The following dialogue was presented on Radio National, a part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in 1998. From the program intro: Robert Theobald, is discussing the subject of learning. His guest on the program is Australian Kathleen Rundall, who lives in Brisbane, and she’s been heavily engaged in formal education for many years. Her most recent project has been working with students in many parts of the world to develop global visions.
Robert Theobald has been involved in discussions on education issues for over thirty years, and he believes most teachers are fully aware that industrial era models no longer work because they teach people a body of knowledge rather than give them the skills to learn for themselves. He emphasises the need for people to be given skills to make choices in a world where more and more decisions will have to be made by all of us.
Robert Theobald & Kathleen Rundall
When we talk about education, our first thoughts are always about schools, colleges and universities. We discuss how to improve grades and scores, about how schools can more efficiently train people to be good workers. Our conversation is impoverished because it runs along familiar lines rather than asking the questions we need to ask in our fundamentally changed circumstances.
We need to remind ourselves of education’s real challenge. Until this century the knowledge and wisdom of the old was the best source of instruction for the young although there were always new realities to be absorbed. It was nevertheless realistic to assume that past experience was largely irrelevant to the life the next generation would experience.
Today the challenge is totally different. Margaret Mead caught the change in a piece she wrote for one of my edited books. She said ‘We are all immigrants into a new time.’ This inevitably requires that the patterns we’ve inherited from the past must be tested against a new set of realities that nobody sees clearly. Immigrants into a new culture can learn from current inhabitants; immigrants into a new time face a more difficult challenge.
What then is required to educate for a profoundly different and ever-changing future? Up to the present time, most educators have concentrated on developing a more relevant curriculum. However, as the amount of information continues to increase, the time needed to learn all that seems necessary for various jobs, careers and professions can often no longer be found.
We therefore require a profoundly new starting point for our thinking. The individual learner needs to become the centre of attention. Each person should be provided with the opportunities required to discover their own unique skills and competencies. This is the same revolution as is required in many other fields: for example, the patient should be the centre of attention rather than the medical system.
Fortunately, there is already movement in this direction, particularly for children up to the age of 12. More and more parents and schools believe that imagination should be encouraged rather than suppressed, differences supported rather than discouraged. While the picture is still very mixed, positive change is taking place in many places.
The picture changes for the worse however, as one moves into the higher grades. There is a clear movement toward the belief that graduates from schools, colleges and universities should have the information and skills needed to hold a specific job. The primary direction of change for students at this level is away from learning-to-learn skills, and toward techniques that will become obsolete in the short run.
This trend is disastrous because the world is now changing so fast that people who do not develop learning-to-learn skills will inevitably be marginalised. While there are many people who are fully aware of the emerging tragedy throughout the educational system, the inertia is against them.
Of course the current trends make no sense, given that more and more heads of companies argue that they need people who can keep up with ever shifting realities; that job skills are best learned after a person is hired. More and more teachers and professors are all too well aware that teaching specific techniques does not serve the student.
Given the growing sense of the need for new directions, why do we continue to support past models? I remember a professor at one of the prestigious Canadian universities who informed me of an effort to renew the campus. His scathing comment was that all the proposals were either trivial or moved in the wrong direction.
The problem in education, as in so many areas, is that it is impossible to challenge an existing system without a vision of what can replace it. It is true that there is already broad acceptance of the fact that the current system was designed to serve a vanished industrial era. But we have so far failed to face the core issue. It makes no sense for people to be cut off from the real world during their educational experiences. Education needs to take place in the world, not cut off from it.
Thinking and doing need to be meshed. Imagination needs to be encouraged. People need to take intelligent risks in order to grow. These are some of the clues to the new system we so urgently need, and we shall discuss them during the course of this program. And at the end, we shall suggest a couple of core questions that you can continue to chew on with friends and colleagues.
I shall be talking with Kathleen Rundall. She has been part of the formal educational system but is now working outside it so she can now create new approaches and visions. When I first met her on my last trip to Australia, she was working with groups of young people from many countries.
Kathleen, I though we might start from asking what you learned from this work, and what would you be doing now if you were doing it over again?
