 All right great My name is Charles Eisenstein. I'm going to talk about well I'll begin by talking and then we'll go somewhere else But I'm going to talk about de-schooling yourself releasing the unconscious habits of school because a lot of us are pioneering new ways of learning teaching education and New ways of relating between adults and children. I mean, that's really the most general formulation of school a way for children and adults to relate and we're trying to do it in a new way and A lot of us have an intellectual understanding of what that is We may not all agree on it exactly, but we have an intellectual understanding of what we want to do what we don't want to do But sometimes I've noticed at least in my own experience with this that I have unconscious habits unconscious ways of being thinking and speaking that perpetuate the old system even though in my mind I Believe myself committed to something new so I'm thinking about the new but still living in the old and these these habits of thinking speaking and being have gradually come to light for me over a period of years and I expect that there's still many ways in which I'm still very much a school boy or a school boy and that there are many Ways that I'm still in the process of discovering or still yet to discover So I'm hoping that some of these will come to light for me in this in this workshop today and Perhaps all of you too. Some of you might have awakened to your own internalized schooling in different ways than I have and So maybe some of what comes out here will be new for you also because we all really I think in pioneering this new age We need help from each other from other pioneers as we explore the invisible paths of the new world Now the the things that I'm about to talk about the Habits of school. They're not just of school. They're not if even if you were Homeschooled or unschooled or went to a free school You're probably still not completely free of them because they permeate our civilization They permeate permeate our culture and our civilization on a very deep level school isn't something separate from the rest of the grand enterprise of social engineering Yeah of world domination It's it fits in as an integral part of the system that we've created it is an intensification of Trends of management and control that have been going on for thousands of years So it's not just what we're going to talk about isn't just what happens in school And if you didn't go to school, you'll be free of it, but it's something that school is especially designed to To drill in to our habits of being and a lot of what happens In school we internalize as adults the ways that we related to Teacher and to parents of course, but this that's not what this particular seminar is about But the ways that we relate to teacher and to authority in general I mean school is really our first experience of an authority outside the family and So the way that we relate to this authority eventually we grow up and we relate the same way to an internalized teacher and internalized authority and We no longer need the external controls the external rewards and incentives and punishments and threats When that happens, we are considered educated. We're considered mature matures, and we get a document to certify that we are That we have learned the lessons of school that we have internalized these programs that are now of self-control And we can be counted on to be compliant That certificate is called a degree And if you want to prove your exceptional submissiveness and compliance, then you can get a graduate degree or PhD Okay, so I saw without any further ado. I'd like to just begin a big list of The habits of school the unconscious well for some of you will be unconscious for some of us conscious for most of us Probably half conscious But the habits of school things that you learn in school. I'm just going to start off the list With a Few examples For example Here's one. That's very apropos the current setting being on time Okay Right punctuality being on time Okay, we're more generally being on a schedule Oh, and by the way though every habit almost every habit of compliance that we learn in school has has a mirror image Okay Which would be a reflexive rejection of it Defiance there's habits of submission and habits of defiance. So the habit of defiance would be Being defiantly late all the time Because you know, you got it. You got a one way that that I mean rebellion like Reflexive automatic rebellion is itself a habit of slavery Okay, so this would be Being on time never on time Okay, another example is Dutifully doing your assignments being being dutiful and voice is not dutiful and industrious In the work assigned to you Okay, and then another habit of school would be laziness, which is a natural Quality of slaves and people who have who have been slaves if you can't rebel outright if that is futile Then you rebel by pretending to be lazy and stupid Hence a lot of the the that's what people believed of of the African Americans They believed that well, they're lazy and stupid But that was really a form of unconscious rebellion when overt rebellion was a little bit too dangerous And that's what that's what some of us do in school, too We pretend to be lazy and stupid so we can get out of doing things that we don't really want to do Okay, so then lazy Okay, and so I just want to open it up call out some habits of school Getting permission. Yep. Yeah Raising your hand I knew I was gonna come up You know what I'm just gonna give up this board because well, it's so nice to see them all here Yeah, that's a good idea Keeps wiggling around I can help hold it up Okay Right, so getting permission that was halfway written good staying in your seat Feet on the ground. Okay. Good Yeah, just call them out. Yeah I Visual appearance Okay. Yeah, I mean again, this isn't something that is completely restricted to school, but it's the crucible for for Learning to appear acceptable. Yeah Okay, right Telling learning by being told Okay being led being led, okay Yes, absolutely Reflexive distrust of authority. I mean maybe in this world there is a proper place for authority But if authority is abused then a child Naturally will Some children will will cow will be cowed other children will be Defiant and distrust all authority, even if it's not improperly exercised and this could be a Philosophical conversation about is there ever a place for authority or leadership being led, right? But that's not what it's about right now right now. We're just gonna talk about the habitual aspect of it I Add one Wanting credit for being right wanting credit for being right We're just wanting to be right wanting to be acknowledged is right Acknowledgement for being right so along with that relying on somebody else to assess, you know performance Yep Right rankings Measuring up how about measuring up do I measure up because in school you constantly are Externally evaluated about whether you measure up whether you make the standard even more now of course with no child left behind them when I was a kid but but Do I measure up do I measure up the the internalization of the external standards is right? Does this child measure up is the external Aspect of it when it gets internalized becomes a habit do I measure up? Okay, and just anyways anyone doing it right now notice right now What habits of school are operating for example? Are you evaluating whether you have these habits and giving yourself credit? if you Don't have them and if you do have them. Oh, you know I flunked Okay, and so we can see how deep this goes and the freedom that is available When we no longer are in the habits of school any others Yeah Right Yes Now how would I respond to that in a way that doesn't reinforce the habits of school? Well as as the person who's facilitating this workshop How can I right now? Act outside the habits of school and act to to not reinforce them Yeah But that's not how I would do it. I'd say I'd say that's exciting for me. I said that that point I feel excited about that point and Don't you think that's still kind of the same people people get a rev okay? And well, right, but that's right and that so you could still I mean you can take anything and feed it through your own School filter right teacher Teacher getting excited. You can say well that counts as praise and now Charles likes me because I made this point that feel He feels excited about and so wanting to be liked by authority competition Mm-hmm competition definitely a habit of school. Yes manipulation Right so right because kids are always trying to manipulate manipulate the teacher. It's a constant program when I was teaching Well this came up a lot when I was teaching at Penn State for a top there for four years a while ago and It was very rare at least for the first part of the semester that anyone was a genuine Because there was this you know kind of background program of let's make the professor like me So I'll get a good grade. Let's make him think highly of me. Let's act in a way that shows that I'm smart Okay, so publicly being smart I would put onto the list wanting to be seen as smart. I notice that a lot in Well, sometimes live things but also especially email forms of various sorts where sometimes it seems like you know, everyone is just competing to be publicly seen as smart and right Yeah Treats the staff Yeah Yeah, definitely Being dependent Mm-hmm. Yep, everything on on on Gatto's list of the seven lessons of school Is very deeply woven into this? Yes Yeah That's right. Yes, that's a good one. I hadn't thought of that one. Yeah, not wanting to appear too keen Right, you know, you know, I mean other kids will make fun of you if you if you like learning too much Yeah, so cynicism Cynicism, you know not really believing fully in anything and not being too enthusiastic Mm-hmm self-censorship. Yep, because you could get shot down. Mm-hmm. Yes Right you can go both ways Right, there's the dependency The dependency that that a couple people have mentioned