Theory of Indivisibility: Transitioning Away from Conventional Education
Below is a transcription of a talk I gave on October 19, 2019 titled “Self-Directed Education For A Sustainable Planet” (click here to watch & listen). It has been edited for clarity and flow.
Has your awareness of sustainability and climate change gone up significantly in recent years? Mine has too. Like many of you, I’ve just been going along with the pre-prescribed scripts of life and sustainability wasn’t one of those things that was told to me to be aware of. But I’ve been paying attention lately and there are some interesting perspectives. As I think about the person I’ve evolved to be, I start to see connection points and patterns around how we got to this point of unsustainability and also about what the potential solutions are for the long-term.
What I’m going to share with you all may be confirmation for you. It may resonate with you. But what I’m going to share may also be a really uncomfortable paradigm shift. I’m not trying to coerce or change anyone in where you are. My only goal is to dialogue with you and just share my perspective. I hope that you will be able to include my perspective in your greater worldview without necessarily changing your greater worldview.
The reason we’re even having this conversation is because humans have neglected, abused, and gotten out of alignment with our most important relationship: our relationship to nature. I explain nature as a collection of interconnected and interdependent systems and subsystems. Everything in nature is a system. Everything is a system and these systems interact in a circular manner, creating feedback loop relationships that bring balance and sustainability to environments.
We’ve grown up being taught to think in linear ways. We’re taught that the worlds unfolds and exists in straight lines. We see a point A and we see a direction towards point B and then point B leads to point C point C leads to point D this continuation of events. But in reality, we live in a world of circles and circular relationships. So, A influences B, B influences C and C influences A and A influences B over and over and over again. These are called feedback loops and it’s a scientific term.
So, nature provides us with a blueprint for balance and sustainability. I’m going to give you some examples of how this blueprint works and how these feedback loops work. Everything in nature is a system. Guess what? Humans are nature which means all of us are made of systems. For example, humans consist of a series of organ systems like our skeletal system, our nervous system, our digestive system, endocrine, respiratory, circulatory, etc. The unique thing about those systems is that they all have systems within them that make them work. But each of these systems has distinct responsibilities that make us function in order to sustain our life processes and internal environment. The interesting thing about these systems is that they are connected and they’re interdependent. They need each other. If you separated all those systems outside of our bodies, you would no longer have a functioning human. If you harmed or destroyed one or more of those systems, you destroy the whole human. Generally speaking, we can’t live to our fullest extent without all of those systems. They don’t compete with one another interdependently and interconnectedly.
For example, in the digestive system, there are subsystems and various parts – we put food in our mouth and chew chew using our teeth. Then we swallow and it goes down our throats moving into our intestines, both large and small intestines. The food goes through all these processes in different parts. Then the system shares with the other systems. It shares the various nutrients and sustenance that are needed for the rest of the body and the other systems. Finally it disposes of whatever we didn’t use and it just works. It just works! Do any of you ever have to think about how it works? Does the digestive system need any special training to work?
No, it doesn’t need any special training. We don’t even think about the process at all. It just works because that’s the way it was designed to work by nature, by God, by the universe, whatever your belief system says. There’s this magic that happens and we don’t even have to give any thought to it, but it all works. No system is more important than the other system. No system has any more value than the other ones. No system has more power than any of those systems, but yet they all work to sustain life and support one another.
Participant Question:
How did you come to systems theory for those who don’t listen to your podcast?
Everything I’ve given you is a system story. I learned about system theory and systems thinking during my doctoral studies. Prior to that, I was someone who always had this desire for our world to be a better place, to want people to get along. I wanted to see peace and harmony.
First I was in the business world for many years.When the markets crashed in 2008, I had to use my degree so I decided to teach because I said, “If I’m going to work for anyone, I’m going to work for children.” So, I went into the public school system.
Immediately, my entrepreneurial mind wanted to solve problems and do things in ways that I felt were more efficient and just better. But I told myself, “No, you have to play the game. You can’t get here and just start changing things.” So, that didn’t feel too good because I immediately started recognizing inefficiencies within that system. Also, at that time, I decided to go back to school to get my graduate degrees. During my doctoral studies, I had a class called “Thinking in Systems.” When I took this class, it was like night became day. All these things I was seeing and feeling, in terms of inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the world, feeling lack of balance, and all the dysfunction I noticed – it all made sense. Learning about systems thinking gave me the language. It gave me the tools to be able to understand the why behind the problems that we see in society and the disconnects that continue to perpetuate those problems.
