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Contents
- Update on Project Renaissance
- Double Festival 9 — Nov. 3-5, 2000 by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
- The Shape of Things to Come by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
- Experience Your Creative Energies Directly by ‘Curious George’ Copsey
- Proposed Idea-Generator for Quantum Physicists and String Theorists by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
An Update on Project Renaissance
Win Wenger, founder and president of Project Renaissance, is as busy as ever writing books, articles, speaking at various places, and holding his monthly thinktanks.
More Winsight articles are up now at Winwenger.com
In case you’re new to all this…
Find out what Image Streaming is and how to do it at:
http://exploreit.net/improvethought/imagestreaming.htm
Writers needed–to help prepare children’s books, some details up at http://www.winwenger.com/author.htm
Writers needed who know the periodicals market. Some major apparent opportunities.
Someone handy needed, to tinker up and help develop several low-tech, simple inventions, in return for partial ownership.
A great way to use Image-Streaming directly to build your powers of understanding, not only your intelligence. See “Winsights,” August, 2000, at
http://www.winwenger.com
WANTED: ambitious college students to tutor classmates using Project Renaissance methods. Help others, help yourself, possibly earn some money.
Editor: Michael Cole
© Copyright 2000 Project Renaissance
The Ninth Annual Double-Festival,
of Creative Problem-Solving Methods
and Accelerated/ Enhanced Learning Techniques—
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Year after year, this is absolutely one of the world’s very very best annual small-conference events! We’ve left up our instructions to presenters so you can see the extraordinary lengths we go to make this event the richest interaction of powerful information content and participant involvement you are likely to find anywhere!
Nov. 3-5 in the Washington, DC area, come experience first hand why it is that nearly all conferences will eventually follow our involvement model and use our methods to make the informative part of each presentation totally accessible and meaningful to its various participants.
This conference is both substantive and participant-involving. Our participatory events are not only participatory, they each make a major, meaningful point. So do the intense, content-rich lecture presentations we also have, by leaders from various fields and disciplines. We turn the last 15 or so minutes of each such lecture session into an all-involving thinktank, participants and presenter together on the main issue developed during the session. –And again Sunday afternoon of this weekend conference, everyone is thinktanked together in one rousing Grand Panel of the Whole, on the chief issues and insights to emerge during the three days.
Still better: this year features not one but two Implosion Sessions–
- John Gowan and Win Wenger will head up one remarkable implosion session on unified (and unified human) field theory. –Closing in on one single elegant statement which defines and explains usefully all phenomena in the universe. This year might well be the breakthrough on this “Holy Grail” of scientific inquiry. (See: “Unified Human Field Theory,” below.)
- George Copsey, Win Wenger, and Kathy Carroll will head up the other extraordinary implosion session, conveying a working experience and knowledge of four or more fast, gentle, comfortable methods for near-instant emotional release, freeing from phobias, and clarification. (See “Emotional Release, Clarification and Healing,” below. )
Unified Human Field Theory
For centuries, scientists have sought to make sense of the world and universe around us. –Not only meaningful sense, but useful sense, which has given us the technology which so enhances our lives today. Some of the patterns of how things work, some “natural laws,” have been pretty obvious, like some aspects of the law of gravity. Others have been subtler, harder to discern from within the midst of everything going on, but likewise universal and powerful, like psychology’s law of effect. Others have been subtler still, but no less powerful. Each new clarification brings new exciting vistas and new possibilities.
From different directions, emerging major theories are closing in on finding the one elegant statement which will most usefully encompass everything and define and predict it meaningfully. Mssrs. Gowan and Wenger chairing.
Emotional Release, Clarification and Healing:
Emotional Freedom Technique, Brain Gym, Psychegenics, NLP, and Rapid Eye Tracking, are among the programs which have found near-instant, effective but comfortable ways to achieve release of old and current pain and phobias and to gain clarity on issues. It does NOT “have to hurt to get well!” We don’t need to come unbuttoned to clear things up. “No pain, no gain” no longer holds!
When we are victimized or hurt, 90% of the damage is done by what we do to ourselves. We don’t have to keep on doing that.
The physiological side of this reflects not only the distortions we’ve kept in our flow of life force, chi or pranha, but in our more physical circulations as well, starving and toxifying some areas of the physical body by the old body-english we have left over from old hurts, old strivings, and old anticipations. These old patterns continue to color our experience and our actions even though they’ve become so familiar to us that we no longer notice them. Amazing restorations often occur when these old patterns are finally released.