Intellectual dependency, you know looking outside for the answers and then then the the on the other side is Is I'm gonna go it alone. I'm not gonna get answers from anybody else. I'm gonna do it myself Which is again not always appropriate or possible in this in this world Both of these habits keep us small Diconomous right and wrong definitely something we learn in school. Yeah repressing emotions in the classroom and in the academic world in general, I mean, you're not supposed to get emotional if you if you a If you try to publish Something in an academic journal, you know, it's not supposed to be emotional. It's supposed to be objective so this is Definitely a habit of suppressing emotions and suppressing subjectivity Suppressing intuition because you have to have a reason you have to be able to produce a reason for things. Mm-hmm Yes Yes Are you say what are you saying about religion like excising it from? Okay So how can you sum that sum that up into like three words adhering to higher values, okay kind of okay I'm trying to think how that would be in public school, but there is kind of like this The state and the government right civics being a good a good citizen and and productive member of society and that kind of stuff Mm-hmm, right. Yes labeling. Yeah Mm-hmm. Yes labeling and related to that Labeling knowledge and Dividing dividing the world into subjects Okay, so in school, you know, you go from whatever social studies to math to English to this to that Disintegration and then in life. It's like well, I have different compartments of my life I have my relationship, you know, I have my work, you know, I have my hobbies I have this I have that this compartmentalized life this kind of Fragmentation perhaps didn't exist 10,000 years ago and then related to that mendacity institutionalized lying lack of honesty of individuals Permits the whole thing. Okay. Give me a give me a give me a concrete example. Yeah Nobody wants to work step up above it because it makes everybody else with that ever you get slack for doing Putting your full effort in because then everybody else is gonna look bad Yeah From high levels of organizations They will make pronouncements that after a while everybody starts to recognize that it's never the truth Yes Yes Right, except there. So there's kind of this acceptable There's this realm of acceptable discourse acceptable questions acceptable answers acceptable opinions that everybody knows is not true this is Ubiquitous in our in our culture Habitual and semi-conscious mendacity as you put it From everything from you know, you drive around and look at the subdivision names, you know Walnut crossing there are no walnut trees and nor is there a crossing Maybe they cut them down to build it but but often there is there weren't even any to begin with you know Aspen Heights No aspen trees there and it's not even a Heights, you know, it just sounded kind of British, you know So they decided to name it that Right, so invoking these these symbols That have no necessary connection to reality and we're so habituated to this that when politicians lie We think nothing of it Maybe some of you guys are exceptions, but people are not really shocked when for example, this was a while ago But George Bush the elder Supposedly saw Independence Day this movie that was kind of patriotic and then Statement was issued about his opinions about the movie and how much he liked it but this statement was written before he'd actually seen it by somebody else and And everybody in the press knew that But nobody called him on it and nobody really cared and it just went out there as into to the you know And it's not just Republicans who do this Feeling unsafe Right playing it safe, yeah It's just it's a lot of emotional Right playing it safe and and okay. Here's one of these unconscious habits that really was powerful in me Okay, to make it personal like I found that before I said anything I would first calculate whether I would get approval and Whether it was safe whether it was it was acceptable Given the role that I occupied in this big class You know there's different roles and different people can say different things But I would have this kind of program running that would calculate everything Based on how is somebody going to see me and how is somebody going to react to me if I say it this way so I was not comfortable ever ever ever ever and not feeling free to just be myself and Yeah, put myself out there, and if you don't like it too bad That's something you do not learn in school And it really has to do with all school education, you know being smart and having a lot of knowledge is really valuable and Not having not showing or using that knowledge Is you know my place is very different You know schooling is really so valuable and not having schooling not using You know higher education in your work or in your life, and you're not quite as valuable I'm really I see I'm seeing both are been in both places Yeah You know school sets that up Right that more broadly it's a habit of disassociation and that's a natural consequence of Evaluation because to evaluate something including yourself you do have to step outside which can be good perhaps When you do it consciously with intention But when it becomes a habit then you become disassociated from yourself out of touch with your passions your desires Your feelings which is considered a good thing Because how can you have a society where people do things that are degrading to human? Capacities or insulting to human nobility if you are in touch with your feelings and passions You won't have people pushing mops all day or lying to customers all day or building weapons all day probably Pardon me Yeah Yeah There's always What were you gonna say you've had your hand up for a long time Yeah Yeah To me that's a big one for me like like the things that they teach explicitly like about the great explorers and the great heroes and the movers and shakers I Think that's probably only about five percent of where we get the habits of school The received ideology is less important than just the ways of doing things that are so routine That we think that that's just the way things are done But one basic one is what's my assignment? And we internalize that so deeply that people are very uncomfortable if there is no List in of instructions here. Here's what you are to do when I was teaching at Penn State again like if I gave an assignment and And they're like well how many pages did you want us to write and if I said however long it takes To do it to your satisfaction people were extremely uncomfortable with that because they've been habituated to Fulfilling some requirements because you fulfill some requirements and you get your reward and If there are if there is no list of requirements to fulfill It's disorienting and so what kind of job and what kind of life is that a kind of training for obvious quantity over quality Or or you could say Fulfilling the letter of the requirements Yeah, although a lot of times the intent is that you fulfill the letter of the requirements Yeah, yeah, it's a different thing Right Right, but but more basically it's just you know this desire to be told what to do and then the opposite of it, of course is is Hustility unthinking hostility to ever being told what to do But you know what like sometimes we need to be told what to do at least that's what I've discovered in my Oh, it's not good. That's what I've discovered in my life is that sometimes I Truly need something from the outside Mm-hmm disregard for integrity or higher principles in favor of rules and procedures Yeah Yeah, and Yeah, that's a good question Integrity makes a lot of sense to me higher principles sounds suspect. Yeah Right someone's reality is better than someone else's this is yeah get with the program this Right to do it through an act of will then he does somebody who naturally and and what school valorizes is Mental activity because there you are your body is bound you're sitting at a desk and this is good and this very deeply ingrained And then when you when you go to work, you'll be evaluated on teamwork Yeah Fear underlying everything I can't even I can't even gauge how Okay Yes, that is that it's one of the big ones because How do you make somebody do something that they don't want to do? like What is what do we mean when you say well, you know the teacher made me do it? Or somebody made me do it like what does that really mean? because it's tied up in fear and it's and If school is about anything if you read the historical stuff that that that gato and other people write, you know That that school developed basically in order to train people from a young age to do things that they didn't want to do because nobody wanted to work on an assembly line for 12 hours a day or You know add up columns of figures like industrial revolution clerks Had to do you know no one wanted to do that kind of work Especially if they had been a farmer or a craftsperson doing General things that were that were creative and interesting No one wanted to do that And so people had bad work habits and so they said well We're gonna have to train people from a young age to do things for external rewards But they don't actually want to do that are tedious and degrading etc etc etc right most most people probably understand that that narrative of how school Developed in the industrial revolution as part and parcel of that enterprise To break the spirit to do things that are of the machine so How do you make somebody do something? well if if someone is pointing a gun to my head and Says you know do do that then I could I could rightly say that they made me do that because If I didn't do it they would kill me. I mean in some sense. Maybe I even then they can't make me do it But That's right, right and and and that's really important because On a deep level to free ourselves from the habits of school which are the habits of civilization We need to no longer be afraid to die We have to we have to at some point