It also empowered me with the knowledge that everything is a system. There are natural systems and there are also human-made systems. It empowered me to think that if humans created our current social systems and the ways we live and interact with one another, then humans that are alive today have the power to create systems that are more sustainable.
Let’s get back to natural systems. I gave you an example of the human body being a natural system. Another natural system that you’re probably familiar with is the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle. Humans and other animals have this relationship with plants. We breathe in oxygen. We breathe out carbon dioxide, CO2. Carbon dioxide is a waste product for us. We take in what we need from the oxygen, then we give out the waste, which is carbon dioxide for us, but plants breathe in the carbon dioxide and that’s food for them. They use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis to make their food and they give off their own waste product. The waste or by-product of that process is oxygen which is something that gives us life. Do you see the circle in that relationship? Is there any special training that’s needed for us to have that relationship with plants and for them to have that relationship with us? Do either of us, plants or humans, have any more value than the other? Does anyone have more power than the other in that relationship? Nope. It’s A leads to B leads to C leads back to A, leads back to B, C back to A over and over and over again. It’s a symbiotic, give-and-take relationship. Nature is full of these symbiotic, give-and-take relationships.
Another interesting thing: do you think all plants give off the same amount of oxygen? They don’t. But do any of you wake up in the morning having any fear that there won’t be enough oxygen? Is there any judgment against the plants that give off less versus the ones that give off more? Do we go around saying, “That lazy plant! You only gave off this amount of oxygen today?” We don’t do that. We don’t judge plants in that way. You know what we do? We trust. We know that all of our needs will be met through the collective contribution of all plants. We know that we will be sustained. I’ll say for me, I never gave it any thought until I started thinking about these concepts.But it all works! Do you know why? Because that’s the design of nature. Nature designed us in that way, or whether it be God, the universe, whatever you believe. It’s the magic of the design.
Another interesting thing along the same lines of give-and-take with plants and humans is when we give off waste, whether it be CO2 or when we defecate, guess what? That fertilizes the ground and provides nutrients for the earth, the soil, the plants, and what do they give us in return? Food. Nourishment that we eat and then we give off waste again and it’s used for nourishment of the soil. There’s that circle. There’s that cycle once again. So many examples.
Let me give you one more. Another thing that sustains us is what? Water. So, oxygen, food, water. All animals need these things to sustain them. Nature provides these things to us at no cost. Have any of you ever paid for oxygen? We don’t pay plants for what they provide. It’s a symbiotic give-and-take relationship. The water cycle, which is precipitation, collection, evaporation, condensation, and then back to precipitation. So rain collects in our lakes, our rivers, our oceans, then it evaporates and through the condensation process with the clouds, it rains again. So we have the water cycle. And, like the other natural systems, it just works.
The most important life sustaining processes are things that work without us having to give it any thought. We don’t have to train the plants to do their part. They don’t have to train us to do our part. It just happens. Why does it just happen? Because that’s the grand design of the universe, the space that we live in.
I like to call this “nature’s economy.” Nature’s economy is this magic I was talking about earlier. The way it works is this: each system automatically meets the needs of other systems as a by-product of meeting its own needs. Take that in and remember, everything is a system. So remember we were talking about the systems inside your body. They are not working for the other systems. None of those systems have more power. None of them had to learn it. Are you catching the pattern? I know you’re catching it.
There’s another thing I want you to think about. Within this grand design of natural systems, there really is no waste. Instead of waste, we can call it by-products of these processes. All of our by-products give life to other parts of the system. There’s no waste. Everything is used efficiently and it’s sustainable. Natural systems are sustainable. There is no pollution in natural systems when they’re balanced. These circles are sustainable.