People can go to expensive therapists for decades and make less progress in treating phobias than they can make in minutes treating themselves with some of these modern methods. It’s always good to have a qualified wise counselor, friend and listener, but it’s also good to get clearer and better control of your own life and self into your own hands.
Researchers and practitioners Carroll, Wenger, and Copsey, from different disciplines will lead participants through several of these modern, comfortable, quick techniques and begin the process of finding further insights between and beyond the several specific disciplines from which these techniques spring.
Other Special Features:
For the first time in any conference event anywhere in the world———
Rebuild and Strengthen the Very Foundations of Your Understanding!
Double-Festival Nine, Nov. 3-5, will be the first time ever that Cognitive Structural Enhancement has been experienced in any conference, anywhere on our planet.
To discover what’s at stake and how this tremendous strengthening of your ability TO understand anything and everything will be achieved, see “Winsights” # 44 at http://www.winwenger.com/
By strengthening the concepts through which you understand other concepts and the world about you, you greatly enrich all aspects of your life and give it meaning.
What Else to Get From This Festival:
What do the presenters get from this conference? –Among many other things, they get to develop their perceptions and insights with a mixed but quality audience under enriched feedback conditions which result in their own further understanding of their own subject.
What do you get from attending this conference? –
- Useful understandings about yourself and about the world, some of which will amaze you.
- New skills learned in the course of special interactions with yourself and with others in the richly exciting contexts and clarifications of this conference.
- You get to interact directly with the leaders, movers and shakers of some of the great work now going on. The mutual enlightenment is 2-way, not just one-way.
- Not only your joy of understanding but your power of understanding will improve.
- Arguably, some of the best three days you’ve ever experienced.
- Some very positive surprises.
A further listing and description of conference events and sessions will appear here shortly. This Year 2000 annual conference of Project Renaissance and friends is a special millennial opportunity…
Double Festival IX–
A thousand years’ worth of perspective
The new Thousand-Year Double Festival of Creative Problem-Solving Methods and Techniques of Accelerated/Enhanced Learning—Double Festival Nine—will be held the first weekend in November—Friday, November 3, through Sunday, November 5, 2000. Please mark it on your calendar.
For the ninth year in the Washington, D.C. area; this year’s Double Festival will be at the Hampton Inn, 20260 Goldenrod Lane, Germantown, Maryland 20876, 301-428-1300.
From Year 1000 to Year 2000, human understanding and the human condition experienced changes of several orders of magnitude. It seems fair to expect that by Year 3000 we will experience several more. (Participating in this conference are people who have been involved in recent discoveries which make it possible that some of US, possibly including YOU, will be AROUND for Year 3000!)
A Retrospective–
You know the story to date. Year 1000, deepest pit of the (European) Dark Ages, berserker Norsemen pushing in everywhere, threatening to extinguish the last bit of any surviving order or civility or human continuity. Life was brief and brutal—if sword or plague didn’t get you, you died drunk in a ditch or of old age at age 30. Education, even in its present un-ideal state of our schooling, in the brief time left that we are to have a school system (our socio-tectonic models are predicting a sudden major socioquake is imminent there), seems somewhat preferable to the school system of Year 1000. Our state of understanding—of ourselves and of the world around us, slightly less than perfect though that understanding is—does appear to be somewhat improved over the level of understanding which prevailed in Year 1000.
In all seriousness: what advances will occur in our understanding, our science and technology, our childraising, our education, our society, our way of governing, our manner of living? We’ve developed some ways to find out and are looking for more. Some of the ways to do so are found in in the extraordinary book Discovering the Obvious.
If our shivering, starving, filthy, miserable forebears in Year 1000 would have anticipated a little of what finally developed by the time of our Year 2000, they could have saved themselves a bit of difficulty. By like token so can we—and we do have some fairly reliable means by which to find out. And:
“Those who do not learn from the lessons of the future are doomed to undergo them!” (See Winsights No. 25, in www.winwenger.com.)
Advances in our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us, and advances in our means of human development, are the main focus of the new Thousand-Year Double Festival, Double Festival IX. Our Double Festival annual conferences have been nearing achievement of a human unified field theory, toward an integration of all knowledge, a simple elegant core statement and model through which everything else makes immediate good sense, in whatever specialty.
