Investing in our Children's Education - Part 2

I wonder if anyone reading the previous blog would have taken it out of context. Well, the fault lies in me because I assumed readers would know I was talking from the premise of the average parent that sends their child to public schools.

If I had a choice to invest time, money and effort in a speculative way or a productive way....guess which choice I'd make? A sound investment is one that takes in good info, sound fundamentals and smart models of calculation to arrive at a logical investment strategy.

All of us are investors, one way or another. By the choices we make in our lives, we've investing in a creation or destruction of a worldview or way of living. There is no escaping the fact that we invest in every aspect of life and since we are organic and not mineral forms of life, we either evolve or devolve.

People always say that investing in the sharemarket is risky. I believe it's only risky if you don't know (1) the market (2) understand the fundamentals that are driving the market (3)investing more than you can afford to lose. But then again, don't listen to me, I'm not an investing guru. I'm just applying common sense here. But how about investing in a schooling belief where no one truly understands the origin and purpose of schooling, the hidden curriculums, the obvious but unspoken collaboration between schooling and mass economy? How can we invest in our children's education when we cannot identify and watch the shift in the tide, or the undercurrents behind fundamentals? How can we expect a downfall or to succeed in investing when we don't even know the first thing about the implications or ramifications of our actions/decisions?

Subscribing to the idea of schooling lock, stock and barrel is like putting your nest egg into a company you can't even understand/verify the reports or know nothing about their philosophies, management, operations, culture and direction.

I'm not asking parents to pull their kids out of school. If you know what you're doing, you're not likely to get burned. But in the event you do get burned, make sure what you had at stake is something you can afford to lose. Otherwise, educate yourselves.

There is hardly any excuse for people nowadays to say they didn't know that. There's an information freefall out there and blogs, youtube, websites, books are all pointing the direction for us on where to go, to educate and empower ourselves. Today, a student told me, "Teacher, there are people whose mindset do not allow them to gravitate towards useful information. There are people who, even if you tell them and explain to them, they will refuse to believe the writing on the wall." I asked her, "Why is that, then?"

She goes on to say, "It's because people don't know whether to trust the information or not. Maybe they're afraid to change."

So what lies at the heart of our atrophy? Whenever I come across new information that challenges a previously held belief, I ask myself whether what I'm believing is helpful to my life? Is it helping me achieve my fullest potential and live a fulfilled, loving, abundant and joyous life?

Dragging my only child out of bed and have her screaming and cursing me at the crack of dawn, scaring all my malaikat and blessings away is not a helpful situation in life. Is schooling worth this? And so I base my examination on one simple rule : If something is broken and to keep on doing the same thing that got it broken is pure stupidity.

Sometimes we cannot make the decision in an instant; unless you're a highly spiritual, transparent vessel of life that you can immediately see the cause of the danger/problem in one instant. If you have a gut feeling that something you're doing in your life is broken or damaged, you have to stop and listen to the voice of Reason instead of using our Ego to make up excuses and justify life.

Right now it looks like only highly educated and fairly affluent parents can homeschool their children. But the investment in education I'm talking about is not about homeschooling per se as a choice. It's about needing people to stop fooling themselves about what they're investing in. The first fundamental to learn and understand is the parent. It is the intelligence of the investor him/herself that affects the outcome of the entire investment.

Fortunately, children have a way to repair themselves once they are adults. Schooling won't destroy the entire human race, it simply slows us down tremendously from unleashing our potential and purpose as a collective. Suffering increases when the distance between our perceptions of what reality is, and Truth, increases. The opposite is true for Joy and Happiness.

Schooling by itself cannot cause as much damage as the collective, the parents and teachers, add to the entire machinery. It is the type of people still inside schools and the type of parents still looking to school as a benchmark of their own self-worth that's causing all the problems.

Once, I had a student that liked nothing better than to complain about schooling and what they were made to do in school. In short, I told her it's because her expectations of school differs greatly from the reality of schooling. She then said, if she had her way, she'd not want to go to school anymore. I asked her why isn't she doing that then?

To which she answered,"Well, if everyone thought like me and stopped going to school, then the schools will close lah! Who will go?"

I smiled at her until she realized what she had just said. "Exactly. Schools will have to change when people stop going."

"But the government says we have to go to school."

"And if the government asks you to go to war and kill another human being? Kill the child of another person? Kill the mother or father of someone else? You would?"

Ironically or not, the answer was 'No'. But that's exactly what nationality that is being taught in school is for - that we engage in a type of identity which would justify killing other people for 'country'. "Untuk bangsa dan negara." So in Malaysia, it's a bit unique : you can choose to kill each other for different reasons, bangsa or negara. You can kill each other because each of us is defending or bangsa. Or we can sepakat and kill people from other negara.

My point is, people have a default excuse when it comes to "The government said we must do so." They mouth that off without realizing two things : (1) Governments are elected representatives. We can de-select them. The government and the generals only have power because people are willing to be killing machines for a faceless, temporary, figure of authority. Whether it's Najib, Abhisit or Hitler, they have power only because people give it to them.

(2)People are very arbitrary when it comes to what they are willing to do or not to do based on what the government tells them. By not empowering themselves about the meaning and purpose of life, human beings surrender their autonomy to a government that can create the perfect storm to 'motivate' people to obey and behave in a predictable way. Read : Hitler. Read : Nationalism and Religiousity in schools.

The fact that school became this way or the dream that schools will be a place of empowerment has little to do with the schooling itself or the teachers/government. It might not seem that way, but it is the INVESTORS, the parents who are buying into the very illussions that are supporting the system the way it is right now. It is tax-dollars supporting the government and the way governments are using schools. And it is parents and taxpayers who are really at fault for not having a proper understanding of the history and projections based on those fundamentals.