A Renaissance in Education: Creating a Wiser, Healthier and Less Violent World

By Ronald Veronda

As our schools go, so goes our society. We all know this to be true, but we have been living this credo in reverse, passing on what our society is instead of what can be. With this confused pattern of thought, social ills not only repeat, they increase in frequency and magnitude.

“A Renaissance in Education” explores aspects of our children’s lives that touch people’s hearts, regardless of country or culture. Life education—author Ron Veronda’s specialty—affects anyone wanting to find peace, happiness or love in life.

Where authors addressing educational changes have pointed out the errors of our school system they often have done so by pointing fingers and laying blame. “A Renaissance in Education” points out the “sense” of how we got to where we are, and more importantly what to do about it.

Author Ron Veronda offers creative lessons for teaching mindful awareness as well as examples of life lessons that can be used by children and adults to help get beyond the ego and the false sense of who we are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronald Veronda
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996202626

Ronald Veronda

Ron Veronda is an educator, author, speaker and emissary of social change. He has over four decades of experience as a teacher, school principal, college lecturer and educational innovator. He began teaching at age 20 and has taught nearly every grade level.After seeing schools change drastically for the worse during his first twenty years as an educator, Ron moved beyond his regular duties to look for solutions. In 1993, he co-founded The Children's Consulting Center in San Mateo, California, a think tank and action center for children, parents and educators. Two years later he created an alternative school within a public school system, tailored for troubled teens. Choices in Life School modeled a different, more effective way of educating youth.For the last fifteen years, Ron has intently taught graduate-level university classes, conducted workshops and participated in conferences in the United States and abroad. He is the author of A Renaissance in Education: Creating a Wiser, Healthier and Less Violent World (2015, No More Turning Away: A Revolution in Education, Solutions for a Violent World (2001) and contributing author to Educating for Humanity: Rethinking the Purposes of Education, by Mike Seymour (Paradigm Publishers, 2004).He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Book preview

A Renaissance in Education:

Creating a Wiser, Healthier

and Less Violent World

RONALD G. VERONDA

San Carlos, CA

A RENAISSANCE IN EDUCATION: CREATING A WISER, HEALTHIER AND LESS VIOLENT WORLD

Copyright 2015 by Ronald G. Veronda

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Imprint: Ron Veronda

San Carlos, CA

ISBN 978-09962026-0-2

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing April 2015

This book is dedicated to the family of my birth:

Raymond Joseph, Helen, Ray and Steve Veronda, with love and gratitude.

But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.

Only where love and need are one,

And the work is play for mortal stakes,

Is the deed ever really done

For Heaven and the future's sakes.

~ Robert Frost

CONTENTS

Preface: The Lighting of a Fire

Introduction

Part One: A Foundation for Change

One: Setting the Stage

The Renaissance of Yesterday, the Renaissance

of Today

Schooling and Education

The Workplace of Us and Them

Two: Change Requires a Shift in

Consciousness

Bill's Lament

Moving Past the Fear of Change

Three: Leaving Knowledge, Welcoming

Wisdom

Leaving Adulthood Behind

Social Systems Theory

Three Authentic Pursuits

Part Two: Education Inside

Four: Lessons from Inside Ourselves

The Toddler

Selflessness

Understanding Ego

Attachment and Separation

A Hammer Seeks Nails

A Negative Side to Thinking

Life Lesson: Thoughts

What Were They Thinking?

Understand It Or Become It

Five: Relational Movement

Duality and Conflict

Balance

Oppositional Imbalance

Six: Relationships to Live By

Love and Fear

Better Living through Relationships

The Ego Hangs On

Truth in Relationship

Seven: Illusions of Life

The Blind Men and the Elephant

The Ten Percent Truth

Truths from Different Views

Truth and Conflict

Eight: Personality Patterns

Using the Enneagram

The Egoic Twist

Healthy Movement

Part Three: Wisdom Applied

Nine: Being Mindful is Being Smart

An Example from another Culture

Saying Good-Bye to the False Self

Life Lesson: Catching Pebbles

Life Lesson: Learning Not to Judge

Life Lesson: Good Duck, Bad Duck

Life Lesson: Love and Fear

Life Lesson: Suffering Less

Life Lesson: Being Grateful 1

Life Lesson: Being Grateful 2

Ten: Lessons for Life

The Toolbox

Personal Journal

When You’re Smiling

Teacher Mistakes are a Great Opportunity

Life Lessons in the Daily News

Checking Weather, Inside and Outside

Moving Beyond Duality

Truly Listening

Happiness Squared

Reconnecting Freedom to Responsibility

Eleven: Returning the Fluid Mind, Heart and

Spirit

Wild Mind, Wild Lessons

Returning the Heart

Life Lesson: Pebbles from the Heart

Connecting with Spirit

Twelve: Measuring Success

Effective Academics

Thirteen: Opportunity Knocks

Places to Begin

Creating a Center for Education

Conclusion

The Choices We Make

Summary

Closing

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

PREFACE: The Lighting of a Fire

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

~ William Butler Yates

Over two hundred teenagers are staring up at me, seated in orderly rows. They are twitching and fidgeting. Many are whispering to each other and a few are staring off into places only teenagers go. I smile and remind myself that adolescence is like no other period of life: pubescent hormones surging, childlike actions but a snap away, and endless possibility still on the horizon.