and this will happen to everybody You'll come to some point in your life where you're saying you know what I'm gonna do whatever it is I'm going to and it could be something You know, I'm gonna quit this job. I'm gonna start this school I'm gonna jump out into this endeavor, which is risky and I'm gonna do it No matter what even though I'm gonna lose my health insurance Even though I'm going to take a cut in income even though I might not be able to pay my mortgage even though all of these scary things come up and Basically, you're saying it's more important to live right than it is to stay alive Life is more important than survival is another way to put it to be fully alive and fully human and to be here for the purpose That you were here for and so at some point in this de-schooling process you come up against fear of what is going to happen This is instilled in us in school when they say, you know, you better Do your homework and get good grades or it's going to go on your permanent record I mean, this is what I got in 10th grade, you know, this is this is for real now You know in 7th and 8th grade that wasn't on your permanent record But now colleges are gonna be looking about looking at this they're gonna look at your GPA and if you don't go to good college You're not gonna get a good job, you know and and etc etc etc And so it's you start early and then in 7th grade you were there were already saying, you know We're not gonna coddle you like you didn't like we did in elementary school You know, this is gonna determine whether you get into the AP classes in high school. I mean this this Inculcating of fear goes back very far So living in fear is a habit of school one way I'm a lot of stuff's coming through here And I just want to just finish off this thought and then we'll have more comments one way to No, actually, I will invite comments now and then I'll give you the second part soon Talk louder so we can pick it up on that Yeah Right, right. Yeah, Alan Watts Had some insights about that and so what you do is you take away this primal security Then you give back a conditional security and threaten to take it away In order to control somebody Mm-hmm. Yeah, you first and then and then you Mm-hmm Right I think that has Structural function in Making us think the way we do think Right Yeah Yeah Yeah, that is related to some of the things we were talking about um, but one thing that that That reminds me of And maybe it's the same thing that you're saying is Is that in school in school? One of the things that we learn is that you have to start with the elements the basics the fundamentals And you build up from that so in order to learn organic chemistry first you have to learn, you know about Electron valences, you know, and then you have to and you build it up into bigger and bigger molecules And if you want to learn physics if you want to learn, you know, Einsteinian physics first you have to learn You know the equations for force, you know and for acceleration and you build up from that but But as a matter of fact that's not actually how people learn usually you start with the Higher-level questions and then you say okay now in order to understand this then you go lower and lower and lower and you get to the elements From these higher-level questions and that's historically how it evolved to you know, people didn't start with the basics and One effect of and as so many textbooks say elements of this elements of that elements of algebra elements of political theory And one of the effects though of of doing it from the top from the bottom up and like you said to try to build Knowledge is that knowledge and learning is very boring at the base level it's very boring and the real Questions the real the real interesting stuff is inaccessible to anyone who hasn't gone through this really long process so knowledge becomes a realm of experts and That feeds into the another of the things the unconscious habits of schooling well If that if that's the case, then the experts will have to tell me what's true Yeah, alienation from learning Yes Right and and perhaps you can if you build up from these basic building blocks and finally finish grad school then you too Can be in the rarefied realm of real science and real knowledge and you can make an infinitesimal contribution to it And in thinking about this I've been kind of like running Like a chicken and egg kind of question in my head because I'm feeling like I can't just jump and say that like the Source of all these habits are is in fact school And I think it's like reductive to say like there's some sort of time before or there's something like that because you you mentioned it You said these are like the habits of civilization so for me like in recognizing these things in myself and having gone through public school and trying to Understand what if these things are in myself, but then also seeing them in other aspects of the world in offices and in You know situations that don't even have anything to do with school I wonder you know I just want to throw that question out in terms of what is it about maybe the human condition or human You know beings that that leads us towards these these types of things So I think like with Alan Watson kind of the wisdom of insecurity. There's something about a yearning that people have towards Fixed and secure and it's so much easier to have somebody Telling you what your structure of your day is or telling you know like that And so if we're talking about because we're you know talking and framing this in the sense of de-schooling ourselves Basically, so yeah, we're talking about is then de schooling Civilization, but we live in civilization. So how does that right? You know, how do we put this and that's a big like that's the question I just running my through my head. I'm like I see a lot of you know reason why all these things exist in school Or why they perpetuate and things like that So how do we even begin to de-school ourselves if civilization in itself? And I mean, I don't know we don't have any really record of of you know What primitive man's social structures were like so it's hard to hard to just imagine what it was that there was some time when it Wasn't existed. Okay, this is this is completely what my book is about my book is called the Ascent of Humanity It's a semi-ironic title and But that's the question that that I've that I spent half my adult life thinking about the Answer that I came to you that was satisfying for me is is that the origin of all of this stuff is As deep as it could possibly be it's the human sense of self all of this comes from a belief and a felt experience that To be well, let's do it actually here Do a let's do a little experiment. Okay Close your eyes and I would like you to Make a picture of yourself Doing nothing But simply being I don't want you to experience yourself as just being I want you to make a picture of yourself doing nothing But being but existing what does that look like to just exist? Okay, open your eyes And the second part will do a felt experience of just being To show why the picture that most people have of just being is a Trick That's being perpetrated on us. How many people imagine yourself alone Imagine yourself your picture of you just being was a picture of you alone Most people imagine themselves alone if I say well, do you know imagine yourself doing nothing, but just existing What are you doing right now? Yeah, you are and you're not alone But it but but you could say well, you're you're in a seminar right or you're talking to somebody so you're not just being That's that's I don't believe that logic, but I'm saying that's what someone might say Right someone might say say that you know if you're not interact like interacting with somebody that's not just being but there's this Pure state of existence. So to be is to be alone so at the foundation of of our civilization and of our educational system both Is a human sense of self that is separate and and discreet like like Starts and ends here. It's what Alan Watts called the skin encapsulated ego. It's what biology calls the phenotype the expression of the nuclear DNA it's what Religion would call something like the the soul encased in flesh and separate from other souls It's what economics calls the the the economic man the rational actor Okay, and so on all of these systems you have these separate units that Have relationships and interact, but they're fundamentally separate ancient people did not think this way and Stone Age people tribal people to this day don't really think this way to be to them is to relate and If you strip away your relationships you are less That's what's happened through our ideology and partly through our schooling is that our connected self has been Truncated and we've been made small This creates a very painful wound, which is why It hurts just to be a state which we call boredom Which is a new state? Indigenous people did not have a word for boredom because it didn't exist for them they were happy to literally sit and watch the grass grow and So much comes from this This separation part of it is the ideology of objectivity that were separate from the universe too so I'm not going to go too much more into that but If you want to What Yes Ah Stretch that idea Associating with others There is some deep metaphysical issues here that I won't go into too much except in one small way which will be relevant, although maybe not so much to schooling, but there's only two ways to look at it, like you can say that, okay, the orthodox ideology says that every electron in the universe is identical, that there are many, many, many of them and they're all identical, that every carbon atom in the universe, well every carbon 12 atom is identical and every carbon 14 atom is identical and every building block is identical and therefore that we are basically just permutations of the same basic building blocks and we're not fundamentally different, there's nothing unique about us, it's just that we're different mixes