What They Don’t Teach At School .. Yet

When you read a title like this on a social web site, you can expect a truckload of cynical advice from people with bad experience and a bad character. This is obviously not the case here.

In fact, school should become less cynical, not more. School tells pupils how to behave, but doesn’t tell them what to do if others don’t behave. As such the strong guys are told that they should not bully the weak, but the weak guys are never told what they should do in case they are bullied. "Go to the teacher or headmaster", is a good advice from the point of view of the adults, but we remember quite well it didn’t work very well in the old days either. The issue is important, because school performance is in my honest opinion, more often affected by lack of a safe study climate than by a lack of intelligence. In her book Dreamers who do, Hilde Helsen mentions three basic skills all children should become familiar with at school:

•  They should teach all children the principles of non-violent communication. Non-violent meaning here: not based on humiliating arguments of power, but based on arguments of perceived behaviour. In the Bible, the fraternal admonition is recommended. You should talk "under four eyes", and if that doesn’t work, you should get one more witness. If that doesn’t work, go to old wise men. The strong should be confronted with their weakness, and the weak should be confronted with their strengths.
• All children should be taught some type of meditation: yoga, mindfulness or transcendental meditation. In the old days, we had prayer. It is now a lost type of meditation because we became too idle and too proud to believe we could need it.
• All children should recognise compassion as a universal human feeling and a universal human value. Compassion is neither an emotion to be ashamed of, nor an obligation that is imposed by one or the other religion.

I guess most schools do something implicitly in one or more of these topics. However, these remain side topics, being done in the margin, during a break. The way schools are organised, suggests these things are less important than the hard topics that determine whether you succeed or fail. I am convinced that you can raise the quality of education more by teaching these soft skills than by raising the bar for the hard topics. I refer to my earlier blogs: “The Importance of Being Gentle”, “Bullying, Indignation is Growing” and “About Meditation - die Schöne Kunst des Innehaltens”.