My experience facilitating Socio-Emotional Learning for Kids & Parents
Today (Nov 14th) is celebrated as Children’s day in India. I am penning down this article both in awe of what children are capable of, and in deep gratitude for the amount of learning I have had, facilitating Socio-Emotional learning for Kids and Parents in our close community of Friends and Family! As an entrepreneur some of the key faculties I try to stay in touch within myself, is the ability to navigate unchartered waters, ability to work with educated guesses and build conviction, and most important to trust my intuition. Without an iota of doubt, I now firmly believe that children are the best tutors to teach you, and to relearn life itself.
Intuition
Intuition means to be taught from within. I find too many professionals and adults trying to over-explain, over-think and over-do what Intuition really means. It is because education makes us dumb. Concept of Education, the way it is practiced today, is a farce. There, I said it. You really cannot educate somebody or anybody. Nothing can really be taught, however most things can be learnt. All learning happens from within, isn’t it? Haven’t we heard cliches like
If the student is ready, the teacher will come… Or
You can only take the horse to the water.., etc
Yes, these cliches are in vogue for a reason. Let me share some hard facts, to prove that you really don’t educate or teach anybody anything, they learn.
All children (without exception), have the ability to automatically learn, any number of languages spoken in their growing-up environment. Did you try to teach them their mother tongue? NO. Did they not automatically pick it up? YES. Even as barely as just 2 years old, children have the ability to learn 5–6 languages like English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, etc…, if those languages are being spoken, in the spaces they are growing up, isn’t it? Nobody teaches them! So children learn by intuition. We were kids too, so we learn by Intuition too. Meaning, humanity learns by intuition. Language is in fact, the seed for all learning. So, if we can learn 8–9 languages itself, by the time we are 2–3 years old, do you really think we need to be taught anything, especially how-to-learn? I don’t think so. As long as the kids are interested in anything, be it music, dance or literature, they learn it automatically, Nothing need to be taught. In fact educating / teaching, become painstakingly hard, because they are not natural. Learning is natural. Teaching is not. In short we can all only be taught from within (i.e., by Intuition).
Can we really teach some one to swim, or ride-a-bicycle? Is it not natural to learn how to ride, if we allow the kid to just hop on a bicycle and try it? Instead imagine if you started teaching the cadence of peddling, the # of strokes per minute, hand-leg co-ordination etc.., and try and make it a hard-science? It now becomes unnatural and hence extremely difficult. This is precisely what all education, has morphed into. Sir Ken Robinson, summarizes it beautifully.
Joy of Learning
In the sessions that I facilitate for both the kids and parents, we only try and provide opportunities for the kids to learn themselves. From their own experience. I must admit, I have been taken by surprise as to how much we as parents and adults can learn from kids in the whole process. Experiential learning is about allowing yourself to be continuously, in a state of observation and learning. In the process getting back in touch with the joy of learning. Below, I highlight some of my own intense learnings from such sessions.
- Children like Guessing: One of the best sessions we had, was when we allow kids to guess the feelings/emotions that another person is enacting/articulating without speaking. It tells me that we all have an inner-process that loves guess-work. As an entrepreneur, self-doubt is essential, but I also rediscovered my passion to make intuitive-guesses.
- Children like Blindfolds: Blindfold games are amazingly popular with kids. They are not intimidated, in fact they are excited. They are not even tentative, they go about playing it with an exploratory zest, and that is fascinating. Again as an entrepreneur, navigating unchartered waters is similar to being blind, and instead of being tentative, I discovered that its best to have an exploratory zest.
- Children are fast-learners: We can all learn fast. In a twist to the marsh-mellow experiment, we allowed kids to resist the temptation of dough-nuts. Even just 7–8 year olds, came up with innovative ideas, like imagining it to be poisoned, that its stale, etc, to resist temptation and that too for 30 minutes. Shifting perspectives is vital to learning fast. One of the biggest problems, I don’t learn fast as an Entrepreneur, is because I am unable to see an alternative perspective and pivot fast enough.
- Children love team-games: Team work, playing and collaborating with each other is natural to human nature. Humans are indeed social-animals first. Kids love team games. What I discovered is, teams form and collective-organizations emerge to overcome individual shortcomings. This was best demonstrated in one of the sessions, whose photograph is attached below.
Rediscover the Child within you!
Children’s day comes around every year to remind us to reconnect and rediscover the child within us. The Children’s day ritual is a gift and opportunity to revive that immanent capacity of the divine child in each of us. Rituals are themselves processes that provide expansiveness. Rituals are residual answers, to forgotten questions, i.e., rituals help us find and arrive at the right questions to ask. This children’s day too, ask yourself, what are you doing with the divine child within you? And like Sadhguru’s quote below, its time for us to relearn life itself this Children’s day! Happy Children’s day everyone.