Let’s talk about the sustainability crisis. According to NASA, “human activities are changing the natural greenhouse. Over the last century, the burning of fossil fuels, like coal and oil, has increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In its assessment report, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a group of 1300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world, under the auspices of the United nations concluded that the industrial activities that our modern civilization depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 400 parts per million in the last 150 years. The panel also concluded that there is a better than 95% probability that human-produced greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have caused much of the observed increase in Earth’s temperatures over the past 50 years.”
So basically, we did this. When we talk about the sustainability crisis and climate change, humans did this. What I mean is, basically the industrial processes have just gotten things out of balance. We’re putting way too much CO2 into the atmosphere and Earth’s natural systems can’t keep up with it. There are not enough plants and trees to absorb it all.
The ecologist, Julian Caldecott, explains it like this: “The crisis of sustainability is the collective effect of environmental changes with which humanity cannot live in the long-term. These include ozone depletion, biodiversity loss and mass extinction, ecosystem and land degradation, drought and desertification, crisis of water supply and sanitation, pollution of the land, sea and air by a wide range of persistent and destructive toxins and climate change. All have proven to be large-scale, long-term, pervasive, resistant to piecemeal, easy, or cheap solutions and, in many cases, mutually interactive and reinforcing. They also combine with other human-caused problems such as overfishing, overpopulation, and war to undermine the living conditions, livelihoods, health, and wellbeing of almost everyone on earth, but particularly those of weaker human stakeholders, such as the poor. Put simply, their presence makes the human condition unlivable.”
So, it’s a sobering reality to have to grapple with what ecologists and environmentalists have been telling us for the last 50 years. We’ve really only just started hearing about this in the mainstream maybe 2 or 3 years ago, but environmentalists and other scientists have been saying these things for many years.
I listened to a podcast by an environmentalist named Jem Bendel. I can’t think of the name of the podcast right now. [Click here for the podcast.] He wrote a paper that he tried to submit to various scientific journals but they wouldn’t accept it because they felt like it would scare people too much, causing chaos and hysteria. Eventually he just published the paper himself on his blog. I listened to him speak about it on his podcast and, quite frankly, it frightened me. I have children and you don’t think about what could potentially happen where our species no longer exists. You go from angry to frustrated to frightened and all these various feelings that I’m sure some of you have probably experienced from what you’re learning as well. Ultimately, we’re conditioned to look around, and to assign blame.
I’m here to tell you that no one is to blame. No one is to blame. I know that’s hard to stomach because we have built social systems that say that someone has to be accountable and someone is always to blame. But the reason we got off-track is just an evolutionary reality.
Beginning about 10,000 years ago, with the changes that occurred due to the agricultural revolution, human-made social systems and industrial systems have gradually become misaligned with the relationship with nature. Gradually, over the course of thousands of years, humans have gotten away from our natural ways, specifically “civilized” humans because indigenous people lived these ways naturally. Indigenous people on this continent, even though they’ve been pushed into the corners and they’ve been ignored, have been pushing for these environmentally sustainable practices. There are several reasons why this is happening.I’ll get into a little bit about why but I go into it in detail about the history of the misalignment on a podcast that I created called Theory of Indivisibility.
Basically humans, hominoids, Homo sapiens, we evolved on this earth approximately 200,000 years ago. Prior to that, and at that same time, there were other humanoid species on earth that have since become extinct. Homos sapiens are the only species of humans that are still on the earth. This was news to me when I learned it. Prior to two years ago, before I started this journey, I didn’t know any of this. I want you to know that I’m not someone who was a scientist my whole life. I’m someone who was literally seeking the truth and seeking patterns. I think that’s a relevant connection to make with you. I’ll give you a little more context on how I got here.
My desire to be part of the solution in the world came from my desire to solve race relation issues and the divide around race. That was my introduction into trying to be a problem-solver in the ways you’re hearing me speak about today. I had a podcast called Race Haven Solutions, focused on dialogue about race relations in America and everything you hear me reference is at my website. I also had a Facebook group of about a thousand people of all different backgrounds where we would dialogue about racial issues. Ultimately, because of my teachings and my learnings in systems thinking, I understood that there weren’t long-term solutions within the system of race. There were no solutions there.
