What would your life be like?
if you knew everything you know today from adolescence?
What would you have done differently?
Had he made other decisions?
Had he suffered less?
Please, close your eyes and think a little about the following:
What did you need to know at age 15 and nobody taught you?
Guard that answer.
You can open your eyes.
The successful person model,
with own car, own house and a stable job,
no longer corresponds to the needs of many people.
Who here knows someone who has thought or has already decided to drop everything
to study something completely different,
travel the world or realize a childhood dream? Raise your hand.
But where does this dissatisfaction come from?
Why are so many people dissatisfied, wanting to give a “re-start” in their lives?
These are the flaws in our educational system.
The reality is that neither parents nor school
young people’s education.
Many of them, many of the parents, spend eight hours working,
another hour or two in traffic,
and when they get home they are very tired,
do not have time to devote themselves to the education of their children.
And the school, which is based on a model
which also does not respond to our needs as human beings,
it can not provide the education we need.
What do we need? What is education?
Go back mentally to this answer you thought now
about what you needed to know at the age of 15 and no one taught you.
It is likely that this response is related to your current happiness,
or with the absence of it.
What makes one person happy and another not?
What if we could learn to be happy?
What if the school could teach us how to be happy?
But how to teach something that changes a lot, that varies a lot from one person to another?
There is a tool in “coaching” that is called “the wheel of life”.
The wheel of life is based on Eastern philosophies
and it presents a way of assessing human happiness.
It has eight elements:
leisure, intellect, health, financial life,
friends and family, work and career, spirituality and love.
The problem of traditional school
is that it is based on only two or three of these elements:
work and career
and, at best, leisure and intellect.
The most overlooked of these elements is the most important:
spirituality, which is not equivalent to religion.
You must meet someone very religious and not very spiritual.
Spirituality has to do with the meaning of life,
with the connection you have with something bigger,
with the feeling of you feeling filled,
or when you wake up in the morning
and meets what you are, with your life, and you like it.
Spirituality has to do with self-esteem,
with self-love, with inner peace,
with the connection with the environment, in harmony,
and with that feeling of fullness.
The pursuit of happiness starts early for most of us,
and the lack of answers, guidance in spiritual matters
generates many crises in adolescence.
At this time it is common to ask questions like:
“Who am I? What do I want?
Does anyone like me? Why does not anyone understand me?
Why was I born into this family with parents who have nothing to do with me? “
Someone? No?
(Laughs)
Then, these crises emerge
and we do not know how to deal with these teenage crises.
And when they do not fit the standards of what is socially acceptable, and suffer,
We do not know how to handle it.
Many of them are diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses such as depression,
anxiety disorder; panic attacks;
or, at school, they are expelled from school,
or become bullied.
This is how we deal with unhappiness in adolescence,
as if it were a plague that must be eradicated.
In ancient Greece,
education was trying to incorporate some of these issues we are bringing here.
The word “school” was called leisure.
Only people who did not need to work went to school.
School was leisure, rest,
what you did when you wanted to have fun.
This is the school’s first problem: we do not have fun.
Education had two purposes:
to form the human being with full harmony and self-control
and prepare you for citizenship and civic duties.
So where’s the fun place at school?
Why do not we have fun at school or college,
nor at work?
Why are we waiting for the weekend to arrive so we can have fun?
At school, we learn not to express what we feel,
to compete with our colleagues, to exclude who is different
and spend all the time doing something we do not like,
studying things that make no sense to us.
This is how the school prepares us
for unhappiness in the labor market.
The word “educate” already anticipates part of this problem.
“Educate” comes from Latin and means “to lead out”,
“direct out”;
word used to prepare the person for the world, for work.
In the Brazilian Constitution, we speak of education in this sense:
“Education aims at the full development of the person
for the execution of the citizenship and its qualification for the work “.
Again, the emphasis is on the outside, on leading the person out of themselves.