It is time to move from the faceted bug vision of our narrowly specialized fields and sciences toward a more competent human vision. Our Double Festival’s very founding celebrated the 95% convergence/overlap between two important human fields previously unknown to each other (creative problem-solving techniques and accelerated learning methods). That’s the “double” in “Double Festival.”
That origin has understandably focused us on matters of human development. (This development appears to extend far further than you might think!) But this Double Festival, celebrating toward the next thousand years, is vitally interested in any development or aspect which bears upon the quality of human experience, performance, ability, and the human condition.
Tuition: $495.00, less $100 discount for previous attendees, for spouses, and for workshop attendees daytime Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 pm, of the core of the Beyond-Einstein Training (see below).
Beyond-Einstein 1-Day Core Training:
A concentrated one-day core of the Beyond-Einstein Training, giving you hands-on experience of Einsteinian Discovery Technique from basic ImageStreaming or Over-the-Wall Problem-Solving to full Instant-Answer procedures and full High Thinktank, will be led by discoverer Win Wenger from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 pm Friday, November 3rd, in the same site at the Germantown-Gaithersburg Hampton Inn where the main Conference and Double Festival are being held starting Friday evening 7:30 pm. Get into the conference with a bang! –and gain a lifetime of invaluable new skills in visual thinking, in learning, in creativity, in problem-solving, and in much more. This one-time condensed occasion only, $195.00. If you also attend the Conference, $100 of that $195 will apply toward your tuition for the entire Conference.
Einsteinian ways to get to an understanding or “in-sight:” let that vast majority of your brain, which works in sensory images instead of words, freely make its associations. Bring these into clearer focus by describing them aloud to a listener or recorder as you examine them in detail. Once into that focus, the concepts represented by those reflexive sensory associations can usually be made pretty apparent. This whole process is fast and easy because those reflexive sensory-image-associations go on in all of us all the time anyway, and is virtually instant from moment to moment in relation to context. These associations are highly accurate or “true,” because so much more of your brain and data resources are involved than with narrowly conscious verbal thinking. –And because some parts of your brain and data resources are considerably more sensitive to subtler aspects than are our verbally conscious minds.
The High Thinktank part of this simply helps us keep objective and accurate that path to understanding, to not be swayed aside by our verbal-conscious mind’s assumptions, expectations and editings.
In apparently everyone, in many or most respects, the effective intelligence of this sensory-image-based majority of the brain is very high, much higher than anything we’ve gotten to measure on an I.Q. test. Improving communications between those extended regions, of your brain and mind, and your verbal conscious focus, is one of many strong ways to increase your readily available, effective intelligence, your “I.Q.,” and your quality of experience.
The Training of Trainers:
Monday Nov. 6 and Tuesday, Nov. 7, $200 each day, will be conducted in a nearby site to be announced. Explore and build the unique special qualities needed to qualify to train on behalf of Project Renaissance. Some of the special skills built bear strongly upon the quality of training you might do in ANY discipline. Gain further, richer insights on the discoveries you’ve made during the Beyond-Einstein Training, the Double-Festival Conference, and your own rich independent explorations.
The Shape of Things to Come
Making recent news—
Headline: “Billionaire Pitches Cyber-U to Businesses.” (In the Washington Post, B-2. 3/17/00).
Part of story: –MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor spun his vision for a free online university to local business leaders yesterday and announced the appointment of three interim advisers who will help get the project rolling.
His formal announcement that he will spend $100 million as a deposit toward creating the university, with more to come….
Since then, MicroStrategy’s stocks led the roller-coaster dip that flurried through NASDEQ and a few of Saylor’s billions evaporated, at least for the moment before rebounding.—But apparently that project is still on. Saylor’s move to create an entire university and curriculum, a total education free on the web, is a huge step toward the way things have to become. Before distance electronic learning can become truly effective it will have to adapt methods featuring in-person student-to-student interactions, not just student-professor interactions, but that is bound to come.
What is clear is this:
The entire—and we mean THE entire curriculum, high school, university, graduate and post-grad, plus whatever specialized community and industry/occupational courses—WILL be free on the web as a public utility. Whether Internet “baby billionaire” Saylor’s project makes it or not, university-level education is about to become a free public utility in much the same way that the Internet already is.—And many new enterprises will emerge in its context just as have happened with the net.
