Dear President Obama,

You yourself are beautifully educated and know the significant difference in outcome between memorizing for a test and developing questions, discussing ideas and managing investigations. Certainly you will guide your own children in the latter, confident in the knowledge that reflective people are more open to ideas and more likely to make informed choices. And as our President, you know that progress in education could make every cent spent on reducing crime and improving health more effective by orders of magnitude, while hackneyed practices will exacerbate the dangerous lack of analysis that characterizes and paralyzes so much of our population. Still, you propose the tired, failed practices.

I trust the integrity of your intentions. However, may I say respectfully that I think you don’t know the right questions to ask in this field - which means you can’t discern the right problem to solve and therefore lack a basis for deciding what to do.

The right problem to solve how to channel every person’s inbuilt drive to raise questions and pursue them; that is, the innate drive to learn and work. This is the most efficient, profitable road to reducing and preventing disaffection – and ultimately to a more reflective society. Furthermore it costs a great deal less than what we’re doing now and students become better educated virtually 100% of the time they are in class.

Why isn't this prominent in the public education debate? Myths have the whip hand. Here are the details.


Myth
Reading, writing and arithmetic are the basic skills of education.

Reality
The basic skills for learning are observation and documentation, conversation and visual imaging, music, pattern and design, mechanics and invention – traits that develop as a partnership between nature and environment yet very importantly have no time constraint and so can come into bud at any age.

These are the skills that so many children in silent, still or angry homes don’t develop. So, going to a practical setting, when you hand a teenage non-reader some simple text, but he hasn’t got the learning foundation in place, he can’t read the text no matter how simple the words. The teacher determines it’s a matter of will or ignorance and either gives him a young child’s book or alerts his counselor and parents, or both. The adolescent is mortified and frustrated; if he lacks place in a family, he’s angry and he acts up. It isn’t a choice; it’s how we’re built.

But you have to know that, and about the mechanisms, and how to recognize the signs when someone lacks the pre-literacy basics. You have to know, too, the pivotal role that tools, beauty, pattern and the search for reality play in preparedness before you can pave the way for reading, writing, computation, analytical thinking, problem solving and informed judgment.

Myth
Some people don’t want to learn and some people can’t learn but teachers and learning-to-learn programs can help.

Reality
Learning is inborn. You can’t teach people to learn and you can’t stop people learning.

Learning is the survival drive that helps us satisfy the need to answer questions, beat the competition and get as close as possible to feeling happy. So you cannot teach people to learn and you can’t stop people learning. You can create the environment within which people channel learning, and you can help people switch learning to a constructive path.

Think about it: babies are instinctively curious and always exploring. Toddlers are always asking why, although no one has told them which why questions are best. No two kids ask the same questions, and if you address the question, they’re rapt. How could that disappear?

The answer is, it can’t – and never does. No matter how long someone has been on a dark side road – no matter if the person has no love or support, no matter what age and even if the person is illiterate and innumerate - given any opportunity to follow up on a constructive idea, preferably one arising from one’s own question, that person will find work, feel proud and search for love. What’s more, that person will learn to read and write, will take care of himself, pay attention to health messages and watch out for those in his circle. That’s not only true; you have to work very hard to make it otherwise.

Per se you cannot teach people to learn, and any money spent on such duff stuff is good money after bad right down the drain.


Myth
It costs a lot of money to educate people properly.

Reality
It costs hardly any money to educate people.

You can make a start with a spider plant, blank paper and fine quality well-sharpened pencils, and if that’s all the money you have for materials, the students will find their own questions and progress their own education.

Many other simple things provide an environment within which people find questions and a structure for following up. But you have to know why you use a spider plant yet not a rubber tree, for example, and which students need observation training to reawaken the visual system before turning to the plant. You need to be a diagnostician specializing in the field of human learning.

Cost is negligible. It wouldn’t take a fifth of current expenditure to redress and prevent disaffection across more than 90% of the population.

Myth
You have to fix the family before kids will progress academically.

Reality
Once a person finds work, the person pursues it, irrespective of the setting.

The two basic drivers of human existence are love and work. In the absence of love, people pursue work, and when they’re strong enough in that domain they go out in search of love. So you may spend a lot of money working one to one on families, and that has its benefits, but the opportunity to find work at school will accomplish as much for a fraction of the cost.

Learning and work help us stave off boredom and keep our spirits up if we are lacking love; they equip us to complete, develop inventions, and find love – three driving forces for all human beings. We need only let in the light and air.


Myth
Preparing to teach is essentially about learning theory and lesson planning.

Reality
Teacher education is about how to choose materials and help individuals progress.

Would you like to visit a doctor whose primary training was in administration of medicines but who hadn’t been trained to know how they act on the human system?

If you want to reduce and prevent disaffection, the choice of materials is more important than what you say and much more important than what you ask students to do. But you have to be professionally educated in human development and learning in order to prepare instructional practice.

* * *

Here’s an example of the ideas in practice.

Twenty Men in Jail, Twenty Dollars to Spend

I worked in a medium security prison with twenty men (all together once a week for four hours each time). They had always been learners, of course, only they’d been learning how to cope with an empty life and how to get better at being criminals – which, as they pointed out, they had not done as well as they might have liked.

But once they had started enjoying conversation, and following up systematically on ideas about mechanics, pattern and design - which began during our first moment together thanks to the materials I put before them – it wasn’t long before they started inventing.