Kathleen Rundall: Robert, I’d be very pleased to begin here because I learned what I needed to move on with. And what I learned, working with the project which was called Global Visions was that young people are yearning for good work to do; that they want to be with adults, that they want to be with other young people and they want to face the times. They want to know what it is that is happening out there, but they want to know what is the bigger purpose and meaning, and they want to find that out in company with knowledgeable people of goodwill. And this project allowed them to do that.
When I look at several of my sites, particularly the ones in Brazil and the Philippines, these were perfect examples of how we can engage young people, both recreating and creating anew societies around them and the world in which we live. These young people formed communities, they had eclectic preparation using art, music, drama; they learnt about team functioning, they learnt about their own emotional health, they had spiritual formation, they learned all of the skills that come with futures analysis; they developed genuine relationships and the broadened into global connections. And they actually felt themselves a part of the web of life.
A lot of young people in Brazil had actually been on drugs and they’d been living the university life of ‘I’m going to prepare for my own career, look after myself and make as much money as I can.’ These young people today are living together in communities and their big questions are totally different. Their big questions are How can I help? How can I know more about myself? What can we do? And they’re not depressed, they’re very energised, they’re joyful, they’re happy, but they haven’t got their eyes closed, they know the world as it is because they’ve been taught how to do that in their futures work.
So I’ve learned a great deal from taking part in this project and being the co-ordinator of it, and what I know (and this is what I want to go forward with) is that young people need genuine relationships, not the relationships that occur in the schools. And I do have compassion for schools, and I do believe we’ve done the best that we possibly can, but they’re not good enough for the times, they’re not. There are too many islands of anger, dispassion and grief, and I think that schools, we need to learn how to have fun, we need to know where the true joy in life is; we need to tap the deeper collective and the deeper sense of self.
And so the sorts of programs that we need don’t actually fit in to the boundaries of schools. We need to tear apart the walls, and this has been said for decades by learned people and by people who have been in the schools and despaired. But we really do need to introduce once more that sense of interconnection with the local community, but it has to be a bigger one than ever before because for the first time we’re in a cosmic reality, we’re not in a feudal society of connectedness any more. So those are some of the things, Robert, that I learned from this project.
Robert Theobald: You know, what’s so encouraging to me listening to you, is something I deeply believe and in fact am running into more and more, which is that young people are really interested. I mean I hear this rhetoric again and again: young people don’t care, young people really are quite satisfied, young people only want to make money, you know, all of the rhetorics we hear. And yet, when they’re given a chance, when somebody actually comes to them and says, ‘Look, there is a reality out there; you should be dealing with it because nobody else can if you don’t.’ I find them saying, ‘Well how have we been short-changed? How can we possibly be living in a society which refuses to tell us what’s really going on and keeps on talking about realities that have long since vanished?’
I was at another Canadian college, and a woman of I suppose about 22 or 23 came up to me and said, ‘You are the first person who has talked about the world in a way that relates to the way I understand it, as opposed to the way that we seem to be told about it. And I have been so completely turned off by the education process I’m in -‘ and this was a part of a College of Education, I hate to say, – ‘that I’d sort of stopped believing that anybody really understood what was going on.’ How have we failed young people so dismally? And how, in a sense, on the other side, can we be surprised that there is so much frustration among young people whose experience of the world doesn’t seem to me to mesh at all with what they see in the schools and colleges. And as you say, we musn’t get into the blaming game, because teachers do their best, but the system doesn’t work, and you can’t do it within the current system.
Kathleen Rundall: Well Robert, I believe the system is formed by ourselves, and that we are the people who have the limits. We as the teachers and the system builders, and even to a degree, the young people in the schools, we have the limits within ourselves. And the issue really is to explore the limits that we have put upon ourselves and to see how we all can collectively grow. And so I really don’t want to look too much at the divide between young people and the older generations because each in our time have had that frustration as we’ve moved on through the generations. We each bring new freshness and inspiration and courage and vision, and it gets dulled and we become bored in the whole process of education, and then we introduce limits into our life, and we then begin to turn off and we depress all that beautiful energy that we had as young people.