What’s held up Distance Learning?
The main thing preventing distance learning from taking off as yet is that no one has provided an effective system for cueing student-to-student, face-to-face interaction as per our “Dynamic Format”. You want students interacting on a face-to-face level for all the reasons you want them interacting with the course or program content. Especially important: keyboard and screen are too narrow a context to learn in. Most people cannot transfer most of what they learn there to other contexts, or generalize it. You do get that if you have several students to a terminal “buzzing” the key points with each other face-to-face.—The same advantages you get if you have well-focused “buzz-grouping” in well-managed interactive in-person classrooms, and almost the same advantages as if you were one-on-one in person with a Socratic instructor.
The New Avalanche of Enterprises:
Within this new distance-learning public utility will flourish a million and one special enterprises. These will provide services such as guidance and evaluation (of students AND of programs and courses). They will help or arrange logistics for in-person get-togethers of students to reinforce some of the courses and processes used. Yet others of these new firms will of course provide electronic instructional materials, and tech-niques, to various of the course-providers. They will provide a host of other conveniences and products and services beyond prediction just as what is now on that other public utility, the Internet, would have been difficult to predict 15-20 years ago. Already, some electronic tutoring services are beginning to emerge online, the very front end of an avalanche soon upon us.
A second major change coming onto education is the re-re-re-re-rediscovery that nearly all the information and understanding sought, in present educational efforts, is already within each learner, by various means and exposures already, and need merely be Socratized forth into focus. Once that core is focused and conscious, whatever learning remains to be done can then integrate quickly and easily around that already-known core, a core of experiences and understandings which is in every one of us.—Even in that slacker over in the corner, and in that lout in the back row though he wouldn’t think so either. This is the area where most of the present Project Renaissance education-related methods are currently engaged. Many more, and perhaps better, methods than those presently available will emerge from these same principles. With some of the current Project Renaissance methods, one may already acquire years of proficiency or skill in almost any given skill or topic or subject, in only days. The front end of this avalanche, also, is already here.
Further, it has become clear that we get most of our learning and nearly all of our growth from the point where we are getting back something of what we put out. Feedback. Reinforcement. Not just feedback from the environment—maybe 9/10ths of it or more is feedback directly from our own ongoing output, to which the environment is almost incidental. New information can come in, but mostly has to ride the feedback loop like on a carrier wave. (See also our “rough clump of papers” expressing this “Feed-the-Loop Model.” I think this theory is our most significant step in what we’re attempting to evolve. We stand on the shoulders of Montessori, Moore, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and Marion Diamond, but in this we’re a step beyond even these.
This profoundly clarifying “Feed-the-Loop” model, though arrived at only in 1999, is so generative of new insights and new methods that it seems fair to characterize this model as the third hugely transformative issue now breaking upon us and upon all of education.
Further Transformative Issues:
Fourth transformative issue: today, anyone’s reasonably competent PC has more and better access to more and better information than did even the top universities even ten years ago. How long can schools continue to try to do business-as-usual as THE source and authority of knowledge over the tabula rasa students and in society generally? Schools HAVE to redefine their roles and how to fulfill them. Right now, or be blown away utterly in the next several years even were not the other factors afoot. We no longer need the sociotectonics model, which has been tracking other factors, which predicted the sudden astonishing fall of the huge Soviet empire, to see THAT great socioquake coming in American institutionalized education (and perhaps in institutionalized Western education generally)!
Fifth transformative issue, of course, is how poorly schools were and are doing that job even before that role disappeared on them. Driven to that point by—
The Sixth Transformative Issue, a perverse incentive structure. As various levels and programs of governmental aid, funds and money are poured into those schools which do the worst job, trying to staunch their emergency, other schools which make the mistake of improving what they are doing get disqualified and cut off from assistance. This is the main source of the disease which has been eating away at American schools since the late 1950s. How general incentives work, good or bad, is not on major decisions but on a host of minor decisions, cumulatively, where it’s correspon-dingly easier to go on in one direction than in another, over a long period of time. Individual teachers and schools may resist the general trend for a time, but the system as a whole drifts irresistibly in the directions pointed by the general incentive. We pointed ours wrong and it’s still driving us in wrong directions.
Seventh Transformative Issue: Emergence of “cardboard computers,” battery-powered, with radio modems, so cheap they can be airdropped to blanket every jungle backwater and extend not only the Internet but that free university education to every child on the planet.