At the start many among these men couldn’t read, write or do sums very well, so the materials I used were line drawing images without any numbers or words. Yet at the end of two weeks the men proudly mounted an exhibition of their work – illustrated and labeled with dimensions and correct terms. Because they were proud, and wanted to do things right, they had mastered the ruler and compass, checked one another’s spelling, used a dictionary, and learned to use Word.

By the third month, they were studying about human development. They’d given an illustrated lecture to the prison population about how people can get to be criminals, and they’d formed a company called Stay Free which would teach prison officials why education for questions could help reduce re-offending. And they formed a Father’s Group to consider how they might keep their own children from becoming lawless. And they stood together at the phone, helping one another say to their children, I love you.

They were waking early to do their prison jobs so they could meet more often; they ironed their shirts, stood tall, and had become teachers to a second group of prisoners. They formed a company, Stay Free, to teach prison officials why questions stop re-offending.

Virtually No Cost

The materials I used cost just a few dollars in all. There were photocopied images, some remainder bits of beautiful art paper, geometry tools, fine pencils, quality technical drawing pens, extra-blade pencil sharpeners and a professional eraser, the backs of writing pads and X-Acto knives. Not much when you consider the nation’s education budget. For research into questions, students consulted one another and used the computer. Later the prison librarian joined the team, helping with research and the composing of letters with questions to experts.

Do I see your eyebrows go up at the thought of X-Acto knives in prison? It is notable that over an entire year not one item went missing though nothing was locked away. That includes the X-Actos.

But you have to know which images will bypass resistance and tap the drive to raise questions and prefer constructive behavior. And you have to know how to help individuals progress. That is, when someone is stuck, do you offer a solution, suggest possibilities, work one to one, or let the person rest until something suggests itself. This is a critical instructional judgment that depends on the nature of the work plus an accurate diagnosis of the learner’s physical, mental and emotional state at that moment in time.

* * *

The Cost Effective Solution: Equipping Teachers to Redress and Prevent Disaffection

Does the work kids do in school lead to the outcomes promised by public officials and publishers? Are teachers educated as diagnosticians, equipped to choose materials aligned with natural patterns of human learning and brain development – people who are equipped to help individuals progress?

No on both counts. The right problem to solve is that educational practice doesn’t often center on a student’s own questions. And by now it must be apparent that the most cost-effective solution to reducing and preventing disaffection is equipping teachers to do that.

Of course it would mean systemic change that has implications for professional education, instructional practice and assessment. Perhaps that’s why vested interests raise scare tactics at any mention of redrawing teacher preparation. What about all the people already teaching? What about all the teacher training programs already out there? Anyway, there aren’t enough people who would be interested in teaching as a behavioral science; there is no one to write and deliver the new teacher education curricula; and a teacher corps, thus educated, would demand extortionate pay.

Well, it’s good money after bad to fix a broken, outmoded system that’s been breaking hearts and draining resources we need for health care for years now. Still, reason won’t dispel the objections, so you’ll need ammunition to return the fire. Here is some.

Given the chance to gain a professional education in the art and science of developing human potential and equipped with highly developed diagnostic skill, you’d have lines around the block for every place on teacher education programs, and first in line would be those among today’s teachers who hate how little they know about why so many kids slip through the net. Virtually all people who teach are well meaning and want to help pupils fulfill promise yet most teachers don’t know why their good will and new methods make no change.

The enhanced curriculum for teacher education is intellectually rigorous, invigorating and exciting. It incorporates the best today’s teacher education modules, especially where people study by the case method. And, you can deliver the basics in one month to teachers in training or those in service – this has been done many times already - and if need be, people can learn and then teach one another.

Given the chance to correctly prepare those who will take our young people’s minds into their hands, scientists and science professors will line up to join education faculty on curriculum development teams. They would do this because it would help them understand the inexplicable failure of educational policy to date, it would help America recover, it would be creative and it would be very interesting indeed.

The system needs one teacher for every ten or twelve people born; people who decide to teach can do the sums. Properly equipped to do the job and sanctioned to do it, the nonmonetary rewards will be boundless. Anyway anyone who chooses to work in the public sector knows that it’s fair pay and excellent benefits. There is no reason to imagine that professionally educated teachers would thereby become extortionate.

* * *

Mr. President: A person’s own question is the wellspring for constructive behavior, reflection, and informed decision making - and that’s irrespective of age, background or current woes. So how to channel the innate drive to raise questions and follow up on them is right problem, and equipping teachers to do that is the most cost-effective solution.

You know that; a machine doesn’t run efficiently unless the parts are fit for purpose. It would be a relief to great teachers who can’t abide the insidious test preparation and it will preclude the misery that families and society face when disaffected young people turn to destructive roads. It would save all the money we waste on endless tweaks to superficial issues of form that have not one thing to do with whether a person learns, and it would preclude the disappointment teachers and parents feel who are ever hopeful that the next quick fix will do the trick.

It would ensure that legions of Americans will become observant, talk together more, pay attention to health messages, enjoy the pleasure of improved self-esteem and reflect on decisions they make for themselves and others. I hope you will see that revamping teacher education is the starting point, which, as with any educational practice – incurs little cost. Just as in schools, the difference is in the materials you choose, what you ask people to do, and how you help them progress – not a thing to do with how much you spend along the way.