But what is the point of preparing a person for the world,
when she has not met?
What education lacks is the inside look, the self-knowledge.
There are some schools that try to get out of this unhappy, boring pattern of education.
There are already several very interesting initiatives.
The problem is that many of these schools attract a minority of the population
because to begin with, few parents are aware of this situation,
and few of them are crazy enough
to take the children to a more experimental school.
We also have the problem that, in these schools,
have similar people of the same social class, ethnicity,
and the reality is that the world is not like that.
So this school does not show this reality.
Also, these schools must meet the
the Ministry of Education,
and are based on some belief, religion
or specific pedagogical approach that guides and at the same time limits
the freedom of both teachers and students.
I have been working with education for 15 years, just over 15 years.
I went to school when I was four and never left.
I left Argentina when I was 18 years old. I went to study in France, to graduate.
Then came the postgraduate degree in England,
the doctorate in the United States, the postdoctoral
and several years at university, teaching and doing research.
My pursuit of happiness has made me travel the whole world
and study hard.
But I just realized that what I was looking for
he was neither in London nor in Paris nor in books,
long after.
I went through several experiences, where I learned a lot.
Do you know all these courses that are being published on Facebook?
I did it all, everyone!
(Laughs)
All my money went to all the alternative therapies that exist,
the strangest, the oldest.
I did all, all I got.
But it was not enough.
I also needed some “tapas in the face” of the universe.
Do you know what a slap in the face of the universe is?
It’s when you know what you have to do, or what you have to stop doing,
but does nothing and keeps doing the same thing.
Then, the universe comes and says: “Okay, okay.” Pan!
This is how it happens.
I had several.
But that’s how I learned, with the experiences and the tapas in the face,
to connect with myself and to recognize my purpose of life,
which is to show young people, show people,
the light they have within them.
This is how I see my role as educator.
I show people the talents they have, their own brilliance,
and as they learn to discover and accept these powers,
I also recognize mine, I reaffirm mine.
This is how it works to be a teacher.
A while ago, I had a dream
to create a school that would teach all that the traditional school does not teach,
and that was how the “House of the Gift” was born.
Casa do Presente is a school co-opted by young people
and professionals from different areas.
Remember the question I asked you, what did you want to know at age 15?
We did it.
We gathered a group of young people, aged 13 to 19, and asked them:
“What would you like it to be different at school?
What would you like to learn? “
And we invited them to participate in a “hackathon” education.
A hackathon is usually a marathon
which brings together programmers and other technology professionals
to develop software
which usually responds to some kind of problem,
to solve a problem.
We did not create software.
We created an educational model,
with new ways of learning and new content.
And we told them: “At the end of the hackathon,
You’re going to work, we’re going to create this school,
and you will be invited to take lessons with us for free. “
And that’s what happened.
Students from different social classes, in São Paulo,
worked for ten hours to create this school,
the school of dreams.
One of the things they brought were values, because they said,
“We’re tired of rules.
The rules make no sense to us at school.
Why are we all day looking at the board, between four walls,
learning things that do not make sense?
Why are we forced to spend so much paper?
Why are we all evaluated in the same way,
without taking into account the differences of each? “
So we traded rules for values.
Inclusion: everyone must be able to participate,
even those who have no money.
Authenticity … this was very important:
you can be yourself in school.
But not only the student; the teacher also has to be able to be himself,
without fear of being censured.
Collaboration and sharing:
why compete with the colleague if I can learn to collaborate with him
and share knowledge?
Sustainability: this was very difficult,
because we who are older still have this difficulty
to adapt to certain practices …
Participation: You can not stay in school
in a role of passive person who receives knowledge.
You have to participate, be active in the learning process.
Spontaneity: if you as a teacher planned some activity
and you realize you want to do something else,
simply does.
Likewise, if a student proposes a different activity,
So can you.
This spontaneity must be allowed to emerge.
