The world has been changing our current approach to education is not enough to meet the need. The onset of new technologies, social fragmentation and specialization all call for a change in education. As part of this change, students’ personal core relationships will likely play a bigger role in the process of education. If done correctly, this may increase the quality and amount of education students receive while preparing them more fully for life in today’s world.
There are two reasons why relationship-education may play critical part in this change:
1.) Change is difficult and an infusion of new relationships will shake it up.
2.) Wisely integrating relationships with education will allow the use of cell phones, laptops and other technologies which are currently considered distractions.
A longtime friend and colleague recently suggested that I read the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. Toward the beginning of the book the author describes the difference between riding in a car and the experience of riding a motorcycle:
“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer, and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on; it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”
The car/motorcycle comparison is a perfect parallel to students learning from with-in the 4 walls of the classroom vs. those students learning in and beyond the 4 walls through relationships. The current educational systems: public, private and home school, struggle with the 4 walls problem.
The need for a more robust learning system has been building for quite some time. Bill Gates said it this way:
“America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and underfunded. . . . By obsolete, I mean that our high schools–even when they’re working exactly as designed–cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. . . . This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.”
Schools and students are having to add or use distance programs. Both the classroom and virtual classroom environments are weak. But, more can be done with relationship-education and this may revitalize the traditional classroom and connect the distance/virtual classroom with real life. The challenges inherent in both distance and in-person learning can largely be resolved through relationship-education.
Today’s classroom and distance environments might be compared this way:
The limits of the old classroom:
1.) The social environment of comparison which can distract the student
2.) Students often treat the four walls of the classroom as mental barriers cutting the student’s most important relationships out of the educational process
3.) Only one student can communicate at once in a classroom
4.) Classroom dialogue is limited to the people in the room
The limits of distance education:
1.) The distance between the student, the teacher and the class
The benefits of the old classroom:
1.) Powerful synergy of the in-person atmosphere, especially among peers
2.) The powerful transfer of personality that occurs when great teachers go to work
The 3 most common reasons for distance education:
1.) Money saved by cutting the cost of brick and mortar buildings
2.) Convenience of teaching a large audience through broadcasting and recording
3.) Convenience of studying from home or anywhere
Now with Relationships-education you may not have to choose between the two. As each is complimented by relationships their weaknesses are less of an issue.
7 Reasons for adding relationship-education
#1 Relationships:
Relationships are key to resolving the education crisis in America for many reasons.
a.) Abundance of good information is increasing. Due to supply and demand people value what is scarce. As information becomes personalized through relationships this new information becomes scarce and valued. This personalization can be more easily facilitated through relationship-education.
b.) Stability and integrity: What do students have that they can rely on? Careers will shift perhaps dozens of times throughout their lives. Relationships if managed well can provide a constant core during this change.
c.) The specialization crisis: We are so specialized that we don’t talk to our neighbors.
The maintenance of core relationships and the natural need to teach and practice the skills of managing distant relationships is growing.
d.) Relationships can have a positive affect on how classrooms work.
# 2 Student-to-student relations:
Relationship-education can train students to better work with each other. C3 Method below explains how this can be done:
C3 Method (Consultant Conference Calls)
Students present their current project or discovery (epiphany) to four other students on a phone conference call. In this setting the student presenting becomes the living classic. The listening student consultants are provided with a feedback template and several trainings as they transition into the C³ system. The presenting student receives an email from each of the 4 listening students with thoughts, questions and suggestions. Additional relationships are introduced onto the call as proficiency increases.
See JAAA Student-parent Handbook for context
C³s affect student-to-student relationships. Each student begins valuing themselves and other students for what they can contribute (gifts, talents, skills, etc.) This sort-of structured interaction results in a love that can grow as students effectively help one another on a consistent basis.
#3 Genius:
Why are relationships critical for helping discover and develop a student’s genius (gifts and talents)?
a.) Students in the classroom are often just one of a crowd. The pressures of the classroom such as disruptive behavior, schedules, immaturity, social pressures, hormones or poor teaching, do not allow for optimal development of each students unique contribution. Relationships can provide a support network so the student looks beyond the distractions.
b.) A student’s unique personality and talents become apparent at a young age. These gifts are often first noticed outside the classroom among core relationships. Relationship-education can engage the community to help develop those talents. This keeps the autonomy with the student and their core relationships.
c.) Relationship-education allows for a wide range of gifts and talents and includes more personalization, which is hard to accomplish when moving large groups of students together.