My systems-thinking mind told me that since everything is a system. There are feedback loops that we continue to see that caused all the dysfunction and divide in society around race. Those are feedback loops as well. I’m sure you all noticed the patterns. They continue to come up. It’s like we can’t get away from them because they’re feedback loops. So, my systems-thinking mind got me to thinking, “Well, what systems feed race?” I realized that if I wanted to really be solutions-oriented and really get to the root of this, I need to understand all the systems that birthed racism, and that got me on a journey towards creating what’s called my Theory of Indivisibility.
When I started researching, I came up with this Theory of Indivisibility. I’m just going to give it to you how it came to me. I was driving along in my car one day and I said, “Okay, if everything is a system and every system interacts and relates with others, what are the systems that continue to cause this divide over race?” I said, “Okay, capitalism. Racism is profitable in some aspects. So that’s one connection.” And then I said, “Well, what feeds capitalism?” If I have race, let’s say I have a circle here with race inside of that circle, then within let’s draw another circle in your mind. That’s capitalism and the very concept of race as well as racism are all within capitalism. “Well, what birthed that?” Then I said, “Hmm, ownership, the concept of ownership!” So we draw a circle for ownership. And I said, “Well, ownership and these ideas of people owning other people and things like that. And really, it’s men who have done all these things. So, what birthed that? Patriarchy and religion. What birthed patriarchy?” I said, “Okay, religion comes in here as well.” When religions evolved in societies, they were always male-dominated. I knew that patriarchy impacted that. “Well, what impacted patriarchy? How did that get here? Why is that a thing? Ultimately, it came down to the ideas of power-over and control.
Learning about systems thinking gave me the tools to be able to draw these diagrams in my mind.
It’s our relationship with power-over that birthed patriarchy, that birthed religion, that birthed ownership, that birthed capitalism, that birthed systemic racism. Ultimately that’s how my Theory of Indivisibility came about. But at that time, it was still just an idea.
Now I had to go and prove my ideas. As I started to do scientific research, I had to keep going back further and further and further in terms of our understanding of these systems, human-made systems and natural ones. I went all the way back to the scientific understanding of the start of the universe, which is the Big Bang. Through this research I had to confront a lot of the things I learned growing up. What I realized is that a lot of the science that I was learning was relatively new. These are advancements that have happened within the last 150 years, a very short period of time. All these wonderful fields of science – archeology, paleontology, genetics, psychology, cosmology, linguistics, astronomy, you name it. There are so many fields of science. They have all pretty much evolved to the point where we know them today, where they’re providing so many answers to our world. We’ve come so far in 150 years. Science has now provided all this evidence for the way the world has evolved and how we got here, whereas previously it was religion that provided those answers.
As I confronted all these things, I began to get confirmation through my research and it provided support for what I call my Theory of Indivisibility. So that’s how I got here in terms of my understanding of these things and why I’m able to have these conversations. It took a lot of time and research. I did nothing but research for two months to write down the foundation for what I was thinking and it gave me confirmation. It’s because of all that research that I’m able to say these things to you with a level of confidence. I asked all the skeptical questions as I was doing this research. I asked, “How do scientists know that a bone is 1 million years old? How can they know that?” And then I learned about carbon dating. I went down those rabbit holes and it makes sense. If you understand the basics of science that we all learned in school and you start doing the research, it just makes sense. It connects. Prior to that, I was just moving throughout the world kind of oblivious and just going along with the flow.
I was raised as a Christian so the Bible was my history book and my science book growing up. There was no reason for me to even want to try to challenge any of those teachings and learnings. The only thing that got me to the point of wanting to start doing research is that I was tired of seeing people out here fighting and arguing and killing each other and killing the environment and making this place unsustainable. That’s the bottom line. Because I’m wired the way I am, I want to solve problems and get to solutions. That forced me to go down the path that allows me to be able to have the conversation I’m having with you all today. I hope that makes sense. I love my children. I love all of you. That love that I have for everyone and everything pushed me to do this and put the time in to do the research and things that I’ve been doing. So that’s a little more context for you all.
