I recently concluded a learning strategies workshop for school teachers of middle grade class. When I completed the workshop for these school teachers, something changed me and changed me in a very profound way. This was as much of a learning for me as for them.

Read below about my experience and what I learned from it.

Very often a lot of us in the NLP domain assume a critical view of the schooling system and the way the education is imparted. Leave the floor open to us and we can find faults with the way spellings are taught, the way maths is taught, the way just about anything is taught in schools.

And why shouldn't we? We are trained experts in the subject of study of human excellence, study of human subjective experience.

I recently concluded a learning strategies workshop for school teachers of middle grade class. When I completed the workshop for these school teachers, something changed me and changed me in a very profound way. This was as much of a learning for me as for them.

I have been to my school long ago and I have my memories of what my school teachers were like. And these teachers that I met - they were nothing like that. Absolutely nothing like that!!

I found that these teachers of today are a lot more caring about the students. These teachers actually want their students to learn. The questions they asked were very clearly indicative of their need to know "How do we get the learning to happen?".

These teachers narrated to me of how they use different mnemonics to help the student remembers. And many of these mnemonics weren't the standard text book ones. These were examples of creative genius that all humans are capable of and unleashed by these teachers in their search for ways and means to help the children learn.

These aren't the same kind of teachers who taught me when I was in school 30 years ago.

This workshop has made me realize how these teachers are as much in search of answers as the early co-creators and subsequent followers of NLP. This new found perspective about teachers has left me speechless.

I asked myself the question - What is this so called "Education System", or for that matter any "System". Isn't it a term with a very wide scope - something that we might want to refer to as a "Nominalization"? Leave aside the dictionary meaning, doesn't the word "System" refer to an abstract idea in this context?

And any system, including the education system comprises of or is formed of/by people. Human people.

When this so called 'system' is made by/of people - is it any wonder that it could have limitations that are otherwise found in those very same people?

We as NLP-ers start (or are expected to start) with the presupposition of 'respect for the others model of the world'. And yet when we come to criticizing the education system - do we really operate with this presupposition in mind?

Maybe some of us do and maybe some of us do it sometimes. Yet, this got me thinking. Sure there are things that need to be improved as is also the case with all of us. We all need improvement in one way or another if only for the purpose of evolution.

And yet, the very basis of evolution is the existence of the imperfections that gives rise to the need for those improvements.

With this I conclude my article and sit down to think over it.