And so what I would like to see, I would like to see us as a collective, as an inter-generational movement, try to basically move away from memory and history, and move into the realm of imagination. I would like to see us draw ourselves towards a more creative future, rather than be steeped into the angers, the problems, the errors that we have committed in the past, because we all do that, individually and collectively. We have a human drama that we’re a part of. And so rather than treating that as an illness or a problem, I would rather look at it more as simply the history of evolution, and that what appears to be happening is that whatever we’ve done, we’ve actually done it marvellously well because we’re now in a time where we’ve got this extraordinary vision and extraordinary capacity; and humanity seems, I believe, to be at a point of encouraging and allowing marvellous functions to develop, marvellous visions to be possible that didn’t seem to be there centuries ago.
So while I can see the dysfunctions and the despair and the things that we’ve done wrong, I think it is the other part of the equation that I really would like to concentrate on. It’s the learning to be in this world with all the capacities we have. I think Teilhard de Chardin expressed it extremely well when he said that we act from only a tiny part of ourselves. Well the school system actually convinces us that we are actually only a very tiny functional little robot in the system. But what we have to do, and this is what happened in some of the sites, not all of the sites in Global Visions, and I’d like to make a contrast there, but in some of the sites in Global Visions what happened is that because of the particular circumstances and the capacity of the project, the young people actually began to understand that there is in fact a cosmic reality, that yes, some of them lived in small villages in Pakistan, some of them lived in very depressed areas in slums in the Philippines, some of them were extremely wealthy. We had a whole cross-section of young people, but whoever they were, they seemed to know themselves only as a tiny little person in a part of the world. Well this project actually allowed them to broaden out to global citizens, that’s the part of the project that we’re aiming at, but also introduce them to who they were in that global reality with little hints and whispers that in fact there is a cosmic reality. And it was the excitement of that, and the practicality I might add of the project, because it was very practical as well, those were the things that allowed them to get their hands into some real thinking about where we all are without becoming desperate or impoverished, and de-energised as a result of it.
Robert Theobald: You know, it’s fascinating to me that whichever field I look at, and one of the consequences of the type of work I do as I sort of get pulled into all sorts of different areas, and I never quite know what’s going to come over the Internet or the telephone or in the mail next, is that there is this radical recognition that we can no longer live with a problem/failure sort of orientation which we have lived with for so long. What’s the deficit in a community? What do you have to do to make it work? And we’re moving towards the asset thinking, the possibility thinking, the vision thinking, and I see that as one of the huge shifts that’s happening in the way we are learning to think. But it really does cut across the image we have of ourselves and people and particularly of kids, which is that you can’t afford to let kids be who they are, that if they do they will misbehave and they will be destructive. And it seems to me it’s exactly the other way round, that as you deprive kids of that sense of who they are and the wonder they have it seems to me in their early years, that violence and anger develops. And I’m fascinated by the feeling that what we did in the industrial era, what we had to do in a sense, was to turn people into robots, but it’s no longer an attractive way to behave, which is the point you’ve been making. But I always add it’s no longer a functional way to behave.
So how do we take that vision you had, how does one bring that into a community and say ‘We have a better image, a better vision, which can attract the schools, which can attract people into new ways of behaviour?’ Because I don’t think you can force this, I don’t think there is a way to manipulate the system into this; I don’t think it’s done by Government policy, it’s done by people changing their own thinking. And a friend of mine, we quoted this on the programs before, Willis Harmon said that things change when a lot of people think and do things in slightly different ways. How do we help people to recognise that they have a responsibility in the shift towards first of all a more cosmic reality but also a positive vision of this cosmic reality. Because I find hope and courage seem to me something which we haven’t as much of as we need, and how do we help create that, how do we give people the space to realise that they are players in this creation process?
Kathleen Rundall: Well it’s an old village method, but I believe it is current and applicable, and it is the telling of stories. I really believe that what we have to do, and this is one of the things that we do here in our Futures Curriculum, is to balance the books. There are so many stories that we meet every day about how things don’t work and how bad people are, how cruel we are, and in fact there are millions of tiny acts of kindness going on all round us. And in addition there are probably millions of acts of extraordinary courage, in the middle of war, in the middle of poverty, in the middle of catastrophe, in the middle of everyday life, and they happen around us and they appear not to be noticed. We seem to be fascinated with the trivial and fascinated with those things that mirror back to us the image of ourselves as failing, difficult and frail people.
