a job. Other “progressives” appear to intend using it for teaching life skills not taught in the home. Whether because of its alleged basis on the Prussian model of child rearing, the main thing seemingly taught in 12 years of influence seems to be subservient character moulding. Sit quietly, accept what you’re told and be competitively graded on your regurgitation abilities. That’s so 18th Century!

I don’t know much about other cultures’ schooling except a little of the Japanese system and I definitely don’t see her going there – for experience, yes, for school, no. The closest I can imagine was the system of private tuition given to noble children before the Industrial Revolution required large amounts of factory workers trained from a young age.

Considering how paradigm shifting the internet has been, repeating this indoctrination for my children with the awareness of schooling I have is unethical.

My list of 15 learning wants above are still valid, but we are now living in a totally different world to the one even I grew up in, so the list may need re-working further. Eg for the amazing learning capability of children using computers and the internet watch this video. {http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html}. My recent learning experiences on the internet have led me to have close contact with Matt Furey, a Gold Medallist champion wrestler turned businessman and salesman who I’d never have met without the net. Another mentor who greatly changed my life direction, Simon Zutshi and his Property Mastermind was greatly enhanced by the Internet. And this hasn’t even touched on Wikipedia/amazon.

This massive paradigm shift is happened in other ways too. No longer is the focus of schooling for local caching of info. To live well now, we’re not expected to read, study and assimilate from books and classify that info into our heads – rather we now just google the answer.

Adding to that we offshore the doing of many jobs (Tim Ferris, 4 hour work week, style). I get many jobs done by virtual PAs, both in UK for customer focus and India for tech skills. I outsource for skills I both have (to save time) and don’t have (to enhance my ability). Schools haven’t caught up with this… even for the churning out of mental factory workers.

Now jobs are being done by 1) understanding what is wanted of the task, 2) searching and assembling info. Searching can be done by the internet as well as collaboration and searching other people’s heads – ironically very similar to the school idea of “cheating”. I currently get paid 5x the average UK wage by “cheating”. That’s also how Mel and I built our property empire – “cheating” again. So different from the time-waste of school.

That learning list is generic for all people-types. For my daughter, I’ll use my knowledge of analytic psychology to find her preferences and abilities, Wealth Dynamics style as well as a few others, to guide her to ways of large income AND fulfilment.

Adding to this, there are preferences I will be continually on the lookout to observe in her, in order to help guide her. Some of these preferences are:

physical or intellectual activity

Indoors or outdoors

Leader or follower

Solo or team based

specialist or generalist

working with people or working with things

Focussed single-mindedness or going with the flow

Each of these preferences lead to roles (traditionally called jobs, but I don’t like that the associations with that word either)

These preferences form the basis of any skills and attitudes required for domain experiences like job roles she wishes to focus on: for instance she may wish to specialise. Even within her multi-skilled mother’s and polymath father’s abilities is a range of experiences she could take further than we have: eg stage musician, formula 1/rally driver; computer or maths geek; billionaire investor; champion martial artist. These are roles derived from abilities her parents have that are already further developed than the “average” person. And who’s to say who she’ll meet and be influenced by to take her preferences even further to their full unfolding.

So when you asked if schooling questions weren’t 5 years away, I hope you can see that I’m not just talking about shoving a kid into the day-care called “School” with me wanting them “just to be happy”. For me, education, growth, material achievement and spiritual unfoldment are all the same.

I wonder if you realised what you had opened up with that short, but high-vibing email you sent back on schooling.