of the same stuff and that's one of the ideologies underneath school which basically treats people as variations on the same identical template and tries to use therefore standard methods to educate us to get a standard result, there are two ways to look at it that are alternatives to this, one and these both have physics justifications, one is that every electron is unique which is why when you send them through a diffraction slit some of them decide to go this way and some decide to go that way and there's no realistic reason to explain why and the animist, the tribalist would say it's obvious why one goes this way and one goes that way because that one chose to go this way and that one chose to go that way and they each have a uniqueness, they each have a personhood, a sentience, when you apply this to school then you get everything that this conference is all about because fundamentally we say that every child is unique and self-determined and has a right to be self-determined. The other way to look at it that's equally true is that there is only one electron, there is only one electron, every electron is the same electron, not identical, not separate electrons that are identical but the same electron coming in and out of existence, looping back through time and that we are all therefore the same being, looking at each other through different eyes and you can get a felt sense of that and the joy and the relief and the connection and the intimacy is so intense that we just have to look away in half a second either with our eyes or with our mind. Okay, I want to, let's see. Can I ask, when Dave asked that question it was running through my mind and you were talking about what's this perspective of what people were doing thousands of years ago, it seems that a lot of learning must have come from nature and watching and you know, animals killing each other and you know, just this whole idea of survival that is to some degree. Yeah. Helped manifest that fear in one way and helped manifest this idea that you know you do have to exercise marks in some way to move forward. Yes, the analytic method and the ego self and the fear based self does have a proper role. I mean there is knowledge that you can gain by taking something apart and dividing it up into little pieces and doing all the things that we do in our educational system but what's happened is that that particular way of approaching knowledge and approaching being has become, we've over applied it and tried to apply it to everything including things where it does not apply and that's why categorically rejecting it is itself a habit of schooling, right? It's one of the ones on this side if we had maintained that that, but for those of you who came in late to reflexively and unthinkingly reject something is just as much a habit of that thing as to unthinkingly accept it and to be free of it is to take it on its own merits and use it appropriately. So I want to, I have another, okay I think I'll conclude this hour with one more observation about fear because I asked the question how do you make somebody do something and talked about putting a gun to your head. The greatest fear, the greatest fear of any young mammal is abandonment. It's a death sentence for a young mammal who's nursing. So when we, if you want to control a child the most powerful way is to tap into the fear of abandonment which is the fear of death and the way to do that is through conditional acceptance and rejection. Acceptance says I won't abandon you, you're here. Rejection says I might abandon you, you're on thin ice and if you keep doing this you know I'm going to push you out of the nest. I think birds have the same fear. And so this, this is how parents control their kids and this is how teachers in schools control children too. Grades and red stars and check marks and all of this, these are emblems of acceptance and rejection and they tap into the primal fear of a young mammal. And then we internalize it as guilt and shame. The label of good, I was a good boy today. Or bad, what's wrong with you? This is the internalized program of control that we learn through our, through our childhood and through school. And it doesn't work. We think it works and we think that when it doesn't work we have to do it even more. So for example, if you try to go on a diet and you, you're really good and you say you know I'm going to stay on my diet, I'm going to be really good and so you're giving yourself these pats in the back and a day, two days you're on the diet and then finally it's not strong enough and you can't do anymore and you eat everything in the house. And then the rejection part comes in, why did I do that? What's wrong with me? Hitting yourself, right? Beating yourself up and it doesn't have to be a diet. It could be, you know, I'm not going to yell at my kids anymore and how could I have done that? I'm so bad, right? So this internalized punishment and reward system. It's all going back to the greatest fear of any young mammal but it doesn't work because essentially to control somebody by threatening their life is nothing more and nothing less than slavery and we're not meant to be slaves. We are noble divine beings and we're not meant to be slaves and the response of any slave is to rebel and so that's called a binge when it comes to diet or an outbreak or an outburst when it comes to some other area because we're not meant to be slaves. But these habits of self-control, this use of fear encoded as acceptance and rejection. This is another habit of school. The habit of constantly evaluating yourself, was I a good boy, was I a good girl today and we think that we're going to be kinder to the planet by imposing this even more generally and more intensively, this huge effort to be good. And it doesn't work. So in the next, now we have a part two here at 3 o'clock and I'd like part two, what I would like to set up for part two is that everybody goes out in the next few hours, lunch, conversation, another seminar, one something. And just to observe yourself and see if any of this discussion has brought to light a habit of school that was unconscious in you before and now has come to light and to watch it operating and just to gather some impressions because I would like to hear how other people are liberating themselves from these habits because that'll help me liberate myself from these habits and we can all help each other. So gather some data, gather some impressions and we'll meet again at 3 o'clock and we can share with each other the ways that, this is the theoretical part, now I want to really get practical. So we'll share with each other how we can actually liberate ourselves and what we've learned from observing ourselves in the next few hours. Okay, so thank you very much. A lot of people who were here last time are not, which is to be expected because there's lots to do but some people here weren't here for the first part too so I want to just kind of figure out how many people are in that category so I know how much to, okay, the category of you were not here for part one. Alright, quite a number of you, okay good. Alright, so basically one of the things we did in the first hour was to make a list of the unconscious or conscious or just the habits of school and I pointed out that they're not habits just of school, they're of our whole civilization and in a lot of ways they're intensified in school but even if you didn't go to a normal school these habits still might be present in your thinking and your habits, your way of being. So when the first part ended I invited you to spend the next three hours while you have lunch and get into conversations and maybe go to another seminar to kind of observe yourself to see if you can notice any of these habits in operation especially a habit that was unconscious to begin with but might have become conscious. Since there's so many of you who weren't here for the beginning I'm just going to give a few examples of these habits and there's basically, you can think of them as being of two different types there's habits of submission and habits of defiance the habits of submission and defiance. Right, for example a habit of submission would be to be punctual to be on time all the time and that's something we learned how to do in school among other places a habit of defiance would be to be never on time to flaunt being late and to procrastinate procrastination is also, you can contrast that with the habit of always doing as you're told when you're told to do it to reflexively reject anything you're told is just as much a habit of school as it is to do everything you're told the habit of looking outside yourself looking to authority for answers is definitely a habit of school another habit of school would be to reject automatically reject anything that comes from authority to reject authority just because it's authority so I noticed at this conference there's a lot of people who have the habits of defiance which is probably a necessary stage in liberating ourselves entirely from the habits of school and then we can be free well I did the little lunchtime homework assignment as well and I noticed in myself this habit of always wondering if something is allowed if something is permitted, is it allowed to do this, is it allowed to do that and in some ways I've rejected consciously these conventions so I have both a habit of submission and a habit of defiance in this area my habit of submission is to be very tentative and very obedient and to only do what is expected, what is conventionally permitted for example in a situation like this my habit of defiance would be to just flaunt convention to act in unconventional ways just because it's unconventional to refuse to shave maybe to refuse to wear nice clothes just because I'm not going to do it, you know, fuck you, that kind of thing like that's a habit of school saying, you know, fuck you to the teacher that's just as much as to say yes sir to the teacher so I noticed while I was thinking about how to prepare