And so basically it is learning to look at the world differently, and learning to select out from our environment; I don’t want to distort, what I actually want to do is to get an accurate picture for the first time. I want to get a picture of we as human beings, the real self that we are: a mixed-up, confused, but still holy and loving people that do do things wrong, but yet are heroic, are loving, are compassionate. And so what I would like to do really is I would really like thousands and thousands of stories, and I see it happening actually on the radios and TVs now, but I would like to see many, many more of these stories told so that we begin to tell ourselves back how beautiful we are, how courageous we are, how wonderful we are. And then young people don’t have to go around depressing their energy and telling themselves that really they are only small selves, that they’re really only human. I hear that so many times, ‘we are only human’. When in fact the potential of the human is absolutely extraordinary and this is what they need to know.
So I think it’s those people who have seen the world differently, who have a benign aspect, who do have a sense of fun also, to actually get off their butts, get out there, join the collectives, the small movements, the non-Government organisations, the parents and friends, all of the thousands and thousands of organisations we already have. We don’t need any more I don’t think. What we actually do is we need to liberate the energy and the wisdom that already exists in all of those groups, and sometimes it only takes one person to let the cork out of all that energy for it to flow. Because you’ve been in many meetings where if a person introduces a negative thread, then so often the energy goes down and everybody brings in their sad luck stories and the critical analyses, etc. But it can take one person to turn it around, to offer the positive, the hopeful, to take the courageous step, to be very truthful.
So what it is, I simply think is we need ourselves to have the courage to be honest, to be truthful, to be loving, to be compassionate, to be those things that we truly are. I think those words, the hope and courage, those two words you used, I think they’re extraordinarily important, but there is another one too: I think we need to be aware, and it’s back to that Teilhard de Chardin statement, we need to be aware that we are more than a tiny little robot who seems to have no sense and purpose in this larger story. We need the huge story and we need to know our role in that huge story, and we need to become aware of the magnificence of that story. And I believe it is an incremental set of activities that occur. I think it has to be millions of millions of people out there every day releasing their own capacities to do that, but I do believe in leadership. I do believe that there are people who are more joyful, more turned on, more aware, more enlivened, who do have a benign sense about the world, and I really think that they’d better get out there and they’d better take their role as leaders, not as despots, not as dictators, but as leaders. Get out there and like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, blow their pipes, sound their music and let people walk with them and dance with them. So that’s some of my answers, Robert.
Robert Theobald: Well it’s interesting you raised all sorts of issues for me of course in that. One of them is that I like Robert Greenley’s phrase ‘Servant Leadership’, it’s a great book that he wrote and it hasn’t got around as much as I’d like. It’s a book called ‘Servant Leadership’ by Robert Greenley. So that’s one thing that you triggered in me.
A second thing you triggered was your word ‘real’ because that’s another thing I hear more and more people talking about. Look we need to look at both the positive and the negative, and coming at reality in terms of what actually exists, and that what’s wrong is not that we look at the negative which we do in our culture, but we so grossly over-estimate the importance of the negative. So our media are around the negative; we look at what’s going wrong. We don’t know how to make what’s going right exciting.
A third piece that I just want to weave in a piece from the last week’s program, and that was when Bob Stilger talked about the two meetings he ran for the Chambers of Commerce, the first one which really totally flopped and the second one which started from ‘Well we’re going to ask you to look at a child that you know that needs help, and then we will move on to talk about what we as a community could do about children.’ And because that became personal and real to people, that the flavour of the meeting was totally different.
And so what I’d like to push us onto is what are the spaces in which the sort of conversation, the sort of storytelling that you’re talking about, can happen? One of the things that impresses me so much is that there seems to be so little space for the conversation we’re having in our cultures at the moment. Partly it’s that we’re overloaded, we’re over-stressed, we’re over-pushed, but it’s partly I think that we’re all so nervous these days about what we can afford to say to each other. You know, there is this sense that so many people seem to be able to get angry so quickly about things, rather than having this conversation where we’re looking for how to build with each other, how to be creative with each other. So how do we create positive spaces in which people can be comfortable discussing the real, can recognise that dealing with these realities is fun, but it’s also stressful. I’m in a small group at the moment where we spend quite a lot of our time in tears because what was surfacing is old angers, old frustrations, old difficulties, and they come out with people and people need to deal with that, and I suspect this process of growth out of seeing oneself as a robot into seeing oneself as a human being inevitably involves both joy and pain. And I really do believe that those two are connected. We try to have joy without recognising that that is the mirror image of the pain of life.
