Wealth is created by people of good character, not by their pedigrees – or their posturing.Photo by: Sam valadi
The Driven are either taking over the social group or abandoning it, the Incandescent are amusing it or insulting it, the Sociable are enjoying it or resenting it and the Cautious are neither in the group nor out of it.
The world is always turning that way, but we mostly don’t notice, since each one of us is spending every second of our lives trying to coerce the world into turning our way. That doesn’t work – and what works even worse is shaling exclusively for Ci/INTJs in our educational praxis.
We’ll talk in greater depth another day about how Cautious/Incandescent education frustrates, retards and cripples the emergence of character in children – resulting in an “education” system that fails 98% of all its victims, while thoroughly eviscerating the emotional lives of the one-out-of-fifty kids “lucky” enough to be inducted in the the high-priesthood of the “educated.”
What’s wrong with what we’re doing now? Walk up to any tweenager you see and ask, “What’s six times seven?” Barely half of the high-nerds will know the answer. The rest of those kids will look like flustered puppies – defiantly ashamed and adorably pathetic.
Don’t worry, though. The education all those kids are being cheated out of is only costing you a hundred grand, per each, in taxes. And it’s not like anything they do later in life will matter to anyone. Why should anyone care if a bookkeeper, much less a cashier, doesn’t know the times tables? Why should anyone care what a surgeon did in school when he should have been studying?
Oh, wait! Character does matter. In fact, contrary to centuries of accelerating errors in Cautious/Incandescent education, we don’t educate our children so that they might master arcane and trivial facts but so that they might be whole: Sane and civilized. Precise and concise, yet still fun to be around. Productive, cooperative and self-responsible. We educate our children not so a tiny mob of mini-Mandarins can be enslaved as the slave-minders of the muddling millions – seen more as mere livestock than as pitiable convicts – but so that they might be human.
Repeat that: We educate our children so that they might be human.
How’re we doin’ at that job?
You can’t point at a headline that doesn’t make my case for me. That’s why we’re going through all this, to learn how to go at education another way – a way that works.
I call it ThriversEd, but that much is simply a set of formalized strategies for acquiring a Driven/Sociable education: Schooling aimed at bringing the light – and the warmth! – of reason to all people, rather than showing just a small few how to wreck their lives by obsessively pushing back (some of) the darkness – or, worse, by pushing other people around.
I’m talking about ThriversEd for Toddlers now, because that’s the place to start. Parents should be doing my kind of activities from birth, but ThriversEd is built for people who are substantially autonomous: Walking, chattering – ready to thrive. Even so, the ThriversEd style of education is meant to last a lifetime – and it will, too, because kids who start learning the ThriversEd way won’t want to work any other way.
A (lifelong) ThriversEd education is supported by these three legs: Performance, Accountability and Leadership. We master Leadership by making Dutch Uncle games of everything we do. We master Accountability by PEAK evaluating every ThriversEd activity and by being evaluated for our own individual contributions. And we master Performance by delivering the goods, over and over again. Usus est magister optimus. Practice is the best teacher.
PEAK is weighted DISC and this PAL paradigm is PEAK practice: Performance is D and C doing I for S purposes. Accountability is D and I doing C for S purposes. And Leadership is I and C doing D for S purposes. Why is everything being done for Sociable purposes? Because the purpose of education is humanity, not arcanity.
How simple is that? We’re practicing human virtue in everything we do, and the virtues we’re practicing are all both self- and mutually-reinforcing. We’re cultivating well-rounded people by making everyone get better at everything, even as we’re quarrying depths of the arcane far beyond the current crop of Poindexters. Why is that? Because Dutch Uncle-led work and study groups can go wherever they want – not just places the “expert” knows about.
Wealth is created by people of good character, not by their pedigrees – or their posturing. Cautious/Incandescent education fails catastrophically because it is a cargo cult: It prefers every map to any reality, so the most-virtuous man is the monster who can out-sneer all the other monsters. Driven/Sociable schooling works the other way: We educate our children in humanity for the sake of their humanity. We educate our children so that someday they will educate theirs…