I regain their attention with a question. Why do you go to school? As expected, this question elicits some giggles mixed with moans. A boy yells out, Because we have to. Others laugh at his outspoken response. Prodded by his directness, a girl yells out, Because our parents make us.

I smile and chuckle, acknowledging each responder. I am familiar with those two answers, as I get them nearly every time I ask this question. But I ask for more. No really, why do you go to school?

After some thought and hesitation a spattering of responses come to me; a couple kids blurt out To get a job. A girl suggests, To graduate and another boy says, To get money.

Okay then, I say. How many of you go to school to graduate, get a good job and make money? Nearly everyone smiles, nods or raises their hand in the affirmative.

After a few moments I ask, How many of you go to school to understand who you are? Pausing again for effect I then ask, How many of you go to school to understand the world around you?

The kids look at me quizzically. Some motion yes, some look as if I’m speaking to them in a foreign language. I have just taken them out of their oh-so-familiar world of schooling and into the world of true education¬—a world that is purposeful, exciting and nurturing, and one that has been forgotten for far too long.

Continuing, I say to them, For thousands of years the process of education involved pursuing the answers to those two important questions. Going to school to get a job and make money is relatively new; it came out of the industrial age—about two hundred years ago. Industrial age schooling serves the job market. True education serves each and every one of you—and the world we live in. A job may be important these days but I’m not sure trading your life for a job is such a good idea. How about if we change it back?

Schooling for the Job Market

Most of us know that the design of education we inherited came out of the industrial age, but most of us don’t stop to think about what that means. Put more precisely, how we structure our schools, how we determine what is to be taught, the way we teach, and how we measure the success of this process was set into play by people who were focused on the growing field of industry, back in the nineteenth century. They were not educators; they were industrialists who were excited about making money by manufacturing things relatively quickly and cheaply. To do this, they needed a workforce—hence our highly focused and systematized design of schooling was born.

In some ways, the industrial age must have been an exciting time, as the world was making a dramatic shift. People were leaving their farms, leaving trades, and leaving family as they knew it, to go to the big city and work in a new way with giant machinery. The pay was relatively good and the mood was initially hopeful, but things began to sour. The excitement was slowly replaced by the reality that comes from work being done solely for money and the ill health that comes to a society focused too much on things and not enough on people. Being in the factory for extensive hours took a terrific toll on individuals, on marriages and on families—the building blocks of our communities and society itself. In the factory, individual dreams had to be set aside. In the factory, creativity was not needed, emotions were detrimental to efficiency, and the greater mystery of life was too big to be considered. The people of the day certainly didn’t know it, but this new idea of job was a slow-cooking recipe for a societal disaster.

The world has changed over the last two hundred years. The industrial age is gone, but the schooling design we inherited from that time has pretty much stayed the same. Yes, we have public and private schools. We alter the way the curriculums are presented by creating cores, cycles and themes. We’ve created schools within a school, magnets, academies, charters, and other short-lived programs, but these changes have for the most part been superficial. I call them the changing of the wrapping but not the changing of the gift. To this day we still have a system of schooling with the prime purpose of preparing people for the workforce.

Let us look at this strange historical predicament from another angle—just a bit tongue in cheek. Imagine if brain surgeons operated on patients according to a format set up by the plumbers union. Imagine if plumbers worked on your house under the direction of the American Medical Association. Imagine if airplane mechanics used repair manuals written by poets. Imagine if poets… well, you get the idea. By stepping back, the view is humorous, ridiculous—and quite alarming.

To a true educator, examining our current system of schooling is disturbing. It is common belief by those who support the current view of schooling that the foundation of education today is the teaching of the three R’s: reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic, plus the teaching of science. What makes all of this especially tragic is that the schooling design and the measurements used are way off track. Reading, writing, arithmetic and the other curriculums are actually tools for education, not education itself. As Henry David Thoreau bemoaned back when the industrial age was in full force, Men have become the tools of the tools. Teaching the three R’s in this limited context makes about as much sense as preparing children to someday create a home by only teaching them how to use a saw, hammer and nails. Without showing them how to build a house, let alone create the life-enhancing place we call home, the prospects of this kind of schooling are meager at best. The incompleteness of the schooling model essentially guarantees that even the teaching of the tools will not effectively take hold or will be dropped soon after the class is over, because it is not presented within the context of the students’ lives. Schooling for a job may be a step in one’s life in today’s world—possibly an important one—but at no time are we to trade our life for a job any more than we would trade our home for a tool box.

Education Designed by Educators

A rebirth is now underway. The industrial age is fading into memory and true educators are beginning to reclaim their calling. In the renaissance of the 21st century we are reconnecting with the age-old human process of conscious, purposeful living and an educational design that aids that pursuit. True education studies the full range of human experience and seeks to find meaning and understanding. It is a massive refocus and an enlargement on the schooling model of the last couple centuries. What does this look like? For an educator, someone whose life is dedicated to the calling of educating our young, that’s actually not hard to see. Here are some important points:

•The focal point of education is on the child (the student) in each and every step, setting aside the needs of parents, teachers, factory owners, politicians, special interest groups and even the economy. This focus is not simply in words, but in all actions.