#4 Communities:
Education needs to be stabilized by relationships but this will require change. This new change involves the whole education community. It shifts the roles of the parent, the teacher, the community, the administration and especially the student. Local communities are not going to begin helping the student until the full responsibility of education moves, at least partially, away from the classroom.
Change often doesn’t happen unless a reason is presented, a place to move to is prepared, and then a way to move into that new place is introduced. Relationship-education throws the student into the community’s hands. This natural accountability from the community can be infused into the learning process and is key to the success of a more versatile education model.
#5 Speed:
When genius becomes the focus of education, students will come to know themselves better; as this occurs they should be encouraged to communicate what they are discovering. As students are applying themselves they will likely have at least 3-6 discoveries on a daily basis. Each of these discoveries needs to be developed and needs to find its context. This doesn’t often happen as well as it could in a classroom 15-30 students.
The classroom is itself an example of this problem. If a good dialogue ensues in a classroom only one student can talk at once and then only one student can respond at a time. In relationship-education all students can talk at once. This is one of the reasons for small student-to-student groups (class sizes)
Students need to be able to teach what they are learning on a consistent basis. The vast amount of material produced by this kind of behavior is too much for one teacher to process. Relationship-education allows multiple relationship groups to more easily work with the student on different projects.
The information age is the kind of environment where everything is moving fast, if only because of the sheer amount and accessibility of information. The relationship-education model allows information age tools to be used more readily helping with this constant flux.
#6 Become:
In the industrial age we separated the behaviors of seeing, learning, doing & becoming. Now, with the new interactive, visual and recorded media, these operations can be fused together as one choice-based procedure. Procedures can be instigated by the school, but often need to be carried out among the student’s core relationships. The whole process can be stabilized by the student’s distant and local relationships. Students need to be able to track their own progress as they change and communicate it in the right way with the right people.
#7 Interdisciplinary:
The interdisciplinary aspect of learning is often overlooked in traditional settings. It cannot be overlooked anymore. Interdisciplinary learning carries three absolutely necessary attributes. These attributes are key ingredients of success in the coming years.
a.) Desire and initiative are byproducts of interdisciplinary relations.
b.) Creation is also a natural result of interdisciplinary learning. When students create they own the material and will retain it if they can teach their own material several times in different settings.
c.) Interdisciplinary learning is also a short cut to depth. It is sometimes difficult to get a student to look beneath the surface.
These three results increase as communities participate in periodic experiential learning exercises or similar events in their communities. The education environment naturally becomes interdisciplinary as students progress quickly in diverse areas and help each other with projects.
A Shift in Relationship-flow
The old classroom prepared students for the market place. It coldly assessed them as a product through market criteria. Our focus as a society was on quality control through regulation, making sure students pass the bar for the market.
Today, if the classroom is to compete in the knowledge economy it must adopt some new techniques. No longer can a teacher simply move from point A to point B in conveyor belt mentality, moving through material by using a set lesson plan. The becoming process must replace the ‘class’-time event. No longer can the teacher take what a student says at face value, quickly passing on to the next student to keep everyone on the same page. Every student is a genius and must be treated as such; comments made must be assumed to be of more depth than they appear on the surface.
When relationship-education is added to the classroom students can be arranged into small groups of 3-5 and can then give each other the attention they need. These small groups can be stabilized by each student’s system of relationships, which expands systematically as learning expands. Students may then produce the amount of work requisite for information age, stimulating and expanding choice while increasing output and quality through natural accountability and redundancy.
As relationship-flow is optimized the conveyor belt aspects of individual comparison and student exclusion will dissolve. Mentors, parents and specialists can interact with students more fluidly in the context of the student’s relationships giving the student more autonomy but greater need for the mentor.
In the traditional classroom of the industrial age, students were products to be prepared for the ‘real world’. But when transformation becomes the focus, more people are involved. While the choice to learn is still individual, education that facilitates complete transformation is a family and community affair as well. Adding the new component of relationship-education to the classroom engages the local community as the student orchestrates the transformation. In the end the new paradigm we must adopt requires a shift in the flow of relationships and the role each relationship plays in education.