for this part that was one of the things that I noticed operating in myself another big habit just to also get people thinking another major habit, one of the most powerful of school is to want to be seen as smart and right to impress teacher the habits of school get internalized initially it's to impress teacher and then in the future it's to impress everyone around you and also to impress yourself to give yourself credit and to give yourself a good grade we also in the first part related it to fear the habit of always being in fear and living in fear and the origin of this fear in conditional approval and rejection which is really survival anxiety how modern parenting and especially modern schooling uses this to control and manipulate people and then when we internalize it as guilt and shame how we use it to control and manipulate ourselves so de-schooling is about liberating ourselves more than just from school but also from these broader programs of control and ultimately the war against the self and the war against nature and the war against human nature that lies at the basis of our civilization I'm not going to talk about that too much more right now because I'd like to just open it up now to hear other people's reflections on their own unconscious habits because you know like we're all in a different place and it really is helpful just for me personally to hear what other people have discovered in this process of de-schooling themselves because then sometimes like oh yeah I do that you know and wow and maybe I can stop doing that how to stop once you've realized it is something I'll go into later on in this hour so and while we do this I'm going to pass around this if you want to be on my email list when I announce like publications and events and things write your name and your email address very clearly so would anybody like to yeah if you're already on my mailing list don't put your name on yeah one thing that I'm really curious to hear what you think is it seems like there's the rebelling or submitting pretty much what about a third option of acknowledging some kind of self-identity and going in harmony with that rather than being against something mm-hmm yeah I would say that that would be that wouldn't be a habit of schooling I mean that would be transcending a habit of schooling how so because I feel like you're looking interior to explore that I mean certainly using the reflection of the exterior something that I would say I would learn in school maybe no no no no it's not something you learn how to do but it's I mean to me that would be like to that would be coming to terms with what has been unconsciously drilled into you through your schooling and no longer being subject to it unless I'm not maybe I'm completely not understanding what you're saying would does someone else really get what he's saying and can explain it nobody gets me well I think tell me I'm wrong because I kind of have it's the extremism of it's got to be either a negative or a positive almost and it's like finding a negative or a negative and a negative yeah I think it seems like a negative and a negative either you're being brainwashed or you're rebelling against well it's pretty much like there's I mean conditioning just happens in any way shape and form so it's always happening regardless of what path you choose unless you have the answer to this which I haven't read your book and I don't know if this is exactly what you're talking about but you know how do you how do you avoid conditioning I guess can you avoid it by finding an inner piece that just trust in your own self and pulling on your own resources that's kind of what I was thinking yeah yeah that's a long line how do I do it well I think that like what I got from what you were saying is that it's at least my own take on it is that you know everything we're all influenced by everything and school is such a large part of many people's you know formative years that is also a large influence but the reality is we're always influenced by everything and it's not about bad or good it's about being able to kind of remove the layers examine them and say do I want this or do I not want this and I think that it's so yeah I mean I think that it's not necessarily no school is bad but anyway can I give an example of de-schooling myself because I dropped out of school when I was 14 I'm 17 now and the biggest thing that I went through that I had to get rid of was this idea that that I had to be with people kids of my own age with peers all the time every day or else I was unsocial I wasn't cool I would get you know it was the parents and it was the TV and it was everything saying teenagers are social creatures and if you're not social there's something wrong with you and I had to I found out that I was actually I consider myself an introvert and I enjoy spending time alone and I wasn't lonely but I thought I should be lonely because that's what everyone seems to be telling me because everyone says well what about the social life and what about this and it seemed that it was the process of removing agendas from other people and school can be a very large one big agenda just like other you know workspaces and everything like that and the way that I was able to come to peace with it was I discovered the word yes which is such a simple word but it's my favorite word in the entire in any language because I realized that when you're fighting with something sometimes all it takes is a yes that's not so simple but yes to my flaws yes to my strengths yes to this layer and yes to that layer and it becomes a beautiful and you can you know express an artwork and I'm kind of jumbling up my thoughts here because I'm still trying to articulate it but I found that these schooling sometimes can be really stressful if you put the stress on yourself but it can also be a really wonderful experience of exploration and like being with yourself and coming and saying yes to yourself you are with all the layers of influence and without the layers of influence one second is what Matthew is asking are you asking whether it's possible to not get influenced or are you asking are we not getting influenced no I don't think that's possible however I do feel like after you have a lot of influence certainly you're always going to have this influence but when you're a child you're more susceptible to this influence because everything is a stimulus everything is always a stimulus however when you have a more independent focus on you as a self-actualized individual you can ascribe more faith to your interior concept of identity where you can have these experiences however they get filtered through and they always do but when we're younger we have less of a degree of identity then there's more of an exterior influence than there is an interior influence and once we matriculate into this realm of some kind of strong self-identity then we are doing less of a submission or a reaction as much as we are a volitional movement well I think that I'm not sure how too deeply I want to get into this particular conversation but a lot of what we think of as volitional is actually just the internalization of external control and that we're not we don't have as much free will as we think but also the other thing that was coming up for me as you spoke was that just because something is a habit of school doesn't mean it's bad it might be something that serves us very well and we might examine it and say I want to keep that habit so it's not categorically rejecting everything that comes from school which in itself might be a habit of school to say everything's either right or wrong as answers are on tests and that is one of the habits that I like to let go of that doesn't serve me very well anymore the habit of labeling everything right and wrong and having to come to a judgment about everything instead of sometimes perhaps just to feel something and withhold offering to myself a judgment or an analysis I want to have somebody speak who is ordinarily shy about speaking but has something really valuable would anybody like to take advantage of that invitation is that you? I think so I just wanted to say that I think there's a way of bringing together all these things that I call reconciliation when you reconcile a pair of opposites then you move forward you create something completely new which is yours kind of like a sailboat the sailboat has the resistance of the water of its own inertia but the wind wants to move it but then you have the the water and all that stuff and if you reconcile these two apparent opposite forces you can get it to go in any direction including almost into the wind so if you can take the submission, the fines and all of that reconcile them in some kind of way then they become yours Kathy you were going to get a comment too thank you I was having lunch with somebody who was in one of the abortions we got into a school discussion at one point I offered it just felt like a back and forth in terms of what we were talking about felt like we were both on the same page and then I offered a piece of information that I realized didn't sit well he just didn't respond in the same way but what came up for me was oh that was wrong I didn't say a long thing and here we were having a nice conversation and so then I thought about it afterwards and I thought it didn't resonate with him that wasn't right but I really had this deep feeling of oh it was wrong I lost this connection with him that we were having this nice conversation then we went on to something else and we talked about something like we're on the same page again why would we have to always be on the same page about things that could be a habit of school yeah a habit of school would be wanting approval from your peer group or wanting approval from whatever authority is there yeah so definitely a habit of schooling mm-hmm yeah Khalif when I got here I realized that even though I didn't do the assignment actually a habit of school played that way here in my seat is I was