Personal Reflections

6 Years out Of formal Education - school is wearing off for me...

It is only recently that I have been able to rise my awareness of how my schooling has shaped me as a an adult learner. I am so much a product of the system that I now feel determined to be a force for change. I feel that I have always been good at playing the game of education, compliant relatively hard working and driven by aspirations that were sold to me about achieving a career status as an adult. School and university education for me wasn't about a love and curiosity for learning it was a system for banking and collecting knowledge and qualifications ready for life. Instead of being part of life itself education was a preparation for life, it wasn't a bad experience in itself however there was certainly a feeling that better was yet to come and any mild suffering was normalized by the popular societal norms. During some aspects of schooling the separation of life as becoming from life as fully being did manifest in some feeling of anxiety and social isolation. I feel that I used this energy to create a more intense focus towards achieving some kind of career status, as this progressed into my late teens and early 20's I would say i became a 'good learner' i was self- motivated, I invested in reading and digesting as much as I could of my chosen field but this wasn't driven by curiosity, more a need to prove myself as the best. looking back i would say that concurrently the part of me that felt coerced and suppressed by the need to become someone of status rather than live in full presence and curiosity was starting to awaken. I was having some real world experiences alongside my academic study that were beginning to feed my curiosity and rise my awareness of the cracks in the widespread 'banking' approach to education.

I felt myself starting to deviate from the path most frequently traversed and more and more i wanted to create a new way. Fast forward to 25 and as a teacher who is not formally qualified I can see how that deviating has embodied itself. I have become an autodidact and i can feel the effects of my schooling fading away almost entirely. I am developing a closeness with my own sense of curiosity something I feel strongly that lives within us all from childhood. I have a love of learning as a process rather than before when I was following the path I thought would lead to acceptance and creditability.

So having said all this I'm not sure school has had a lasting effect on how I learn now, more so it has set me on a much longer trajectory on my journey to wards transcending the place that society had in stall for me, a similar social status as my family, comfortably uncomfortable. I believe that school prepared me to find a career and perhaps more dangerously a mindset that everyone needs to become an expert or a 'professional' in order to have any social status or worth. In this sense I believe that school is an in efficient machine that aims to empower all who enter but actually its main output is replicating the status quo of a tiered society.

I believe that the main focus for modern schools should be to create a nurturing environment for each student to become who they are and realize their gift. these needs to be a process that is 'living in the world' not as some kind of abstract preparation for living in the world, in a certain way as an adult. Education should allow each individual to transcend their personal circumstances, but not to create there own freedom at the expense of others but rather to realize the freedom for all to flourish, as only when human flourishing is shared by all can we truly experience freedom.