This is Vol. 5 of the archives of Capital Ideasmiths, Project Renaissance's former e-zine. Please note that because these are archives, many external links contained herein may no longer work.
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.
Writers needed who know the periodicals market. Some
major apparent opportunities. http://www.winwenger.com
Someone handy needed, to tinker up and help develop
several low-tech, simple inventions, in return for partial ownership. wwenger101@aol.com
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.
Please contact wwenger101@aol.com
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 (at http://www.winwenger.com,
) 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? –
1.Useful
understandings about yourself and about the world, some of which will
amaze you.
2.New
skills learned in the course of special interactions with yourself and
with others in the richly exciting contexts and clarifications of this
conference.
3.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.
4.Not
only your joy of understanding but your power of understanding will
improve.
5.Arguably,
some of the best three days you’ve ever experienced.
6.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).
Related Special Events...
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. See “To Become A
Trainer” in http://www.winwenger.com/trainer.htm.
November 3, Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., the
Hampton Inn, Germantown:
The Beyond-Einstein Training Intensive, One-Day Core November 3-5 weekend starting 7:30 pm Friday, the
Hampton Inn, Germantown:
The Ninth Annual Double-Festival of
Enhanced/Accelerated Learning Methods, Ingenious/Creative Problem-Solving
Techniques, ninth annual public conference of Project Renaissance November 6-7, Monday and Tuesday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00
pm, nearby site to be announced:
The Training of Trainers
Registrations to: PROJECT
RENAISSANCE
301-948-1122, P.O. Box 332
Gaithersburg, MD 20884-0332 USA
Your Name:
Your Address & Phone Numbers:
(Optional) Your e-mail and web addresses:
Please check your preferences:
Theory
Practical things I can do for myself & others
New
skills
Facts
Better
ways to Learn
New or deeper levels of awareness Release & clarity
Better ways to solve problems Solutions for a particular problem or problems
I’m open
to whatever develops
Other: (please describe on back of this paper:)
$_______________ enclosed, in the form of:
One-Day Core, $195.00
Conference, $495
Core & Conference Together, $595
(less $100 discount for spouse or for previous attendance at this Conference)
Trainer-Training, $200/day, 2 days
If you wish to register by card e-mail, please send
two emails with one-half of your card number (with exp. date, and your own
phone number) in each half, to wwenger101@aol.com,
marked “Registration.” Thank you.
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, MicroStrategys stocks led the
roller-coaster dip that flurried through NASDEQ and a few of Saylors
billions evaporated, at least for the moment before rebounding.But
apparently that project is still on. Saylors 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 entireand we mean THE entire curriculum,
high school, university, graduate and post-grad, plus whatever specialized
community and industry/occupational coursesWILL be free on the web as a
public utility.Whether Internet baby billionaire Saylors 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.
Whats 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 (under Techniques on the world web in http://www.winwenger.com).
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 wouldnt 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 environmentmaybe 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 were attempting to evolve. We
stand on the shoulders of Montessori, Moore, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and
Marion Diamond, but in this were 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, anyones
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, otherschools 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 its
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 its 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, cant 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 peopleand even most
teachersdont even know that such a process even exists.If schools dont play to advantage the several legitimate
advantages which they do have, where will they be when the crunch comes?
Whats Needed Right Now:
Urgency and scopedefined 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
momentand 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
standprecariouslytoday. 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 wont 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, Ohios 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 youhave
to speak from someone elses knowledge....
Especially someone elses 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 todays teachers are precisely stuck in that weak, ineffectual
role, that of passing along someone elses nth-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, on the world web at http://www.anakin.com)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 lemmingser, 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 isnt. 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 orin some casesno 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
dont 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 highlyvalued features, products and services, which cant 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 itd 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 cant be bothered to do these things. Simply put, the vast
majority of these will soon abruptly cease operating as schools. (As we
write this, todays 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 others efforts, as a possible source
for further genuine improvement.
A Hard Conclusion, with All Due Apologies:
Most schools, and most teachers, just wont
survive coming events.For
you as a teacher to survive the coming ruptures, youll 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.
The International Alliance of Learning may currently be
reached via
info@ialearn.org, or 1-719-538-6827 or 1-800-426-2989, or at
P.O. Vox 26175, Colorado Springs, CO 80936.
The Innovation Center of Dayton, Ohio,at http://www.innovationcentral.org/techniques.htm/
Cambridge College, in Cambridge, Massa-chusetts,
includes some accelerated learning courses in its masters-level training
for teachers, the National Institute of Teaching Excellence (N.I.T.E.),
under its Dean, Mahesh Sharma, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. As
does Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, in its education
department under Prof. LyellePalmer.
Observation:
Project Renaissancesorientation, as reflected in Win Wengers 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 youre 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.
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.
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.
(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” method in http://www.winwenger.com];
with ImageStreaming [see “You Are Brighter Than You Think,” pages 2
& 3 in http://www.anakin.com],
and with the Calm-Breathing Patterns [see “winsights” #’s 28-29 in http://www.winwenger.com],
all of which are there free for your use.)
1.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.
2.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.
3.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”
- “CPS Techniques,” in http://www.winwenger.com)
4.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.
5.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:
6.Teams are to:
A] Treat every observation
temporarily as if it were true.
B] Assume that the phenomenon or
aspect observed has counterparts in the quantum sub-atomic realm–and in
the inter-meta-galactic macroscopic realm.
C] 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.
7.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.
8.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.
9.Then, to go to the next power level in this process, you have the
option ofEITHER:
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,” in a friend’s website at http://www.anakin.com).
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, a monthly column running in http://www.winwenger.com)
Copyright 2000 by Win Wenger,
Ph.D., Project Renaissance, Box 332, Gaithersburg, MD 20884-0332, wwenger101@aol.com,
http://www.winwenger.comYou may, however, freely copy this procedure–in whole, including
this notice, but not in part, for use with colleagues and friends.