Kathleen Rundall: It is. I really think that if we put it into the context, and that’s what you’ve been talking about, that that is how we can handle it; that if there is a belief that we have to progress through pain, then I believe that is inappropriate. But I believe that as you say the recognition of the hurts, the anguishes, the angers, the past injustices and the present injustices I might add, all of those things have to be taken into account for us to progress forward. But what we need to do I believe, in these meetings with others, other than having the courage to be ourselves, and I’d like to not underestimate that, because it is an extremely difficult thing. If people did have the courage to be themselves, they would be able to withstand a lot of the muted anger, overt hostilities, the problems that come when people feel disturbed or feel as though they are challenged. So I think that that courage is an extremely important aspect of it.
But I also do believe that compassion with courage is important, and that we need to validate others, that no-one is superior, we are all as superior, we are all as inferior to each other. We are all on a journey, and so I believe it’s extremely important to never give a sense that the other is inferior, that we need in every meeting, whether we have, whether it be just a small group of people, two people or a large one, we need to validate the awareness that people have. Everyone is seeking love, everyone is seeking self worth in their own says.
And so what we need to do first I believe, is to speak to the heart centre, and I have no qualms about that at this stage in my life. I believe that we’ve spent so much time in our head, and that actually has been one of the extraordinary achievements of the industrial era, we have had this amazing period where our intellectual capacities have been enhanced to an enormous degree and I’m enormously grateful for it, but what I do believe is we need to centre, and I believe we need to centre on our heart, and we need to look at everything that we learn through that centre. Now to me that’s not the soft centre, that is the tough centre, that’s where the courage comes from, that’s where the energy comes from.
And so I think that we have to acknowledge that that’s who we are, that we are beings that live in and through love, that’s elemental, that’s the beginning essence of what we are. And my experience in working with individuals and groups of people, particularly in recent times, is that when I acknowledge that as the beginning point, and when I begin to explore the depth and the profundity of what it is to be a human being, that the barriers drop. There is an extraordinary relief, an extraordinary acknowledgment that people say ‘In my quiet times, in my times of highest hope, in my dreams, those are the things that I know myself to be. And yes, I am deeply a caring person, but in my work I can’t’, and so that’s a beautiful place to start. Why can’t we? And they say, ‘Well you know, we can’t affect policy and we can’t affect the systems and the structures in which we work.’ And so our task is then to say ‘Well let’s look at this anew, let’s not look at this from the methods that we have used in the past, let’s see ourselves as whole beings functioning out of heart and mind, and integrate this into a feeling, knowing, aware, centred self, and go to work, go to work from there.’ …
Robert Theobald: I think one of the extraordinary things that came out of the first series I did for ABC was the amount of resonance, which is a word I’ve come to like a great deal, and it was really ‘Look Robert, you didn’t say anything we didn’t know, but you did remind us that we know it and we care about it and we would like to put this higher on our list of priorities, that we are not comfortable.’ And I find an amazing amount of energy which is mobilisable, and I think your point that you raised some time ago that one person can swing meetings these days. I really have a deep belief these days that if the first message into a meeting, almost determines whether it’s going to be a positive or a negative one. That if the first message is ‘We’re going to operate the way we’ve always operated, and we’re going to talk about what’s wrong, then we’re going to have another meeting, a gripe session about how terrible things are’. But if you give people the space to start dreaming and visioning and caring and being compassionate, it is amazing how many people are ready for us and sort of say, ‘Hey, I’ve just been waiting for somebody to do this for me.’ Do you find where we are in the culture? Because I’ve been in this change business for too long, and I think that too many change agents are very much in the business of telling people that there’s yet another crisis. You know, we come in and we say, ‘Don’t you realise that the seas are being over-fished?’ or ‘Our kids aren’t being educated’, you know, all of the rhetorics we have, when people I think are inclined to say, ‘Well we knew that already, that doesn’t really help us. What do we do with the fact, that we’re ready to act, that we’re ready to change the way we move. How do we do that?’ And that they’re even ready to recognise that it isn’t a headset that’s going to change it for us, but a heart set.