•Instead of the child being schooled for a job, we create an educational process that helps the child learn how to live (and work) well—creating an ever increasing understanding of his or her inner and outer world. In education, the focus is on understanding in the largest sense of the word.

•Instead of the children trying to meet the curricula, the teachers meet each and every child’s desire to learn about life with the curricula.

•Where children have been standardized, we re-focus on their delightful uniqueness.

•Instead of patterning schools on what is or has been we emphasize creating what can be.

•Instead of emphasizing competition, which Mother Theresa pointed out is built on fear, we teach children how to collaborate, which is based on love and is necessary for living well.

•Where we looked for disorder and disability in our children, we now try to see the order and the abilities in each and every one of us.

•Instead of trying to create good consumers, we help each other become good creators with, as Rudolph Steiner recommended, our head, our heart and our hands.

•Instead of concentrating on efficiency, we concentrate on effectiveness.

•Instead of seeing education as a noun: the memorization of people, places and things—we look at education as a verb: a never-ending process of learning.

•Where schooling was finite—a fixed curriculum of separate subjects, grade levels and classrooms—we open up the educational design to one that is more holistic and lifelong.

•Where mistakes were once considered bad, error becomes the fertile ground for learning.

•Instead of memorizing data and information about the outside world, we look for understanding inside ourselves first to recognize the patterns that keep us from seeing and understanding outside information clearly.

•Where we sought the answer and argued what was right, we still look for the answer but without attachment, knowing that there may be other answers just as viable.

•Instead of creating human doings we stay connected with our heart and our spirit and learn how to live each day as human beings.

It doesn’t take much in the way of money to create this design but it does take vision, wisdom and commitment on our part. To do this, we have to set our own personal needs aside. The task is bigger than me or mine. It’s also bigger than our kids, our school or even our state. The task is enormous in significance and responsibility, and also filled with delight and personal satisfaction.

But before you gasp at the apparent immensity of the change that is needed, know that the movement to a better way of educating—and as a result a healthier society—is already underway. If you wish, it is easy to join. The first and most important step is the conscious intention to begin. With that, any teacher, school or community can reclaim and embrace the larger design one piece at a time. Reading A Renaissance in Education is one strong, intentional step forward to joining this new world

INTRODUCTION

What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world… Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement.

~ Paul Hawkins, founder of WiserEarth

We are in the midst of a renaissance, and just as with the Renaissance that flourished in Florence in the 14th century, people haven’t been aware of the extent of the movement until it is well under way. This rebirth is not centered in one locale, nor is it focused on one field of study; it is a renaissance of consciousness, an awakening to the higher sense of who we are and the greater potential of humanity. This renaissance will transform the world as we know it from the inside out.

Education is pivotal in this renaissance, helping to recreate a world-society that is wiser and more connected to our highest common denominator—our truer, more loving nature. This rebirth is a grass roots change, and, from this educator’s vantage point, is already taking place with thousands of trained and retrained teachers across the United States and abroad. The change is happening—as its time is here. Where the change rises next will be up to each person, teacher, school or community.

Within each of us is a spark. This spark can’t readily be seen, unless one is taught to look for it. One person, initially at least, may only make a small flame, but millions of people together as one, can make a raging fire—a beacon of light—the likes of which we have never seen. Across this planet, for the very first time, there are literally millions of people from all aspects of life questioning the most basic assumptions of how we think, what we value and how we live.

Many people think that the violence, degradation and alienation we see around us are just part of reality, but that thinking comes from a limited perspective; one that either doesn’t go back far enough in human history or doesn’t explore the right corners of the earth. It is not uncommon to believe that the problems in our schools have to do with insufficient funding and poor academic performance by students and teachers. This point of view is misguided as well. After reading this book, your views on these subjects, and much more, may change considerably.

A Renaissance in Education: Creating a Healthier, Wiser and Less Violent World is presented in three parts.

In Part One, A Foundation for Change is laid, taking us out of the familiar thought patterns of the past industrial age and into the mindset of the age of wisdom. As Albert Einstein pointed out: We cannot create change with the same mindset that created the problem. This foundation is a prerequisite to fully understanding the next two parts of the book and the paradigm of the transformation that is taking place.

In chapter one we look at the context of historical rebirth, comparing and contrasting the Renaissance of the 14th century with today’s reawakening, and we explore the striking differences between the schooling design found in nearly all industrialized nations today and the wiser design of true education. In chapter two, with a little humor, we look at how change occurs or doesn’t occur. We also review Kurt Lewin’s ideas on the sociology of change and the U Model, which draws a picture of how a systemic mindset shifts. In chapter three (for those who have not read my first book, No More Turning Away: A Revolution in Education, Solutions for a Violent World) the mindset of the industrial age with its knowledge paradigm is briefly compared and contrasted to the wisdom paradigm of the current renaissance. We then review an interesting