Of course, because I have that love for all of you and I have that love for my children, I think about these sustainability issues. Jem Bendell – the scientist, the environmentalist that I listened to in that podcast I told you all about earlier – to hear him say he’s predicting that we may see some catastrophic natural disasters in the next five to ten years. That’s going to change our entire way of life. We’re already starting to see it. We’re seeing hurricanes and wildfires and all these things to a level and degree that we’ve never seen before. We’re seeing the rising of the ocean because the polar ice caps are melting and now it’s making life unsustainable on small islands out in the Caribbean and very small islands throughout the world. Those people’s islands may be under water in the next few years. That can happen here even in the United States because of the severity of these various storms and things that are continuing to happen. It’s so important, now more than ever, that we take heed.
Let me say it like this: I conclude, based on everything I’ve shared and based on the things that you all are hearing as well, that what we’ve been doing isn’t sustainable. It doesn’t work. The human-made social systems that evolved out of the agricultural revolution for survival reasons, whatever the reasons, are unsustainable. There’s no one to blame. Those were the evolutionary realities of how those humans chose to survive at those times. It evolved into what we have as our social systems today, where we have these various divides and they have come to a head. Because we have the benefit of being alive in 2019, and we have historical perspective and we’re alive during a time when science has evolved to inform us like it never has before. It’s time that we do things differently.
We have the know-how, we have the skills, we’ve evolved in our cognitive abilities to be able to do things differently. We’ve evolved in our cognitive abilities to understand that chopping folks heads off with a guillotine is just inhumane. But at one time that was normal. A lot of times when people hear me talk about my theories, they’re like, “It’s just human nature to be evil to one another.” But if you really look, we’ve evolved and we’ve been evolving. Our brains also evolved over the course of millions of years. The brain that we now use and operate is an evolutionary marvel but there was a time when earlier humans couldn’t think and articulate and problem solve in the ways that we can today. So we can’t hold them accountable and be upset and point the finger at them. We do have the power today to say, “Okay, we’ve evolved to a point where we can make a change. We can do things differently going forward.” It just takes awareness.
Let me jump back into my notes. I totally went on a tangent. Thank you for going with me.
I wanted to point out a couple of those human-made systems. I talked about natural systems and human-made systems. Humans are nature. So we are natural systems, but in order for us to do what we do – have culture and language, even the way we talk, is all a process of evolution. At one point, humans didn’t talk the way we talk now. Everything was an adaptation, and then it evolved.
Within human-made systems, there are social systems and industrial systems. Our social systems encompass language, governance, parenting, gender and various things. Those are all social constructs. Everything that puts things in perspective and in order in our world were all created. Humans put their heads together and said, “We’re going to give that a name” and they started building culture and community around the concepts that they came up with. The industrial systems were created to support that. Cars, roads, buildings, housing, shelter, clothing, all these various things are industrial systems.
With that being said, I want to focus on just a couple of the evolved social systems that have gotten us out of alignment with nature, the natural design, the magic and magical design we talked about earlier.
One of those human-made systems that got us out of alignment was power-over. For approximately the first 90% of Homo sapiens existence on earth, they lived as an egalitarian society. They cooperated, they shared, they operated in that natural symbiotic way that nature was designed.
Once power-over and control came into play, when humans started wielding power over one another, it started getting us out of alignment. But here’s the neat thing. Think about this. It’s been about 10,000 years that we’ve been treating each other like this versus the hundreds of thousands of years where humans actually cooperated with one another. And yes, that’s according to anthropological archaeological evidence. All the various sciences have weaved together these understandings based on what they’ve been able to find.
Another human-made system is a concept called growth. Remember we talked about balance earlier? Growth replaced balance. Let’s talk about growth. Our entire value systems are centered on the idea of growth and abundance. Think about that, like our economies, our values; we’re always trying to grow. If you know me and my brand, my brand is GROW but in a different way. Companies’ main goal is to grow, grow, grow, grow. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Growth is the goal for endless profits. Building wealth is all about growth and abundance. So, growth replaced balance.
If you think about our conventional schooling, it’s designed to position those who thrive in it for growth and wealth building opportunities. Everything’s about growth. The interesting thing is too much growth in the natural world can be a bad thing. Let’s go back to our natural system example we talked about – the human body. We talked about all the various systems in the human body. Well, too much growth in our human systems leads to cancer. That’s what too much growth is when you get out of balance. It’s cancerous, but our human-made systems are built on growth. Think about that for a second.