One Point of Possible Redemption:
Saving grace: things that classroom learn-ing does which, for a time at least, can’t be matched by distance learning even when we do finally persuade some provider into our system of modern Socratic method. One of the things distance learning cannot provide, even with our modern Socratic methods, is the little-noticed dual plane ratification of perceptions. That dual-plane ratification process is a major factor in the emergence of the conscious mind in young children, but most people—and even most teachers—don’t even know that such a process even exists. If schools don’t play to advantage the several legitimate advantages which they do have, where will they be when the crunch comes?
What’s Needed Right Now:
Urgency and scope—defined on one level by the human minds being wasted and destroyed.—On another level by the fact that even before Saylor started to create the free electronic university and begin what will become a free public utility, sociotectonic theory had been predicting major socioquakes for the educational system, on much the same bases and along the same kinds of fault line that it had predicted the likewise sudden and “unexpected” collapse of the Soviet Union some years ago. In any event, given the alternatives: what parent, and what taxpayer, and what legislative bodies, are going to want to continue paying for what society is now getting from its schools? At any moment—and most likely in the year 2005-2006–a sudden huge collapse will sweep away most of our schools virtually overnight. I say this in a time when schools are about as awash with money that they have ever been.
Can this collapse be prevented? I no longer think so. Individual schools may improve their work enough to be spared, but schools generally have shown no willingness to make substantive improvements. They instead use windowdressing reform to postpone pressures, with little substantive changing behind those showy windows. Thus matters have been throughout much or most of the twentieth century and so matters stand—precariously—today. Can this collapse be delayed? Not even to get viable alternatives in place, though it would be very desirable to have them in place before the socioquake hit. Nor, given the ongoing human costs, do we wish to extend the status quo for very long.
Can this collapse be mitigated? That is, I think, our task.
1. Getting individual schools to improve enough that they won’t be immediately swept away in the quake.
2. Getting viable alternatives up and running, to which people can turn instead of totally panicking when the existing schools are swept from underfoot. The key is to ensure enough positive alternatives to prevent that panic, and to prevent the existing good in schools from getting swept away with the bad.
3. To waste as few resources as possible in this changeover, human and material. That is why it is important to anticipate where a new system of education is headed (the pending free public utility and its swarm of new enterprises accompanying), and what it will be doing. Some cannot be anticipated, any more than could all that is now featured on the Internet have been predicted fifteen years ago. We can, however, anticipate some particulars—
A) Economies force us toward distance learning as a major component. For that to work, though, will require such focused interactive procedures as those of Dynamic Format and Project Renaissance, with multiple participants per terminal to process, with one-another, the program contents. B) Conceptual understanding will again become the main focus, as it did in Socratic days before rote memorization came to dominate the scene. For that reason, something like the Project Renaissance methods will be very much in use whether or not those methods or that organization specifically are used.
C) There will be an incentive reward system for the responsible professionals tied to the rate, quality, and extent of multiply measured gains made by students. Much of the funding for such rewards will come from private corporations, and reflect changing values in the world economy; foundations will have a struggle to keep up on behalf of cultural values and issues.
D) In the Information Age, we no longer can afford to leave people behind as hewers of wood, haulers of water, middle management, and cogs in the machine. We have to draw upon all that we are as human beings. That, much more than any particular method or set of methods, will transform education out of all recognition from what is there today. The sea of passive faces will disappear in favor of service to individual clients. Agencies within the new public utility context will compete to provide unique developmental services in the most supportive way possible to them, because that is what will bring them the business, just as so many innovative companies compete today in that free public utility known as the Internet. E) During the time of the quake and for a few years afterward, there will be a tremendous release of public energy, positive or negative, constructive or destructive, in the context of education and public education. It behooves those of us in Project Renaissance, in the Inter-national Alliance of Learning, in Dayton, Ohio’s Innovation Center and the international Schoolworld Association, and in other positive endeavors, to get as many good projects together and going as we can for that moment, to channel at least some of that energy into constructive work.
SURVIVAL:
Depending on whether the socioquake can be mitigated, some individual schools and some individual teachers may survive. Obviously, those who survive will be those with something special to teach.
Individual teachers will need (1) personal experience of what they are teaching, and/or (2) special knowledge.—In that priority order. And, (3) special or unique skills.