thinking about the fact that I hadn't done the assignment yeah and I was thinking should I kind of reverse engineer or respond to this and think about what happened and try to come up with it now maybe I should what people think for example it shows that I was studious and attentive to the assignment for me one thing that even giving an assignment that I have to overcome some resistance because my extreme reaction to the control of school was to I'm not ever going to give anyone an assignment and or impose my will upon a group and set a direction and stuff I'm going to be democratic and everything and now I'm coming back to maybe more of a I wouldn't say balanced I'd say free I feel free to to do what I want to do being free to do what you want that's one of the really deep things that school teaches you against that you can't just do what you want one of the things that I'm going to say what's going on I was in a discussion with a couple of people and I said I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up that's still a big question every day I'm doing some stuff but is this really what I want to do? yeah not to figure that out but to just keep following until I got to the end of it although I would say that the idea of you've got to figure out what you want to do when you grow up is also an ideology of school not a habit of school since when does anybody who does what they love actually figure it out think of that phrase that figure of speech what it really means is you're going to quantify things you're going to add up all the numbers and you're going to literally figure out through analysis and logic what you're going to do where'd that come from? yeah you're supposed to weight everything here's how to make a decision you assign a number of value to all of the pros and cons and you add them up and whatever option has the highest pros and the least cons in government it's called the cost-benefit analysis and that's really making choices from the mind instead of from the heart which says I don't care what the cost-benefit analysis says I just know it's wrong to cut down this force and I'm not going to do it no matter what that's not something we learn in school to trust our instincts to test these abstractions so that could be another habit of school trusting in abstractions we're always talking about the first time about principles, living according to principles again that's something that's coded very deeply in our pedagogy any other... yeah, Regina somebody was talking about you you were talking about doing what you want to do and one of the things that I am working on in my de-schooling of myself process is thinking about my needs I don't know if I was taught that they don't matter if I was not taught that they do matter but I'm working on identifying what is a need versus a want and what's the relationship between what I want and what I need uh-huh yeah, it's fairly acceptable to say I'm going to learn to meet my needs and what my needs are it's a little less acceptable to say I'm going to learn to meet my wants and I'm going to really indulge those I don't know if I'm even there yet I'm not working on finding out what's a need and do I want what I need is that why I want it or do I want it for some other reason I have another seminar that delves into this in a lot of depth that basically the basic principle is that wants come from unmet needs and that it feels good to meet your needs and that an unmet need hurts really simple that's why if you hold your breath for a minute it hurts and then when you breathe it feels good, very basic um, but that's a little off topic um, but yeah yeah, thank you yeah well, it has to do with ego and like measuring myself against other people so I think there's like this calculator that's got some like the cash register that's sort of always in the background operating like in the background of the computer saying that well I have more of something than he has or he has or less of something yeah and I don't know if that just comes from school and I try to I think it's like a kind of mindfulness to try to just notice that and observe it and just be aware yeah yep, this is uh, yeah I just came from a session where I realized I was one of the few people who did not speak, which is not like me and then I also said well, that doesn't look right if I don't say something I should intrigue them yeah, it's hard for us to grok the depth I mean how impactful it is to be in a setting where you're always being evaluated the teacher's there and the teacher's going to give you a grade which you associate with your future success in life and anything could be part of that grade so you're always on display you're always performing that is such a burden you know and it gets so deeply ingrained I'm basically resurrecting what we have briefly discussed in the previous session is not so much about de-schooling as it is about de-socializing work and work I mean school is just one of the devices which acts for a particular function that society has yes and so it starts with the way the mother feels about the child in her yeah absolutely it's part of de-civilizing ourselves I'm going to say a little bit more about that but definitely it's much bigger than school and school can't change without changing everything else it's impossible to change one thing without changing everything school is just representing that whole yep, yes well I was going to add on to that because I was having trouble with your language but I think that I really struggle at things like this because there's so much anti-school talk and it's hard I don't know I guess I wish we could make that distinction in the language just because I've had good experiences at schools and some other people have had good experiences at schools and I think that it can't be that black and white and talking about it that black and white doesn't feel right to me I don't know if there's another way that we can address it but I think it's a really good point it's not simply de-schooling it's finding truth within ourselves and doing what's right for us as opposed to all the influences of other people so it seems like it's more about connecting with what we want and who we are in our needs and how we can meet those needs and remove the external influences that we don't want Influence is not a bad thing You can imagine I can imagine and I do imagine situations what is a school anyway situations where adults and children are interacting and the purpose is exactly what Anna was saying the purpose of these interactions is consciously to create situations where people can come in contact with their needs where children can learn what their needs are what their wants are, what their passion is who they really are in this world and then have the resources and opportunities to express and enact those discoveries and you could call that a school and it would be a beautiful thing and to some extent you can find this in school already you can find this in the worst public school in the country there's still a tiny little everything that's negative and harmful and destructive in our civilization also has a spark of spirit a spark of a beautiful spirit and the seed of a more beautiful world and there's any school you go to there's committed teachers who really love kids and who really want what's best for them and within even the worst teacher there is that tiny little spark of that desire too to see that to see the beauty in all things that's there at least in a germinal form and to speak to that like Gandhi said he said speak to their reason and conscience see somebody as you know I know you really want to do the most beautiful thing and maybe you think that you can't maybe it feels impossible maybe you're afraid to and you don't want to say that out loud with those eyes and that creates a space where it can begin to blossom and someone will maybe make that choice so I agree not to not to categorically demonize school and it is just a word is there a better word we could use like a replacement word? I don't know if anyone else feels I know you want to say that because then you keep going from one word to another I know I don't want to make it too PC I'm just wondering I see it as ending as really ending the war against the self school is part of the age of school as we know it is part of the age of separation the age of control the age of of the war against nature the war against nature and the war against human nature you can really trace its origins back to agriculture back to domestication and symbolic culture these are what began the distancing process from nature where we began to see nature as an other and began to distinguish between good and evil you know with agriculture for example all of a sudden instead of this unbroken harmonious system of nature all of a sudden the wolf is bad and the cow is good the weed is bad and the vegetable is good and you begin to distinguish and then you have good weather and bad weather is that not natural though? is what not natural? to think of things as good and bad I mean certainly the antelope thinks that the grass is bad not necessarily, maybe he just thinks of them as dangerous isn't it? not necessarily bad even now if you go to crowded communities they don't consider a stormy sky as bad weather they just consider it as weather not the form of weather they are not dependent in any way with weather but they are I mean sometimes when you have crops you have a particular pattern to your life to your weather you need to be able to control the weather but you can't so you control your systems according to which you know the weather to be life but in a tribal situation if you don't need to do that you go with the flow if it's a pre-agricultural tribe and this is a huge topic this it's the origins of separation but really what I was saying is that school is just one expression of the ordering and management and domination of nature because it says and I'm again talking about school as it's normally practiced today but it says