 Stories as vehicles for education and social development. Since the modern advent of human civilization, education and learning became pigeonholed. For the last 100 years or so, the direction of learning took a dangerous bend to feed and satisfy the craving of the industrial machine. Suddenly, the goal of acquiring knowledge changed from making a life to making a living. The primary vehicle for education adopted a different guise. For man, the human, above all else, we are designed to feed off of stories. But the stories became strictly, back then the stories were strictly for education or education and entertainment. But now, education as it is of health that took the place of storytelling. We go to school not to learn, but to be prepared for the future in the social-industrial complex of modern living. Education now is basically uniform. We all dress our brains in the same rhetoric. But human beings, what they are, still learn more from stories told in novels, films, gossip, and more recently on social media. Even more than we learn from the structured and organized framework created to chain us to the fascism of capitalism. So now, we learn as skewed, bent and tampered. We learn incomplete, inconclusive, incompetent lessons that are half-baked from stories, written and sold for profit, backing up the half-hearted effort we put in studying from so-called school. You know, the best form of education and the most powerful pattern is that which was prescribed by the Jesuits. And that is in the training and lessons and patterns laid for a child under seven or until seven years of age. What we learn at this stage is what true foundation of education and social development is laid upon. So this is a complex dilemma of modern and or post-modern life. So the system projects a system to prepare humans for the challenges of industrial life and forget or put on the back burner the system of nature that is designed to fully prepare humans for life. You know, so while animals survive on a system of eat or be eaten, man thrives on the premise of live and let live. The vehicle to convey this dynamic is storytelling. The vehicle for the former, the animal, is what we seem to have preferred and now teach ourselves to eat one the other. Community is dead. Society is pretence. We smile as we stab each other in the back. We fight and struggle for intangible relevance, intangible relevance for things without substance and put aside the values that define us as a human, as human and social and community. Our continual commune, our need one for the other across board, across imaginary or real divides. This is not to blame the system of education designed for industrial complexity as solely responsible for the breakdown of society far from it. The complex only created exactly what it considered relevant to its survivor. So what is next? What to do, what to do? To recalibrate and understand the psychology of humans and remake and remodel the structure to a more fluid state that storytelling allows it to be. For hundreds of thousands of years, or 5,000, 6,000 years depending on how you see time, whether biblically or scientifically the story has been the vehicle and conveyor of techniques for survival and thriving. It still is, but the question to ask is what is the story? Even definitions have been affected and disaffected. What is the story? Is it the novel? Is it the film? Or the tales and myths and legends in which we encapsulate our spirituality our morals, our wisdom, our knowledge? It is that and it is more. A story is the roadmap. It is the vision we tell ourselves, we show ourselves. It is the underlying structure of thought that determines outcomes. It is the true income. It is what comes in the soil of our heart as children and grows with us to yield the harvest as adults. It is what we see around us. It is what we tell ourselves. It is in our conversations, our geists, our communications, our operations, our software. The story is everything that makes us human. The mind is a library and everything in it is a story. And life is a play, a movie, a poem, a vision unfolding. Well, from your presentation what I can see here is I can see empathy, I can see bonding, teamwork. When you put people together, teach them something, educate them through observation of the universe around them. The story, this is how education was in my observation. The education in industrial complex is in the morning. But education in real life is in the night. It is actually under that tree where the society takes everything that is of value to them and put it in a myth, in a legend, in a tale, in a fable and then share it to the children. So when they go to sleep, when they go to bed at night, they sleep on it and it sinks into their subconscious or into their subconscious mind and this is who they become. This is how they become. How they merge. We can infuse both though. I was seeing something earlier that in some part of the world where they bring real life problems to the university to solve. We are taking a case study. We are not just doing it academically. It's not an academic fiction. It's a real life problem. You solve it. It requires rework and empathy and understanding. If you're able to solve these things, you have told the story. So what I'm saying is important for us to understand the real premise of a story. So what is a story? What story has become is detrimental to making a life. What you spoke about is going to make a living. It's going to build a complex. It's about building complexes. What I'm talking about is about building people. So that's different. It's interesting that you say that because as a matter of fact, that's what I was actually going to say. That at the center of everything is people. I always say to my clients that the most compelling and lethal strategy for any business is people. Once you get your people right, you get everything else right. And what do I mean by that? There's the people, there's the internet people, the people that work in the business. Then there is the people that you want to sell to. At the end of the day it's all about people. It's always about people. And stories. So I guess with the story bits. Now the way to get people both internally and externally is by storytelling. So from a marketing perspective, every business is a marketing business. It takes you to market your business to attract the right talent and employees. It takes you to market your business, to do marketing, to get people to patronize that business. So it's always marketing. And marketing is storytelling. What you just said to me, that I'm a storyteller but I can't sell anything. So I'm thinking that okay, something is not connected. So you're probably not telling the right story. So if you tell the right stories, I know from marketing as marketing strategist, that the most dangerous form of storytelling is marketing. Let me give you a simple example. Coca Cola. Agree. Coca Cola. Coca Cola will never say anything about beverage, product, drink. No. They always sell drinks. They'll tell you open happiness. They'll tell you share one. They'll tell you share the love. Those are things that people will never, people will say no to cola. They'll say no to sugar. They'll say no to 12 cubes of sugar. But nobody's going to say no to happiness. So once you understand the power of storytelling, and the same thing with education, how do you learn your ABCs? ABC, the EFG. How do you learn about respect? How do you learn about, you know, it's from storytelling, it's from the story from Ijabba the tortoise. And that's actually what we need to learn. And that's exactly how. It infuses education. If the storytellers, if you can infuse education, if the storytellers go have this paradigm, if they could have this in their thinking, it might affect what they end up putting out. Because we just realize that the music we sing is not entertainment. It's not strict entertainment. It's making in life. So if we sing a lot of rubbish, it means we're going to get a lot of rubbish people. Yeah. So everybody has to be intentional and empathic. Fantastic. You got it. Yeah. So that's why I say you must put people first. Yes. Once you understand, once people's strategy, you can never go wrong with people. All right. Fantastic. Thanks guys for wonderful insights every time. The end always seems to come too soon on The Advocate. However, The Advocate continues on our social media platforms, on Facebook, plus TV Africa, hashtag The Advocate NG. On Twitter and Instagram, at plus TV Africa, hashtag The Advocate NG. To catch up with previous broadcasts, go to plusTVAfrica.com slash The Advocate NG. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, Plus TV Africa. Till next week, same time on this station. Let's keep advocating for a better society. Bye-bye now.