Some teachers may be co-opted into the new electronic public utility in various capacities. Indeed, as did the Internet, the new electronic education public utility will, for awhile, need to employ a tremendous number of people. Some teachers may make it into the new system as providers of unique products and services.
A few, a very few, teachers may survive where they are by virtue of their being the main reason their (surviving) current school has anything special. Whoever survives, as a teacher or as a school, can do so in the long run only by offering what cannot be provided electronically from elsewhere in the entire resourced world.
How Can The Individual Teacher Survive?
How can the individual teacher survive the upcoming dislocations?–
1. Developing special skills, especially uniquely valuable ways of relating directly and in person to his or her students.
2. Developing special skills and methods of teaching. For some that will mean special facility with electronic instruction media, which will let them jump into the new public electroned utility during that initial surge in employment demand.
For all who survive, as in-person teachers or in the electronic utility, requires clear mastery of special techniques. Indeed, what mainly will ignite the electromedia must be to acquire and use many of those same enhanced/accelerated learning techniques.3. Building a unique personal base of personal, first-hand experience, whether relative to what one is teaching, or generally. Following a curriculum guide and didactically “teaching-about” will no longer be an option.—When you speak directly from personal first-hand experience, you are powerful. When you have to speak from someone else’s knowledge….
Especially someone else’s second-hand knowledge, even all the tricks they teach in speech classes to simulate what happens from meaningful first-hand experience, will not suffice.—Even though most of today’s teachers are precisely stuck in that weak, ineffectual role, that of passing along someone else’s n’th-hand information, with little personal experience relevant to draw upon.
4. So far as we now know, basic Image Streaming is the fastest and most convenient way to build a personal first-hand experience base and facility, followed closely by use of the Portable Memory Bank. (Both of these proce-dures are self-taught freely on the web, in You Are Brighter Than You Think) Actual work-ing experience in what you are teaching, is certainly among the more desirable ways of obtaining first-hand experience, but alas is not always available as an option.
So special personal skills with students, special teaching methods, and building a strong base of first-hand personal observation experience, are what individual teachers will need in order to survive past the coming socioquake in our schools. No ifs, ands or buts.
Of course, if a lot of teachers went ahead and developed these before the great socioquake comes, much or most of that quake would be averted or mitigated.—But how likely is this to develop among many of our lemmings—er, excuse me, teachers?
How Can Schools Survive?
What must a school or school system do to survive the coming socioquake? Simply put: even its worst teaching must approach the quality of what is now the best teaching in the best schools.
That sounds out of reach for schools now struggling to lift their SAT scores even a point or so, but it isn’t. Nor is it expensive to do so. A lot can be achieved merely by equipping its teachers with the best educational methods available (which definitely is not the same thing as the most accepted methods!) – and most of these best methods can be learned easily, with little or—in some cases—no cost. At current reading, most of these methods are either Sug-gestopedic or Socratic.—Suggestopedic as can be found through the International Alliance of Learning or as taught in Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota or in some regards at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Socratic such as in most of the various educational methods of Project Renaissance several of which are also taught at Cambridge College.
Second, install a positive incentive system based entirely upon results with students. –Their actual gains, across a sufficiently broad spectrum of measurements. This can be done without taking anything away from standard and poorly-performing teachers: outside funding for legitimate such incentive systems can be found in the private sector. Private sources very much want to help education, but have already deeply wearied of throwing their money over the wall and hoping for something good to happen. A solid results-oriented system, based upon student gains, should attract a lot of support.—So much, in fact, that such an incentive system is the apparent best vehicle for bringing the remuneration, of those who are worthy to be called educators, much closer toward their true value. (–And would be even in “normal” times!) The Schools Which Will Survive…
Here is what will happen to those schools which don’t get torn down or turned into office buildings, after the pending socioquake happens:
1. Most will become appendages of the electronic public utility. BGlorified day care centers supervising groups of electronic learners and losing ground day by day to private operations competitively offering such services.
2. A few will survive as schools and be models and providers in the electronic public utility.
3. A few will develop unique and highly valued features, products and services, which can’t be had else-where on or off of the net, and will carry forward on that basis.
4. (Parenthetically, a special case: university graduate schools may survive by becoming more of what they were trending toward becoming, apprentice trade schools, though it’d be much better were they to cultivate more of the special features which can keep them in demand. At the same time, at the other end of the educational ladder, many or most elementary schools may survive for a time if only because of the greater need of personal supervision of their charges. These schools also, a few years later, will face some interesting problems.)