we cannot accept the un molded child nature then the child's natural impulses must be overcome we have to teach children to overcome their natural impulses so we set up this system of controls and rewards and punishments and you will develop good work habits and good study habits and after you've done all your homework then you can go out and play but only after my I complained to my math teacher that long division was boring I'd actually invented long division in third grade but they told me I couldn't do that yet and then so my parents took up the issue had a meeting with a teacher and the longest short of it was that she said if he's bored with this long division because I had to do page after page of it you know same thing again and again she said that's good because he's going to be bored a lot in life and this is preparation for it and it's really just the overcoming of certain parts of the human spirit of of validating things because they're hard here's another habit validating things because they're hard if I said you know it would have been really easy for me just to give that guy the finger but I didn't do it I'm congratulating myself on not doing the easy thing easy equals bad hard equals good that's an ideology of school that's never set out loud and it is very very pervasive you'll probably notice yourself saying it would have been really easy or it's just easy to do such and such as a synonym for bad well isn't there some relation though to challenging versus pardon so but isn't there worth in challenge and self-challenge and then feeling proud that you've overcome challenge yeah yeah I think the language is the issue where it's like the good and the bad and how people perceive those things because everything like the story everything has a balance and there aren't things that go wrong but going wrong isn't necessarily bad you know and I think that's where Charles had like the good and the bad and how people perceive good and bad because essentially there is yeah a lot of it is in language, a lot of times when people use hard to refer to challenge what they really mean is scary yeah I think this is unconscious challenge or choice versus no choice and it's a pool you know when you're already not thinking or feeling anything or none of it you're not even in awareness of it you're not even in choice there's a couple that come with a fresh mind yeah just don't believe it it's good to be challenged but it's not conscious one thing that this workshop the seminar is really about is simply to make things that were unconscious conscious that in itself creates movement and creates change sometimes people will say okay now I've noticed some ways that I've been unconsciously enacting the habits of school and now what can I do about it I've got to do something about this and I've got to stop doing this and it can set up this struggle which is usually unnecessary usually simply becoming aware of something already causes a change and you'll find yourself acting in different ways automatically and effortlessly without struggle anyone else like to share a yeah I'm curious to hear what you think about this it kind of goes back to the figuring things out and assigning values and whatnot but I was talking to a kind of high ranking military guy and he was in charge of sending people in certain spots to go into battle and I was just not blown away by that responsibility you know how do you determine how you do things and the responsibility inherent in the decisions that you make and he says I take all that information that I have accessible and I use my mind and make up a decision and then I listen to my heart and see how I feel and then I go with my gut and I was wondering where the gut comes into this no that rings true to me where the gut comes in that intuition, that inner feeling that says maybe my heart says this and my mind says this but I'm going to go this way instead sometimes certainly they're in harmony though yeah the Asian alchemists had a way to look at this whole thing they divided me into three parts thorax and abdomen where the head symbolized alchemically by silver was cool, still and reflective the heart and the lungs symbolized by gold were warm and not still but rhythmic and they had some other properties too and then the gut symbolized by sulfur was hot and transformative and the function of the head and the system was simply to reflect the function of the heart was to know and to choose and the function of the gut was to transform to change and one way to look at what's happened in our civilization is that the functions of the head have invaded everything else it takes the place of the heart in trying to choose when it's really supposed to just reflect and to take over the functions of the gut when we're trying to act and change from the head physiologically the results of this invasion are the stillness of the head invades the rest of the body as tumors, sclerosis cysts, stones and other hardening and sometimes when people let go of control in this mental mental world these conditions can clear up yeah okay I think we come to access deeper and deeper levels of desire and yes, you can apply it to you can apply the basic these basic principles of we're really kind of getting off the track a little bit but of basically self-trust and you can apply it to your job as an accountant for a Fortune 500 company and over time what will happen is that the things that you were passionate about and that felt right to you no longer feel right and when you get into a habit of trusting those feelings and being courageous about acting on them that's a new habit then eventually you'll be like, I'm not going to do that anymore because you trust yourself deeply enough and you've seen the results of it before it doesn't have to be this heroic thing whether it's you might see your whole life, your whole profession as your whole way of being as just like the crystallization of what we've been calling the habits of school which are really the habits of culture or civilization and oh my god, how am I going to get out of this my whole life is based on security my whole life is based on getting a good grade my whole life is based on pleasing authority being smart and being right what am I going to do about this, how can I get out of this I want to bust out and that can seem like an impossible task because when you really admit it to yourself you know hey, you might say I'm afraid to go without health insurance or to even risk my health insurance or to even risk my job and I just can't get there so the good news is that this deschooling process unfolds in a natural progression of stages and that the step to take at any one time a, it naturally manifests and b, it will be something on the edge of your courage and not beyond it if the necessary step is beyond your courage then what will happen is that you will unconsciously engineer it via some kind of accident getting fired or some other catastrophe so you don't have to worry about it if what is needed is beyond your courage then you'll take care of it unconsciously otherwise which might be painful but otherwise you'll maybe even tomorrow you'll have something on the edge of your courage that corresponds to the realizations that you have in this deschooling process so Carlos has been persistently raising his hand going back to the question that was asked about the gut and the heart and all of this other stuff I don't think we make decisions cognitively all that cognition can do is give us as much information as possible once you get that information then you've got to go with what I call affective perceptive the mind has at least three different kinds of processes cognitively affective perceptive and the pragmatic, practical action to do sometimes the active perceptive what people call intuition so let's call it intuition to make it easier you gather as much information as possible then you've got to feed that into your intuition because intuition without information is just absurd you just do crazy things but information or decisions made totally cognitively it's what Charles was saying about it's a linear mechanical way of just kind of adding it up mathematically and saying this is, but it's not a real decision the real decision is fed by the cognition all the information you can possibly gather up and then your intuition has to take over okay I just want to just hold for a second here because I'm noticing a habit of school that's being invoked which is okay give me the information it's that the way to do something is to find the information and then to put it into practice right there are other ways in fact that probably rarely happens that way but that's one of the habits that we've learned in school and now we're trying to apply it to personal liberation or something like that find the information and once I understand the information then I can use it and produce it that's not what I'm saying I know it's how you're saying but that's what the information you're providing was feeding into for me I'm not saying you're advocating that but what I'm saying is the information anywhere doesn't have to be from books or whatever you have to understand let me put it that way you have to understand what it is that you're dealing with I'm not actually addressing what you were saying as far as the content was as far as how it was impacting me and how you look at the perception of that yeah because I want to stay really focused here I want to address what he said it's not that way for me it's the opposite way for me first I get the intuition then I get the information I think a lot of times what we think of as reasons are actually rationalizations and justifications for what we want to do anyway that's yeah yeah I think we're on the same page there okay is anybody I'd like to hear one more like something that will really inspire me that someone has discovered that they that they were unconscious about that now they're conscious about a habit of school or a habit of civilization could you make