Alternative Education
1. Like alternative Medicine, just to name an unconventional educational approach which has no accepted name.
2. We therefore need to look at some common features of conventional educational approach first as background to show what is alternative education.
3. Conventional educational approach emphasizes on conditioning our mind to store a lot of data or information in our memory and then to dig into our memories for quick response when we face any situation.
3.1 Commit to memory by repeating subject being learned until it is easily retrievable. E.g. Poems, music, math exercise , formulae, reading, writing.
4. Habit is formed when you keep repeating something for a long enough time. Conventional education therefore encourages habit forming and habitual response.
5. Habitual response is efficient. Can’t imagine if you keep on driving like the first time behind a wheel.
6. However, it stifles innovative capability and breeds bias.
6.1 Racial bias, sexual bias, status bias, religious bias etc. are products of our conventional educational approach. They are habitual, therefore unconscious responses.
7. We need an alternative approach to compliment and supplement the conventional approach.
8. Alternative approach is to condition our mind not to have habitual response. To look at every situation as a new situation. History never repeats itself. Diana Yong today is not exactly Diana Yong yesterday. (Neither “is”, nor “not”).
9. If I was bitten by a dog yesterday, does it follow that the dog (different one) now looking at me is going to bite me? But when I see this new dog, I am scared it might bite me. That is habitual response. I dig into my memory of being bitten by a dog and respond with a self defense mechanism. But then this new dog is friendly. My fear is unfounded. What if, out of uncontrollable fear, I go and attack this dog? It might be provoked to bite me. And I will justify to myself that after all, it is going to bite me, not wanting to admit that it is me who provoke the new dog in the first place.
10. What if it is the same dog? Surely my belief that it is going to bite me is even stronger. I will not think of it as neither the same dog nor not the same dog. I will attack it first to save myself.
11. We have similar response to snakes. But look at those magicians who live with copra. They don’t fear copra nor does copra fear them. Our fear of copra induces the fear in the copra of us and therefore it attacks us as its self-defense process. (Don’t try your friendliness with the copra as our fear of it can’t be eliminated)
12. Assume human has a body and a mind. Whatever is not body that makes up us is mind.
13. We don’t treat our body as one thing most of the time because we are familiar with our body. Because we pay more attention to our body. We sometimes say we have 4 limbs, a torso and a head. At other times, we say we have hair, flesh, bones and fluid. At other times, we say we have 5 or 6 sense organs. In short, we categorize the components of our body according to certain criteria.
14. What about our mind? Do we think of our mind as one thing most of the time? We do. Why? We seldom pay attention to our mind.
15. Look at our house. Kitchen, dinning room, bathroom, bedroom. All are for the body. What do we have for our mind? Where is the good old altar? Our TV set or computer screen has become the altar now.
16. We pay little attention to our mind. We are not familiar with our mind. We can’t be bothered to map our mind. We let our mind wander habitually.
17. There are people who study the mind and categorize its components. Like the body, we can categorize them in many ways according to our criteria.
18. One school divides the mind into 4 major faculties: Knowing or discriminating mind, memory, ego and the operating mind.
19. The knowing or discriminating mind is the boss, the operating mind is the executive, the workers being supervised and ordered around by the boss. The ego deals with Me and Mine. Memory is the storehouse.
20.Our conventional education conditions our mind to go to the storehouse (memory) and pass what we dig out from there and pass it to the workers (operating mind) to take actions. The boss (knowing mind) hardly knows what is going on.
21. Alternative education keeps the mind with the boss more often. When the mind goes to the storehouse, the retrieved object is passed to the boss, not the workers for immediate action without the sanction of the boss. The boss will decide what to do.
22.Alternative education trains the mind to observe (the boss is observing, not the worker) the task at hand, delay action until the discriminating mind makes the decision.
23. In other words, avoid habitual or unconscious response.
24.How is this done? Equal attention is given to all faculties of the mind with a quiet mind. No more leaving the boss in the dark and let objects from storehouse be passed to workers for immediate action.
25.Why quiet mind? The mind is a power full instrument if we allow it to experience the world with different frequencies. Normally, we tune it to high frequencies and it can only experience things in this range of frequencies. A quiet mind has lower frequencies and will allow us to experience the other parts of the world which we normally can’t.
26.How to implement such education in practice? This is something new for educators and educationalists to explore. I can only point out that the boss must be in charge, we can’t depend on habits all the time and let habits run our life and we should train our mind to observe more often rather than getting involved in the act all the time. We should be trained to let go, to form a habit of observing without reacting to the content of the objects being observed.
27.Try to look at your own matter as if you are an outsider. Be less concerned and involved. Look at every situation as a new one.