Presence…
I do not know about you, but when I was younger,
I always wondered what I was going to do next,
when I could get out of school.
That’s what’s missing, presence, being here.
If I do not like the class, I’ll think of something else.
So the experiences at school have to be organized
to bring the person to the present.
Curiosity: we can not kill the curiosity of young people in school.
We have to encourage curiosity.
Do not say, “Oh, you interrupted me. We can not talk about it now.”
You have to make room for curiosity.
Autonomy…
This was very interesting and several of them spoke:
“We want to learn to be autonomous,
not to depend on other people to do anything.
For example, I cook. For example, I change a shower “.
They do not want to be dependent.
And finally, love, which is a very interesting value
because when you have love, when you do anything with love,
you probably work all the other values that are here.
One thing that came up in the hackathon was that our school was going to be complementary,
just so that everyone could participate.
So our students go to their schools during the week
and, at weekends, they participate in the activities of the Casa do Presente.
That’s why our class is a mirror of society.
We have people from the upper middle class, the community, the periphery,
and we even have some refugees from Africa and Syria.
Our classroom changes every week.
The idea is that learning is meaningful
and that is always contextualized, not isolated content, out of context.
The experience of healthy eating happens in a vegetable garden and in a kitchen.
The experience of yoga happens in a space of yoga; meditation as well.
Sharing and collaboration is a “co-working”
and interculturalism is a mosque in the center of São Paulo.
Content is also chosen by young people
and are worked in an interdisciplinary way.
For example, in the experience of healthy eating,
we also have a moment
in which we speak of entrepreneurship in the gastronomy sector,
and also has a meditation on the side of the garden.
In the experience of natural gynecology,
the girls also work the public speaking,
they practice talking about things that are a bit more delicate,
and also, in the interval, we make a meal with organic vegetables
along with the girls.
Our teachers come from many different areas.
We currently have 20.
The way they see the role of the teacher
is quite different from conventional.
First, for you to be a teacher,
you have to love what you do and have to live it in the day to day.
And it is the case with them; they love what they do.
That is why their role as teacher is more of mentor and facilitator,
and goes well beyond the work they do during the experiences they organize.
For example, there are two girls now who have set up their own businesses;
There is a boy who was hired.
as an illustrator of a board game company;
and has three girls who have just recorded a first single,
in a recording studio,
and now we will record the clip to launch it also on social networks.
So that was thanks to the teachers, and it’s a job done with a lot of affection.
According to the spiritual master Osho,
education should be the responsibility of the community, not just the parents.
When the community is responsible, not only the parents,
the parent-child relationship is diluted,
and the reference, when you trade with so many people,
becomes shared.
The House of the Gift tries to do this a bit:
approaching people who want to learn from those who want to teach.
But learning always happens in two ways.
The teacher comes out of his own transformed experience, learning something.
This two-way learning happened
since the beginning of the creation of the House of the Gift,
when we teachers were trying to come up with a name for the House of the Gift.
Imagine this scene: a group of outstanding professionals, in short,
with very impressive, incredible careers,
all trying to create a name,
only that nobody could think of anything remotely, like this …
we only had a list, thus, of bland names.
Have you ever had that experience of looking and saying, “No, it’s not good”?
There, in one corner, he had the son of one of the teachers,
who was on the cell phone, understood,
and he speaks thus: “Can I speak one thing?”
The people: “Yes, you can, Lucas, speak.”
“What if you called the ‘House of the Present’ school?
‘From the Gift’ because to learn what you need to teach now,
and not in a future that does not yet exist.
‘From the Gift’ because it is a gift that you want to give to young people.
And it needs to be called “Home”, not school,
because home is everyone’s place, it’s a place you like. “
And stayed.
(Laughs)
Education needs to show young people the light they have within them,
because it is already there.
What did you need to learn at age 15?
What do young people need to learn now?
What do you need to learn now?
Thanks.
(Applause) (Live)
”
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