Paradigm Shifts in Education and Learning Environments

THE VISION

Imagine a fully integrated approach to inspiring and challenging our youth of today to help teach adults about a new tomorrow… aware of our problems and quickly focusing on creative solutions that empower environmental and social change. Now empowered adults can empower our youth through providing the necessary tools for their process. The human race has entered a new era, an evolution in educational and social methodologies is at hand. The old formulas don’t work anymore as evidenced by many students now dull and listless in the classrooms from ‘helpful’ drugging. Disenfranchised youth internalize their anger and act out in unprecedented violence toward themselves and others.

Traditional education has not addressed the growing emotional and intellectual needs of our children; the connectedness of mind, body, and spirit to everything of a natural order. We are unveiling the embryo of an integrated master plan that could solve our educational and behavioral difficulties… unifying youth with adults and building planetary respect as our global family expands. It is obvious that we need some major changes in our approach to nurturing our relationships for the benefit of all. Genesis II Multiverse Communities… A new myth is in process of creation, one that inspires hope and transcendence, and we all can participate in its development right now, today.

Doors to Perception… 

Our youth of today look at the educational system that they are forced into and ask, “Why?”  We, parents and grandparents, force them into boxes they never belonged in, often drugging them into submission so they can learn like ‘normal’ children. They look at these ignorant values and say, “That’s not for me!” They laugh at the political machinery behind it all and see how the planet is being destroyed and say, “Nothing is working.” They live with hopelessness in a love-starved world and feel, “What’s the use?”  So begins the life of abuse in all its ugly forms. No one seems to listen to these cries for help. Many of these children end up in correctional or treatment centers.

Warehousing of ‘adjudicated’ youths within the social systems only continues to drive the mechanistic and reductionist mentality of holistic ignorance. Children seek rites of passage, often void of guidance, without knowing what they are doing or why; causing social issues of near epidemic proportions in our burgeoning cities and an overload for our courts, educational and social service systems. Do we see a problem? Can we find collective answers and implement solutions? Is it possible for a new type of community to develop that demonstrates a holistic environment?

Anyone who works with at-risk youth understands that much more could be done toward addressing their needs. In the U.S. alone, many are warehoused in group homes with little or no opportunity to develop the necessary life skills to survive and thrive in today’s world. Job markets are shifting faster than academic programs can keep up. Rather than create environments that nurture multiple and emotional intelligences, we drug our youth into submission and wonder why they choose to self-medicate and defy the ‘system’ that holds them captive.

Adaptive systems and ‘wrap-around’ models in social services still only address the problems and symptoms of this decay in moral servitude. Survivors have learned to lay low and keep quiet in regard to challenging the ‘system’ as the bureaucratic nature has created a paradigm paralysis.

Some have risen to leadership roles in these organizational monstrosities, doing what they can to affect change. Peer-community facilitators, as change agents, are few and far between in the development of alternative solutions to this growing problem. Developing a model community that demonstrates holistic integrated solutions seems to be in order. How do we do that?

Undue Duty

Just in case the gravity of the situation has not been made clear, the recent developments of war based on false information should bring some desire for greater accountability. The United States was led into a war based on what appears to be a corporate and/or personal agenda. Our society was numbed by 9-11 and manipulated into fear-based choices.

In our world today families suffer from being ripped apart by a non-supportive society steeped in fearful responses to propaganda. Worldwide the suffering is exacerbated as the complexity of relationship issues rises exponentially. The global village seems to develop from arrogance rather than appreciation. Globalization seems to be increasing these inequities as we become more concerned with terrorists than tenderness, living in fear instead of freedom.

Educational systems, family environments, and welfare agencies no longer nurture the creative spark in our children; the love and care every child deserves and needs. Adults and children who have overcome the myriad of abusive scenarios are teaching others, both young and old, of the necessity to love and be loved.

The UK Youth are a prime example of the change that is happening in our younger generation now. The survivors as educators, parents, social workers, therapists, and visionaries are doing a fantastic job in nurturing those they can, sharing volumes of experience while harvesting their past and showing the rest of us the path to a new ordered world which shares accountability and responsibility toward our future generations and planetary stewardship.

One of the paradigm shifts necessary is to move away from pointing fingers at problems and recognize that we have at least three pointing back at us, offering us the opportunity to share solutions that bridge possibility with practicality. Results come in time, beyond the impatience of our consumerist society and inept bureaucracy.

Current management philosophy within the realms of ‘best practices’ is calling for open communication and a systems approach to doing business, whether it is product or service oriented makes no difference. This holistic practice empowers people to make choices and decisions for which they feel inclusion in the carrying out of the company’s mission.

We can apply this same philosophy to the development of new educational systems as well, expanding paradigm shifts - stubbing my toe on purposethe learning environment from the classroom to the community, with holistic approaches to serving the youth and community. We often expect results from others without first teaching them the process necessary to achieve the results. We expect and even demand certain behaviors from our youth who’ve had no behavioral models or poor ones at best.

Specialization in professions seems to contribute to the inability for adaptive behavior in the inclusion of holistic systems. Essentially, one hand does not know what the other is doing. How can we find wholeness in society with such dissociative and incongruent practices? Now we need to collectively look at what we can do to provide the foundation for a new or adjusted system that inspires everyone to do and be better on a daily basis, nurturing the natural desire to become more than we are as human beings; inspiring love, care and concern rather than fear, guilt and shame.

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