Another interesting thing about our human-made systems when it comes to growth is that we’re told to sacrifice our happiness in the now for future opportunities of what? Growth? If you want to reach your fullest potential, think about all the sacrifice you have to make for wealth. I’m using growth and wealth interchangeably here, but that’s what we’re kind of sold.
Another human-made system that has gotten us out of alignment is the idea of value. What has that replaced? Value has replaced the symbiotic give-and-take relationship that we talked about in our examples earlier. What do I mean by value? We’re told that some people have more value than others. We’re told through this human-made social construct of race, that people of European descent are called “white people.” And that name has more value than people we give other name in terms of that social construct of race and within that system. We have some humans having more value within the realm of class. If someone is more wealthy, they have more value than someone who’s on the lower rung of that spectrum from wealth, all the way down to poor.
If we look at different careers within our social systems we see that we demonstrate value when we pay certain people more than we pay other people. We’re conditioned to be okay with it because we’ve all been indoctrinated with growth and value as if it’s the natural order of things. We’ve been conditioned to think that’s the way it works and it’s the way it should work. But the reality is that concepts like these have gotten us out of alignment and have put us in the sustainability crisis that we’re in today.
We’ve been indoctrinated to think that a surgeon is more important than a farmer. We show that because we pay surgeons a ton of money and we pay farmers much less. We value that less. Farmers don’t make as much money. Someone who builds the roads that the surgeons need to get to work don’t make as much money. Or the builders or even the people who pick the fruit from the farms, they get paid even less. We have this society that says what they do and the ways they contribute doesn’t have as much value as other people within that system. I hope that as I’m saying these things, you all are thinking back to the patterns that we talked about earlier within the natural systems about value.
I had a conversation with someone I’m in a relationship with about this. She was just telling me, “Surgeons deserve to make more money. They’re much more important because they give life or help people live that may be on their way out. They are important. They do deserve more money.” How many of you are thinking that surgeons do deserve more money than the janitor that works at the hospital? In a linear world, that’s logical. But when you can think about things systematically, it’s not. I hope you’ll start to question and grapple with these things, because again, do plants look at you and say, “Hmm, you deserve less oxygen because you’re a janitor or a teacher or a farmer”? Do plants say that surgeon deserves extra oxygen today because that person is important? No. But imagine if they did. Imagine if the natural world worked the way we have created our human systems to work.
Imagine your life if your oxygen supply cut off. You’re a teacher so you’re only going to get about five years’ worth of living supply of oxygen because you’re only a teacher. You said you’re in sales. Let’s talk to you specifically. We don’t really need you. [laughs] We don’t need you around but so long. We’ll give you 10 years of oxygen. Imagine if the natural world treated us that way. Again, there’s no value in the natural world. It’s just a relationship. That’s not even something that we give thought, but humans, for evolutionary reasons, have in ways just over-thought it, or just gotten out of alignment. That’s the best way to put it.
What I’m getting at with these examples is: why are some people more successful than others? In our human-made systems, it’s because they fall in the right class, they have the right race, they have the right career, their gifts, their natural gifts and ability. They were born LeBron James and could jump and run and shoot a basketball really, really well. There are all these unearned privileges that certain people have because of the ways our human-made systems have been designed and the ways they’ve evolved over time to say that some people are more successful than others. But here’s the systems thinking and answer to that, here’s the Theory of Indivisibility answer to that question. The reason why some people are “more successful” than others is because our social systems are flawed and they don’t work for everybody.
Oxygen works for everybody. Rain, the water cycle that gives us water – it works for everybody. Plants producing food works for everybody. Even though humans have messed that up and gotten in the way of that natural process which is totally inhumane. Think about that. Natural systems work for everybody. Those circles work for everybody. So why don’t our human systems work for everybody? They should. In nature, balance is the intention. In human-made systems, it’s growth, wealth, competition. Those things have become the intention. And that creates what? Unsustainability. So how is SDE a part of the solution?