Kathleen Rundall: Yes. And I would say back to them too, ‘Yes, I think that we’d better take all of these crises very seriously because they are all very real, but let’s not run around like mice on the mill, let’s develop into the extraordinary capacities we have, because we need extraordinary capacities to deal with the issues that we have brought upon ourselves. So let’s get about it.’ Because we are perfectly aware ourselves of the great capacities we have. Most human beings, when interviewed I was reading recently, believe that they handle life better than just about everybody else in their local communities, that most people believe that they’re more optimistic than their peers etc.
We do all have a sense of some capacities within ourselves that have not been released. And in fact it was the message back from Brazil from these young people. They said the thing that really got them was the vision in process. They said to actually believe in something that is so radiant, so wonderful, something that works, and they had to develop a practical vision, to actually believe that there are these sets of possibilities actually enables us to be more. Now whether their vision actually comes about or not, whether it was impractical in the long run or too dreamy or whatever, is not the point. What they said it actually enabled us to be more in the moment. So rather than 100 university students pursuing their dull paths that they said that they were pursuing, there are now 100 active, engaged people working on those very crises, but working upon it in an energised and I might say, inflamed way. They’ve got a lot of thought and energy that’s going into the processes that they’re using.
Robert Theobald: You know it’s interesting. I was at the Pearson World College, which has students from all over the world, and they’ve got very good at taking speakers who come in and give them a set of ideas. And you know, because they’re all over the world they say, ‘But it’s not broad enough’ and when I went into them and talked about the questions we had to deal with, they really didn’t know how to cope with me, because I didn’t say I’d got answers for them, I said they had got to get into the business of being creative. And my sense was that that was extraordinarily exciting to them and in fact the one sort of real agreement was ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Pearson World College would drop an enormous amount of its formal curriculum and allow them to become passionate, and joyous and engaged?’ And they saw it very clearly.
Then it becomes how do you actually allow that to happen? How do each one of us help that process to happen, whether we’re teachers or students or parents or administrators, and allow the movement? I mean what’s so exciting to me about our discussion today is we’re clear that the only steps that are going to make a difference, it’s not shifting the curriculum around, making the structures slightly different or even massively different, because it is actually the structure, the fact that we believe in structure in education, which is the problem. We need to believe in flow and process and imagination and creativity rather than saying, ‘Well if we got the structure right it will all happen.’
Kathleen Rundall: Absolutely. But what we have to do is we have to get the people right, in the sense that it is the people forming the very basis of every pyramid, every anything that we ever build. I actually was thinking back as you were speaking then to a project I went to, a youth futures conference in Victoria last year, and one of the things that impressed me immensely that is relevant here, is a particular project that was dealing with long-term unemployed youth. They’re totally disengaged from their societies at risk of all sorts of dysfunctions. And so they had invented a project to bring them back into the mainstream and back into work. The one thing they said that turned the corner in a whole range of activities that they had for mentoring, apprenticeships, job finding skills etc., was a week activity out in the bush where the young people simply spent time talking about the larger issues of life, meaning and purpose. Who am I? They would take them out to the stars at night and they would look at the stars, they would talk to each other about what it is to be human, who am I, where am I, what am I doing here, where are we all going? And apparently it was that week of discussion with each other, in genuine conversation, that the young people reported back changed their whole way of looking at their world and turned them around to wanting to be engaged. And I understand it’s one of the most successful projects run for long-term unemployed.
