Teaching kids a mind's gifts

Teaching kids a mind's gifts

By Rahayu Ratnaningsih

JAKARTA (JP): Our traditional education system gives these
labels to our children: genius, intelligent, average, slow,
dyslexic, stupid or unteachable.

Early in life we were made aware of our limitations. We were
told that we had to study hard and get good grades in school if
we wanted to be successful in life.

We were ranked with a system of grades so everyone knew who
was the brightest and who was among the dumbest. Our teachers
would either give a monologue in front of the class or write on
the black board while we wrote down what was said or written.

If a student still had difficulty understanding something
after two or three explanations, a child with a "learning
problem" was in the making. It never occurred to us, or our
teachers, that it was probably them who had a teaching problem.

That people have different methods of learning was not taken
into account by our educators.

That Albert Einstein failed mathematics and Thomas Edison was
deemed rather a slow student was not widely known or understood
by us.

If you are like a lot of people, your grades were probably
average. In university, the normal distribution system assured
that only a few people were given good grades, and only a few
really bad grades. Most people were average.

We learned our limits early. At an age when everything was
learned at amazing speed and strong impressions were being
imprinted on our receptive but nondiscriminating brains,
impressions that lay dormant, and later shape our lives, after
the brain matures and starts to function on a more intellectual
level.

This can be likened to circus elephants. A thin rope ties the
elephant's leg to a small stake tapped into the ground. How can
an animal capable of uprooting a tree be controlled by a rope
tied to a little stake?

The answer is training. When the elephant was very small, the
trainer used a big chain attached securely to a big post hammered
deep into the ground to limit the elephant's movement. The
elephant could only go so far, and it was not big enough or
strong enough to break the chain or pull the stake. The elephant
quickly learned its limits: It could only go to the end of the
chain that was locked to its leg.

Our intellect tells us that a fully grown elephant could
easily break the rope or uproot the stake that holds it, but
since no one has communicated this to the elephant, it remains
obediently within its learned limits.

The power of belief works both ways. You believe you are great
or poor, you are right on both accounts. One of the most
influential educators the world has ever known is Marva Collins.
She has appeared on the 60 Minutes program and a movie was made
about her.

Thirty-eight years ago, Marva decided to dedicate her life to
making a real difference in the lives of children, most of whom
were poor and abandoned with behavioral or learning problems and
broken families.

She faced her first challenge when she was given her first
teaching job in what many considered to be a ghetto in Chicago.
Her second grade students had already decided that they didn't
want to learn anything.

Yet her mission was not merely to teach children how to read,
write and count, but also to touch their lives. Faced with
children labeled as dyslexic, retarded and learning impaired and
displaying a variety of behavioral disorders, she took a very
brave, and unprecedented, approach to the challenge by deciding
that the problem was not the children, but the way they were
taught.

No one was challenging and inspiring them enough. As a result,
these kids had no belief in themselves. They had never
experienced being pushed to attain the kind of breakthroughs
required to find out who they really were or what they were
capable of. Like the elephant, they were tethered by limiting
beliefs that stifled any form of progress.

So she threw out all the inane children's books and instead
taught the works of Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Tolstoy. She set
her expectations of these children high, wisely aware that people
give results according to expectations.

No other teachers believed that she would succeed in her
efforts, on the contrary, many of them criticized her harshly,
saying that she would only destroy these children's lives.

What happened was her students not only understood the
material, they thrived on it. Why? Because she believed so
fervently in the uniqueness of each child's spirit, and his or
her ability to learn anything that was presented to them.

She didn't set limits for these kids and she liberated them
from their previous limiting beliefs, lifted their self-esteem
and taught them to believe that there was no reason they had to
languish at the level of society that others believed they
belonged to. In the "innocent" words of four-year-old Talmadge E.
Griffin, one of her students Tony Robbins interviewed and wrote
about in his book Awaken The Giant Within, "The most important
thing Mrs. Collins has taught me is that society may predict, but
only I will determine my destiny."

The rest was history. Now all her critics marvel at the
extraordinary results she has consistently produced for decades.

We owe a great debt to Collins for revealing the inspiring
truth that human intelligence is infinite. Over 90 percent of our
brain capacity is unconscious, thus untapped. Each one of us was
born with a built-in supercomputer that outperforms even the
greatest modern computer technology. It is capable of processing
up to 30 billion bits of information per second and it boasts the
equivalent of 6,000 miles of wiring and cabling.

The human nervous system contains about 28 billion neurons
(nerve cells designed to conduct impulses), each of which is a
tiny, self-contained computer capable of processing about one
million bits of information. The neurons act independently, but
they also communicate with other neurons through an amazing
network of 100,000 miles of nerve fibers.

The power of our brain to process information is staggering,
especially when we consider that a computer -- even the fastest
one -- can make connections only one at a time. By contrast, a
reaction in one neuron can spread to hundreds of thousands of
others in a span of less than 20 milliseconds.

Hence, one can only imagine what most of us could do if only a
quarter of that untapped potential were brought to life. Many
great achievers, scientists like Einstein and writers like Robert
Louis Stevenson, relied on -- and never for one minute doubted --
the unlimited power of their subconscious.

Many new technologies have been invented to reprogram the mind
to create lasting change and boost performance, from Neuro
Linguistic Programming to Psychorientology with the famous Silva
Method that emphasizes the activation of the right side of the
brain.

If only our educational system could accommodate these new
findings in the field of human excellence, we could improve our
under-developed human resources so that they survive the
competitive struggle in the increasingly borderless world.
Nothing can be more true in our case, that the greatest gift is
the gift of learning, and that gift is not complete until it is
passed on.

The writer is a human resources and personal development
consultant based in Jakarta.