Simply put: most present-day schools and school systems can’t be bothered to do these things. Simply put, the vast majority of these will soon abruptly cease operating as schools. (As we write this, today’s schools seem to be at their economic and political peak, commanding more money and material resources than ever before in American history, a larger public expense on the whole even than that of national defense. To see how fragile all that is, look at the results they are getting from that enormous investment and commitment.) Even less extravagantly endowed schools, in the poorest regions of the country, will quickly follow their richer cousins into oblivion. When “cardboard computers” are emerging that are so cheap they can be air-dropped in saturation into any jungle to bring the Internet and the emerging free public electronic utility that education is about to become. Flatly, the best available anywhere is going to be available everywhere, and much of it for free. It is that which schools and teachers are about to run into.
After more than 30 years of personal struggle, this writer has come to accept that most schools simply are not going to make the needed improvements, and therefore are about to go down.
How completely and abruptly they go down, and whether enough mitigating alternatives can be gotten into place in time to prevent huge or catastrophic waste of human and material resources during the now-looming socioquake, is the question before us.
For awhile, we had hoped to see the charter school movement establish some viable alternatives, but too many of these have thus far been pale imitations of the regular schools (perhaps because of the review system through which their proposals get cleared). Many seem to beat to death some minor variation or innovation as the great answer, while ignoring all else, even each other’s efforts, as a possible source for further genuine improvement.
A Hard Conclusion, with All Due Apologies:
Most schools, and most teachers, just won’t survive coming events. For you as a teacher to survive the coming ruptures, you’ll have to work without the material or moral support of most of those around you. But five years hence, you then will be one of the few who still have the irreplaceable satisfaction of working meaningfully as a teacher.
Your Socrateur, Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Copyright 1999, 2000 by Win Wenger, Ph.D.,
Observation:
Project Renaissance’s orientation, as reflected in Win Wenger’s book Beyond Teaching And Learning, is on understanding and not on memorization. Some of that understanding can come on pretty rapidly, because most of what you’re trying to learn is already there in your unconscious data-base, which constantly is getting reflexively associated, but whose resultant insights almost never reach consciousness.
This book, and Project Renaissance, feature a good many direct, pretty easy ways to bring those insights readily conscious, in context and generally. Whatever learning then remains to be done, integrates readily around this already-known core.
Experience Your Creative Energies Directly
by ‘Curious George’ Copsey
Folks,
If you’ve heard or read about Image Streaming (ISing), and haven’t yet made it your own, consistently done it….. or even tried it yet, you’ll probably find this article to be of interest.
I’ve found that many, many people are intrigued by ISing, having read about it—but haven’t actually done it. Or they’ve tried and wonder if they’re “doing it right”…. or have gotten less than stellar results.
Announcing a newly revised teleclass (class conducted over the phone), intended for those with NO or little experience with ISing. (and lots of interest) Anyone from anywhere in the world can join it via phone.
This is a two session (1 hour each) class focusing exclusively on the basics of ISing. It’s for anyone who’d like to learn to use this marvelously powerful tool properly, so that you can then have the benefits of:
- building your self-esteem
- enjoying a state of total creative absorbation
- accessing powerful insights
- enhancing your connection with your subconscious
- re-kindle, or light your love of learning
- experience your creative energy directly
ISing is great for students, sales people, managers, etc.—anyone who wants to learn more quickly, think more creatively, act more decisively and experience more of what life has to offer.
The class will help you learn:
- to Image Stream confidentally, with ease, from a certified ISing trainer.
- A simple, 5 minute per day way to incorporate ISing into your regular routine
- Why many people don’t fully use this powerful tool
- Some of the myriad ways ISing can be used and useful
- Three things ISing is… and one thing it isn’t
- Class size is strictly limited to 15. If there’s enough interest, an additional class time will be added.
To learn more about the class, e-mail me at:
george@curiositycoach.com
with “ISing basic teleclass” in the Subject line of your e-mail for more detailed information about the course outline, registration information, dates and times.
Money back guarantee—if you’re not fully satisfied after the 1st session, simply say so before the second session and your fee will be cheerfully refunded.