Robert Theobald: Isn’t that interesting. I suspect you and I can both imagine the conversations. ‘We’re going to spend a week talking with kids about purpose and long-run direction? I mean, are you serious?’ You know, I can imagine the person who managed to push that through and then got the evidence. Because I do think our only hope is to reconnect people with this deeper spiritual crisis. I think the other crises are manageable, but the sense of so many people that they have a hole in their belly which can only be filled up by an addiction whatever it is, to an addiction to violence or consumption or to drugs or to alcohol, until we can give people a feeling that their life is worth living, nothing’s going to change. And yet that’s the work we always give short shrift to, and we run conferences and we spend every minute in sessions, not talking about what matters to us, but we’ve got to fill every minute, just like we’ve got to fill in a sense, every minute of our lives. We don’t like silences, we don’t like events that don’t go anywhere, we’re not willing in a sense, to spend time and say, ‘Hey, that was an interesting period. We didn’t know what would happen, but some extraordinary things happened because we didn’t know what would happen.’
Kathleen Rundall: Yes I agree with you, and what I find is that once that energy has been released, once people have validated for themselves what they have always believed about themselves, when I’ve heard other people talk to those parts in themselves and those capacities and I realise that other people also have dreams and hopes very much like theirs, what it actually does I believe, is it releases the desire to know more, to learn more, but not only that, it focuses it. Because the more that people get into contact with their precise sets of yearnings, then they know what it is that they need to know next. And so then is released that ability to go out and to learn, to learn quickly, to learn well, and get on with the job, because there’s something pretty exciting to do and you want to get on, and you want to be able to do it well. And so that constant addressing of the inner yearnings actually accomplishes the academic goals that schools are all the time working so hard to achieve. That what it is, it’s the motivating factor is the wrong thing. They are being told, they are being lured by being more attractive, being more intelligent, being better than everybody else, climbing the corporate ladders. Most human beings deep down, well I suppose I would contend no human being in their deepest centre would see those as worthwhile goals. And so what we have to do is to plumb the depths, and having plumbed the depths, release the capacities to learn, the capacities to be who we are.
And that actually is a very difficult thing to do because teachers are scared of doing it. And why are teachers scared of doing it? Because I’m scared of doing. I’m a teacher. Because what I’m saying is there, we each have to face it as an individual and question our own lives. We all scared of being who we are, because it is huge, it is wondrous what we actually are, and it is actually sometimes a little safer to be very small and to plod along each day and to depress all those wonderful wishes and hopes and dreams that come up. It might appear to be safer but I think actually the universe has taken the plug out and I don’t think it is possible to be safe any longer, and we’ve just faced ourselves with these extraordinary crises in order to liberate this magnificent capacity that we have to be.
Robert Theobald: You know it’s interesting though, but I’m going to come to another thing in a moment, but if I were a teacher, and I’ve heard this, and in fact I’ve watched teachers try this, and teachers try this and students talk about inappropriate things, inappropriate in terms of how our culture currently runs, and one of the students runs home to their parents and says, ‘Do you know what we talked about in class today?’ You know this one. If we say to students ‘You should be passionate’, they’ll be passionate about the things that matter to them. And some of those are things that we say in our culture kids shouldn’t be passionate about, shouldn’t be aware of, shouldn’t be doing anything with, you know. And that’s not realistic. So there are some huge blocks in this process.
But I don’t really want to take that one up, I want to take up another one which it seems to me, I can imagine two types of listeners: one of them who said, ‘I thought we came in for a discussion on learning and where did we get to? I mean hasn’t this been a little bit woolly, and – ‘ you know. But can imagine most of the people listening saying, ‘OK, yes, I buy this, but what do I do with it? I mean what’s a practical step?’ And I know part of the problem with that is it’s a unique one for each person, and that there isn’t the step anymore. But I’m wondering if in these last few minutes we’ve got left, are there any clues we can give to somebody who says, ‘Look I’m really turned on by this. This really is what I believe. What would I do? How do I start this process? How do I get more comfortable with believing that my passions are important, that believing that compassion is important, that opening myself up and taking risks makes sense, and is less risky than not taking risks?’
Kathleen Rundall: In the long run, yes. Well it is, as you know, an extremely difficult question to answer. But I’ll do my best.