Self-Directed Education is a very unique space. It’s a unique system. Self-Directed Education says that every person is designed to think and learn. Every person is born to think and learn. Self-Directed Education says that we don’t have to do anything special or unique to make that happen. It just is because that’s the natural design of things. Our children were born to think and learn. Self-Directed Education provides a learning environment that says that no one’s skills have more value than anyone else’s. If a kid is really, really gifted at reading and writing, and another kid is really good and gifted at tumbling, running, jumping, and using their body to express themselves, that’s okay. They have equal value here. If a kid is really good at cooking and another kid is really good at singing – they’re not stratified based on ability.
No one has more value or power because of their abilities and no one has less. Self-Directed Education doesn’t wield power or control over young people. There’s a symbiotic give-and-take relationship between the facilitators and the young people. For the people who do it at home, it’s the same thing. The people who choose to homeschool or the adults who choose to facilitate this in any context, they choose to show up differently in their relationship with young people, as opposed to wielding power over young people.
It’s not about forcing growth in Self-Directed Education. It’s not about saying that in order to hit this marker to get to this desired end result that equals success or wealth, you have to do X, Y, Z in a certain amount of time regardless of natural paces. Self-Directed Education honors natural growth because natural growth leads to balance and sustainability.
Self-Directed Education understands that all of us have a role. By being in relationships with one another, we’ll meet each other’s needs naturally. The person who’s good at singing can entertain while the person who’s good at writing will do the writing and the organizing and the collecting of the information in our community. The person who’s good at speaking and oratorical skills will convey what they’re seeing and the person that is tinkering and building and developing things, etc. etc. etc. Self-Directed Education understands that if you leave humans to their devices, all of the needs of any community will be met naturally because that’s the magical design.
Earlier I gave you a list of lessons from nature. I’ve been speaking in patterns, and I’m sure you are picking up on those patterns. Give me a thumbs up if you’re picking up on the patterns I’m speaking in. What I’m going to do now is to replace the word “human” with the word “nature.” Humans are innately designed to create balance and sustainability. No thought or special training is required for these processes to occur. No human is more important or has more value than the others and they need each other to function. Each human is adequate and necessary. We don’t think about or fear whether or not there will be enough insert, whatever, like human societal need for everyone. We don’t fear whether or not there’ll be enough for everyone. We don’t judge people by how much they give or don’t give, because we know that it’s the collective effort of all humans that provides enough resources for us all. And earlier, I gave you all a magic formula that I called nature’s economy. I’ll say it again, for those of you who came late: it’s that each system automatically meets the needs of other systems as a by-product of meeting its own needs. In human systems the way Self-Directed Education is creating space for who you are and who your children are automatically meets the needs of others as a by-product of you meeting your own needs.
So, think about that. The same way we talked about the natural systems and how they just work, no thought needed. It’s just the way it’s designed. No value, none of those power structures. Imagine if we take what Self-Directed Education is automatically naturally doing and apply that across all of our human-made systems and we took this out into the world and shared it with everyone. We continue to create community around our young people so they can continue to naturally evolve in the ways they were naturally designed. For me, that is the solution to our sustainability problems.
Because there will be no need for ideas like money and growth and building wealth or any of those things. There’s no need for that. There’s just balance. Humans living in the ways that make them happy, doing the things they’re going to do to be happy would automatically meet the needs of others. For example: the person who loves feeding people. How many of you know someone who loves feeding people? It’s like they literally get life from feeding others. We know people who love building things. That’s their passion, they love it. They will automatically meet the needs of people in their communities that need housing. The same way the people who love feeding people will automatically meet the needs of people who need to eat. People who love to entertain will automatically meet the needs of other people, because they love to entertain naturally. You don’t have to give it any special thought or any special training. It just happens naturally because that’s the magical design by nature God, the universe, whatever you believe. And that’s how Self-Directed Education is a solution for our sustainability problems.
I believe that we all are doing really, really important work by bringing us into the world, creating space for young people to please. The more that we unlearn the unnatural, dysfunctional, unsustainable behaviors that we’ve all grown up and have been indoctrinated with and continue to learn more sustainable behaviors and actions and beliefs and etc. in ways that a lot of you already are doing, even before I came to give this talk and help you make connections to the grand scheme of things in this way, then we’re being solutions for a sustainable world.
That’s all I got!
Thank you so much for reading and sharing