Warmest regards,
“Curious George” Copsey, PCC
(320) 252-8552
george@curiositycoach.com
http://www.curiositycoach.com
author of “101 Ways to Get Unstuck….. or Move Ahead Faster”
Proposed Idea-Generator for Quantum Physicists and String Theorists
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Folks, I’ve a favor to ask, here because so many of you are high-quality professionals. The following is a very short procedure so it won’t bust any mailboxes. I’m publishing it here not because we have that many string theorists and high energy physicists, but because I need from as many of you as possible the counterpart to this written in your own field, for eventual exhibit at the Project Renaissance website (with due credits, as will be also the case for the new book I’m writing to stimulate creativity in science, engineering and the professions (–Even beyond Discovering the Obvious!) I need a lot of these.
The principle here is to single out a very mundane, common, sensory-based phenomenon which parallels or relates to sectors in your field which have gotten very abstruse and theoretical. Break through to whole new ranges of ideas, vistas, products and services which result from really re-examining the basics, especially in the group format suggested below. Please note that every field I’ve worked in, people have followed one-another’s short-cuts and settlings-for and overlooked terribly basic things whose observation could and should drastically remake the whole field or profession.—So I need YOUR version of this, for YOUR field, as part of the process for triggering the major renaissance for which our little non-profit endeavor is named.
Thank you very much for indulging me.—win
(This procedure following below is productive enough in its own right. –But you can also take this procedure to an even higher level of use in generating new understandings and new creative ideas. Get some preliminary experience with brainstorming [see Gravel Gulch], with ImageStreaming, and with the Calm-Breathing Patterns, all of which are there free for your use.)
- Line up as many colleagues (and students) with some background in high energy physics or astrophysics as you can, in teams of two or three.
- Remind members of the tradition in physics of off-the-wall and weird hypotheses turning out to be “true.” Advise them that while many or most of the weird notions they are about to generate will be discardable, some definitely are expected to pan out which were unlikely to have been reached any time soon by any other method.
- The task of each team will be to brainstorm as many observations as it can, within the team, competing good-naturedly in numbers with the other teams. Prerequi-site: a good understanding of brainstorming and its purpose, and the need to eschew argument and defense and judgement in favor of generating more ideas including even ridiculous ideas to get the numbers up. Members should be alert to making special note (for later use) of any idea which is greeted by a burst of laughter. Each observation, good or bad, to be recorded in a list. (For additional power, you might print out and use the instructions for brainstorming in Gravel Gulch.)
- Here is what each of the teams is to observe: Either–
(Preferred:) A sand tray, acoustically vibrated so as to set up standing waves across its surface. —–Or,
A stoppered kitchen sink or equivalent filled with water, with the garbage disposal underneath it running so as to set up a pattern of standing waves across the surface of the water.
- Challenge the teams to each record 50 or more observations in the brainstorm, within ten minutes. Allow 15 minutes. This is not a standard “brainstorm” for ideas so much as it is a “brainstorm” for things you can say which describe in some way(s) the object of observation.
Survey to see which team has the most observations listed.
Speculative hypothesis stage:
- Teams are to:
- Treat every observation temporarily as if it were true.
- Assume that the phenomenon or aspect observed has counterparts in the quantum sub-atomic realm–and in the inter-meta-galactic macroscopic realm.
- Generate at least one descriptive/predictive hypothesis for each such observation and phenomenon.
Force going through the list at a faster-than-comfortable pace, press hard to get a rapid flow of hypotheses generated and recorded.
- Then allow, at an easier pace, the selecting of 3 or more of the more interesting hypotheses, defining and specifying how they may be tested, and what the prospective outcomes of those tests could mean for relevant theory.
- Then, each group “educates” two other groups (or three other groups) on its respective test design. Each team picks one from each of the other team’s 3+ proposals. Each set of 3 (or 4) teams picks but one, or at most two, of the 9+ (or 12+) proposals reviewed. Put these into the beginnings of a formal project design to present before the whole group.
- Then, to go to the next power level in this process, you have the option of EITHER:
Image-Stream to discover the main relevant consideration(s) not yet addressed; (you can use, even freely print out, the instructions for Image-Streaming on the third page of the online-published booklet, “You Are Brighter Than You Think“).
and/or
Noise-Removal Breathe for clarity, sweeping up and away whatever stands between the percipient and further clear perceptions and understandings in this context. (The free instructions for this procedure, useful for far more than this context, are yours to print out in Winsights #s 28-29.)