I believe that each individual deep down, knows what they can do and what they ought do, and so the first step for me always is to get in touch. Now in many societies that is very difficult because I think it was some of Margaret Mead’s work, where they say that we in the West have lost contact with our soul, so perhaps, and again we might be getting back to the area where you were saying, you know, the woolly area, that we need to get in touch with the deepest part, it doesn’t matter what religion or no religion we have, but the deepest part of what we know to be ourselves, and trust it. That’s the next part: trust it to know what to do. So to learn to take those quiet times, or learn to do it in whatever way is our way, whether it be through music or walking or running or however we do it, but getting in touch with the deepest part of ourselves, and then going with what we hear there, find there, or are inspired by, trust ourselves. And quite often, what it does is it simply sends us out there to learn more. And that learning more might be as simple as TAFE courses, it might be going back to school, funnily enough, for someone who’s outside the system. It might be picking up our own private learning project through reading and mentoring and getting on the Internet and finding out who knows what out there. I mean there are a million different ways for us to learn how to do what we have to do. We are really good actually, at education I believe these days, in the micro forms of education, we are really good at doing what we’re doing and we’ve got heaps and heaps of stuff out there that can teach people what they want to know.
What we haven’t really got well done, is finding out what people really need to know, what they want to do and how they can increase that ability to know what is appropriate for them at any step in their lives. And so that’s the first point for me. It’s the getting in touch with the deeper part of the soul. To me it always go back to that, to the self, to the knowledge of who you are as the individual and collective, and I think I’ll just make a quick comment on what you said before: this search is a supported search, so that when young people might want to unleash those passionate aspects of themselves, this is where the wisdom of an inter-generational project comes in. This is where you need people of expertise, of street skill, and the capacity to be able to help young people to discern what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. Otherwise you could get problems that would be best not to have. It is a supported, collective process. So I don’t think I can say much more.
Robert Theobald: I think you said a lot. But what I want to do because it sometimes sounds a little bit floaty, is to talk about this at a very low level indeed. You know, we have these people who don’t learn to read, and we run them again and again through the same system and say, ‘We will teach you to read by teaching you to read.’ And my argument is that what we need to do is to provide them with a passion, so that then they will say, ‘In order to meet that passion I have to read.’ So this isn’t sort of just for people who are high-flown and further along and all the rest of it, it really is, and it speaks in exactly the same way as that group of unemployed does, that if you can’t reach people and say to them their life is worth living, they need to read, they need to be involved, they will continue simply to stick outside the system and say, ‘We’re not going to care’. So it is immensely practical advice in my opinion, as well as speaking to the much deeper levels which we need to speak to.
One of the things that I’ve become more and more convinced about, and we’re getting very close to the end, is the need for really small groups of people who can help each other, that at a certain point one gets to the point where one’s done some of one’s work and one needs to relate to other people who have done some of it because at least for me I begin to discover that the way people do their work is so incredibly different and in so discovering it broadens my whole perspective not only on those people which is very important to me, but also on how this extraordinarily difficult cultural change which we’re engaged in can happen. Do you have a comment on that?
Kathleen Rundall: Well first I’d like to talk about that example that you gave of the child who can’t read. I would never try to teach – well, let’s put it this way: if a child had great difficulty in reading, I would switch tack. I would look for what they are very, very good at doing. What is their particular potential? What is the way that they decipher the world and what is the better way that they communicate? And I would increase their ability to trust those potentials within themselves, and then out of a sense of ‘okay-ness’, then when they have the ability to do so, tackle the more difficult issue of reading. And I know it’s one of those sacred cows in our society, this thing about reading marks on a piece of paper when some people don’t come into this world to read marks on pieces of paper. They might have this most amazing imaginative capacity which can liberate other people, but yet if we insist that they learn how to read these marks on pieces of paper, they may never know that.
So that’s one comment that I would like to make. And the other comment is that we do all need support, and it’s almost like that AA support. I thought of that ages ago when you were talking here. That group of people meeting together as genuine, committed people who are looking and searching to improve their own lives, and to find out how they can better themselves and through all their different relationships in life, improve themselves. And I think yes, we do need formal methods for this to actually occur. But I also do believe that there are many, many avenues already out there, we don’t have to invent any more. There are already endless clubs, associations, non-Government organisations etc. People of goodwill need to join them.
Robert Theobald: I’m going to have to cut you off because the time has run out, and leave a question hopefully for our listeners to think about and ponder over for the next week: if we need to touch our deepest centres and engage our passions, how would this change your personal life, and the community of which you’re part? How could we engage our passions in our home, our work, and our community lives?