Rebellious Thoughts #63 - 🤘 Imagine if...

Hey Rebels!

As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.

YEW!

Let’s get into today’s:

As you know, I have a slightly unorthodox way to go about education with the kids.

They go to a normal school but I do all I can to ensure they take advantage of the good bits and survive the bad bits.

Pretty wife and I are like a Venn diagram, I’m on one extreme, and she is on the other but we both have a middle ground in which we agree. I think that gives the kids the best of both worlds in trying to understand how to play the game of life.

Let me first tell you how I see school so that at least you know where I am starting from.
And by the way, I am being provocative remember!! So you don’t have to agree with me just think for yourself and use this as a stimulus!

The school system was primarily developed to condition humans to do something they are not instinctively very good at: spend 8 hrs in the same place doing a repetitive task over and over and over again.

To condition a human to accept this as “normal” (given that for 2.5m years it was not normal) you need to start young (6ish!) and go at it for a solid 15 years…

The reason why I am always unlearning my kids what they “learn”, is that with young minds, if you don’t catch it straight away, the damage can be irreversible. Ie: a teacher says casually a few times “Johnny you are not very creative are you?” And Johnny will never write the greatest musical there ever was and we all miss out.

The same as the AICD course I spoke about in the last few newsletters has a lot to answer for the throttled economic potential of Australia, school has a lot to answer for the throttled and damaged human potential.

We always tend to feel sorry for the teachers and I hear statements like “it’s a hard job”, ”they don’t get paid enough”, “it’s hard to manage 30 kids” and because of this tendency we lower our expectations and just let schools get away with behaviour we shouldn’t.

I’m not saying they get paid enough, they don’t, but that’s not an excuse for you to do a shit job. Imagine feeling sorry for a nurse cos they don’t get paid enough and it’s a tough job and letting them get away with an incorrect dose of a medicine.

When a nurse fucks up the consequences are often immediate and life-threatening so there are lots of ways to ensure this does not happen and we also as societies don’t accept it.

When a teacher fucks up and says to a kid “you are not creative” or “do it cos I am the teacher” or “don’t argue with me” or the thousands of little entitled 19th century comments they say - the damage is immediately invisible but incredible profound long term. The damage is perhaps not as bad as death but certainly life-changing.

I told you once my unrealistic story (click here to read it again) - think about how many kids got told to be realistic and replaced their unrealistic dreams with uninspiring realistic expectations.

Imagine if schools purpose was to create the craziest most unrealistic humans you can possibly create where anything is possible - spend 15 years on empathy, love, cooperation, curiosity, team building, adventure, play… anyway subjects we don’t have today but we should.

Imagine a subject where the sole purpose is to play and to remain playful and to invent games to play… imagine how much more innovative corporations would be today?

Imagine another subject called “Team” and all you did was activities to learn to build, lead, and work with teams of different shapes and sizes virtually, physically - imagine if we learnt team earlier in life rather than sooo late… imagine the benefit to societies?

Imagine a subject called “Adventure” and all we had to do was come up with crazy adventures and then go ahead and achieve them!

Imagine that maths and language and chemistry were simply learnt as tools to achieve what you need to - a game, build a team, etc

Love

Gus

P.S. Did anything like this happen to you? Someone told you to “be realistic” or “keep your head out of the clouds"… "stay grounded"… Many of us have been there…
It’s time to unlearn that safe, boxed-in thinking and finally embrace those “unrealistic” thoughts you’ve been sitting on.

In fact, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve created the Career Shake Up! course. To help you ditch the old script and do what you truly want.

As this year winds down, it’s the perfect moment to think about what you want to do next. I decided to extend the 30% OFF until the end of the year to help you make it happen. Use CODE: 30

Join the Shake Up! Experience now!

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