a list of the things that inspire you so that yeah yeah last year last year I gave kind of a preliminary version of this there was fewer people so I had people introduce themselves with your name and something that makes you laugh and something that makes you cry and I said for real something that actually has made you laugh actually has made you cry in the last whatever last six months and many people though despite that instruction still gave this kind of theoretical discourse on what is sad in the world but didn't actually talk about what actually didn't actually tell anybody what actually made them cry and I thought that was an interesting illustration of the habits of school where you don't really get engaged but you pretend to be engaged yeah bullshitting that's a good word for it isn't it I have some kind of realization for the first time I'm just really thinking about if people that did well in the public school that I went to were in some ways more intelligent or in some ways more able to be molded oh yeah definitely I think it's I mean I did very well in public school you know I was got all kinds of honors and stuff and I went around thinking that I was smarter than everybody else for a long time until I realized that the really smart kids to the extent that smart has any utility at all the really smart kids were the ones who saw through that maybe even unconsciously and they didn't waste their time learning the state capitals and they knew they knew as I did not know that it doesn't matter what Hernando DiSoto did or who the whatever president of the United States was they knew that it was junk knowledge they had the intelligence to see through this facade this lie that this is actually useful and I was too stupid I was this is just one version of reality but I was more easily broken and I submitted and you know again you get a document that says has submitted and eventually you get a teaching certificate the teaching certificate says has submitted and been broken so much that this person can be counted on to break other people and make them submit and so yeah what turned the light on what turned the light on for me well it was a few things I mean for one thing like I kept producing the right answer sometimes in 600 page format and I never did get credit for it I never did get my rewards that I had unconsciously assumed I would get you know and also I just saw other people being more effective in their social relationships in their work in and not just in making money but in creating the beautiful world that I want to help create doing wonderful things with their hands and with their minds and I wasn't doing it and part of it also was that I saw that I mean I just saw through the whole the whole motivation of school the whole motivating program of when I read a Lewis Mumford and people like that about just the about the foundations of civilization and the project to build a tower to heaven the front cover of my book the Ascent of Humanities painting of the tower of Babel a 16th century painting which I see as a metaphor for this attempt to create well on the collective level to create utopia by building a human realm that's higher and higher more and more separate from earth and from nature perhaps the perfection of technology through the perfection of nanotechnology and computers and the virtual world and through social technologies of more and more laws more and more regulations more and more ways of controlling behavior social engineering and then in the personal world self perfection trying harder techniques to motivate yourself and the mythology says that someday if you try hard enough and build high enough you will finally reach heaven and this program is falling apart in our time which has to happen the higher you build the more energy is required and the more effort is required even to prevent it from collapsing the sky remains ever as distant in the age of coal if you read some of the early writings on education too they were going to build a perfect world they were going to take these young minds and make them into something that their parents could never make them into the utopian writings from Plato on basically say we are going to take the young away from their parents and we are going to educate them scientifically this is part of creating this perfect world so even and then in the material realm too you know in the age of coal they were saying that work will soon be obsolete now we have machines and each machine does the work of a thousand men so in 20 short years each man will only have to work one thousandth is hard but what did we get we got the 16 hour work day instead in the age of coal why? well we haven't actually built high enough it's the age of electricity that will usher in technotopia oh actually no it's actually atomic power no it's the computer no it's nanotechnology genetic engineering biomedicine right one promise after another and yet are we any closer to utopia now are people any happier is life any more enchanting it was 50 years ago 100,000 years ago it's not the sky is as far away as ever what's happening in our age is that we're in the midst of a convergence of crises as the effort to even maintain the tower and its foundation becomes overwhelming we can't build any higher so we have crises converging in every area you know ecological water food medicine and education and in the what I foresee is that organizations groups meetings like this were pioneering new ways of new kinds not just new technologies new social technologies but new kinds of technology that are not based on control based on the struggle to overcome evil and the war against nature and the war against the self and that the social and material edifices that we will build will be built for beauty and not height because as a matter of fact another part of the babel babel metaphors you know where does the sky where is the sky anyway it's an inch off the ground it's all around us anyway it's just a shift of perception away so the new paradigms of schooling which were just beginning to explore I mean my kids go to basically a Sudbury type of democratic free school which I have some serious issues with I don't think that it's the have all and end all of what a school can be same thing with Montessori same thing with Waldorf see lots of really beautiful things I think we're just beginning to figure out what this particular social technology will be in the age of reunion I call it the age of reunion because here we're in the age of separation I talked about the first time where you know I talked about how school as we know it is an outgrowth of the human sense of self in the modern age where we're separate discrete beings I'm separate from you and you're separate from you and we're all separate from the world and if that is right and it's in economics it's in biology it's in religion and if that's what you believe then essentially we are all in competition with each other more for me is less for you and that's the basic fact of of biology the basic fact of economics that we have to overcome with this conditioning and with the civilizing because we're fundamentally evil the total depravity of man is the phrase that I like from John Calvin and so this paradigm of control is a completely natural unavoidable outgrowth of that sense of self but that sense of self is collapsing now because the civilization that we've built upon it is collapsing it's not working anymore it's not sustainable and that's becoming more and more obvious the collapse invades our personal lives as various kinds of catastrophes that are caused by social breakdown physical breakdown, health breakdown and ecological breakdown more and more and these will continue and in the ruins amidst the ruins of the old world based on the old sense of self the world of separation the age of reunion will grow we are already planting the seeds that's why the work that we're doing in aero is so so important because not not because we are going to be able to overcome the system that exists right now but we're planting seeds that will grow because when it does this is just my view that when the educational system collapses which will be connected to the collapse of everything else then people will be like ok so what do we do now and there will be pre-existing models that we are trying out right now that people in this room are trying out and we'll say well this works pretty well you know and that works pretty well it's Waldorf you know it's Sudbury you know these things work pretty well and we'll have and people are doing this in education people are doing this in economics people are doing this in engineering the seeds of the new world are growing are at least they're ready to germinate and I guess today we've been talking more about the personal level most people have discovered in their lives that real changes do come after kind of a collapse when the old self just isn't working anymore and conversations like this maybe are equivalent to planting the seeds of you know even if it doesn't resonate with you or if it's like well yeah that sounds nice but you know come on like I'm not going to make any real changes now but they are seeds that will grow when the time has come and there's nothing necessarily that you have to do about it right now let's see which time is it it's about four okay let's see what time do you go to? we're supposed to go to four right? that's what the program says I could go on and on like this for a very long time would somebody like to just okay here's what I'll do I will continue going on for a while if anyone has anything that they want to just ask and bring up but for those of you who really want to go I want to respect the schedule here because after all defiantly flaunting schedules in times it's just as much a habit of schooling as unquestioningly abiding by them so I would like to respect people's time if you want to leave I will I will call this complete but I'm going to be hanging out basically all night I'm leaving tomorrow morning