What real education looks like, and how I came to be delivering it

As a brand new teacher, with zero qualifications, zero training and zero teaching experience, I taught my first two classes, three hours each, on the Saturday before Christmas 1991. It was in Bangkok in Thailand, and being a Buddhist country there is no Christmas anyway! But I didn’t care, I had talked my way into an English language teaching job, to extend my travels and stay in this fantastic Eastern land called Thailand. I was ecstatic.

And on that tremendously exciting day, at the age of 27, my new life started. The universe had put me in touch with my vocation in life, and had brought me to a warm climate.

The advice from my Head Teacher at the Lard Prao Branch of the ECC Language School, on my first day at work, is still etched in my mind over 30 years later, and it has forever guided me in my approach to everything, both in the classroom and out in the world… and after all, one is the preparation and practice for navigating the other one with skill and verve. It guided me from the off, the green new teacher, and made the job so much fun in the early years, and ever since then. 

Glen, a happy smiling man from Canada, told me, “Thai students want two things, to practise speaking English and they want fun. Do that and you will be popular.” It may be worth noting that my students were adolescents and adults, not young children.

That sounded eminently reasonable to me, and as I’m not really in the business of being unpopular, I immediately lodged it in my heart and set about making it happen. Now, sadly and criminally, not that I knew it at the time, this was already better training than the entire teacher training program for new teachers in the mainstream school system.

Can you see the profound wisdom contained in this ‘training’?!

See, it immediately got me to put the whole emphasis and focus of my teaching on getting my students to do the work. My ‘teaching’ was in fact to get them learning. I was to do things to ensure they did things, and they would only do them if fun was being had! This, Dear Reader, is precisely how education should be delivered. While I don’t teach children in the classroom, I travel a lot and I always chat to children about their school experiences. Almost universally they tell me it’s boring, and I then ask them what teachers should do. Again, all of them say, ‘Make learning fun’.

How revolutionary a concept is that, getting the students to enjoy their learning!!

I immediately took my teaching job to mean being a ‘learner-enabler’, a facilitator, a guide, a motivator, an encourager, and above all, a listener. I spend more time in my classrooms listening than I do speaking. I say that the best leaders in life are excellent listeners. If you don’t let others express themselves and articulate their own ideas, and in a supportive environment, then this is anti-human and anti-learning.

So, to get students to do things - to read or listen, to speak or write, to chat and communicate, to think and reflect, to articulate and posit, to explore and discover, to cooperate and work together in mutual respect and care for each other - means building the lessons and the course around a whole series of learning tasks and activities. Just like out in the world itself!

And to get them to enjoy doing all of this means the learning tasks and activities, and the learning materials, must be felt by the students to be motivating, enjoyable, and useful to them. It means the learning experience must be engaging and interactive, empowering and enabling.

Education is for the students, not the teachers, not the parents, not the society, not the government, it is to develop the human essence and unique talents in each human being. But, when this is done, everybody benefits.

And for all of this to work, requires the teacher to create and maintain a classroom environment conducive to effective learning. That means, in a nutshell, the learning environment is emotionally supportive yet cognitively challenging to the students. The teacher inspires the students to push and expand their boundaries, and to become internally motivated to do their best, and to forevermore want to do their best.

The motivational, transformational teacher offers an educational experience which inspires the students to become autonomous learners, skilled communicators, and confident human beings. They are now lifelong learners, set up and fully able to take charge of their life, their health and their destiny. Their confidence, compassion, consciousness, connection and inner belief are restored after having had it all stolen or buried during 12 years of anti-fun, anti-human, anti-life schooling.

In the second language teaching world of education, what I’ve just described is a mix of what is known as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and Task-Based Learning (TBL). The interesting thing is, that as students acquire all these learning, communication and problem-solving skills in a second language, it revolutionises their skills in their own language, and transforms their experience in the world at large.

Now just imagine and suppose, if you will, Dear Reader, that children experienced this kind of learning in their mother tongue for 12 years…

Well, I will say categorically, with no equivocation, no ifs or buts (and I generally stay away from certainty in life) that:

if Task-Based Learning became the default teaching approach in all the schools today, within one generation our whole human world would be transformed out of this dreadful cocktail of malaise, corruption, ignorance and suffering we have fallen into, and into a world marked by creativity, productivity, joy, inner peace, healthy relationships, and little to no conflict. Disagreement maybe, for that is healthy and leads to exploration and expanded minds, but not conflict or coercion or compulsion or imposition or violence or war by human upon human.

I have educated, enabled and empowered probably over 3000 adults and adolescents, including about 400 teachers, to become skilled lifelong learners, with their own infinite source of fire in their own belly. Which will only go out when the janitor from heaven comes for their collection.

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I am now creating my Learning Empire: Infinity Education for A Spiritual Revolution to reach millions of human beings, well, a lot anyway! I am especially focused on training up parents, educators, leaders and anybody working with other people in Task-Based Learning for a very good reason, which is why I’m calling it ‘Infinity’ Education:

When the learning experience means practising and mastering the learning, communication and problem-solving skills, and when in the process it is engaging, interactive and motivating, and in addition you acquire self-knowledge, four major beneficial outcomes arise:

1. you are inspired to love learning

2. you become a lifelong learner

3. you have the tools and intrinsic motivation to take charge of your life, health and destiny

4. you are able to inspire and train others - children and adults alike - to practise and master the self-same skills

and dozens of other positive manifestations that make themselves known to you over the course of time. Skilled learners = skilled teachers, skilled leaders, skilled parents, skilled human beings!

So I’m calling it Infinity Education because you will learn and be motivated to learn forevermore, and you will have the skill and drive to inspire others to do the same. You will receive the baton inscribed with ‘The Joy of Learning’ on it, and you will pass it on, and they will pass it on, and hey presto, humanity is in a virtuous cycle of life-enhancing education, no longer stuck in this intergenerational vicious cycle of demoralising and disempowering ‘education’.