Richard Lloyd Jones: We spend our most formative years in it. The best years of our lives, they call it. And in those years, we ostensibly learn invaluable lessons for the rest of our lives. Still, I can't help remembering Einstein's observations that education is what remains after you've forgotten everything you learned in school. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, treating problems in education.
Well, this is a subject close to our hearts here at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy because we work with education a lot. But let me describe something about our structure here first. As you may know from listening to Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, we've been working with new ways to structure business since the mid-1980s. When the president of the International Society of Analytical Trilogy, Norberto Keppe, upon whose psychosociological discoveries I base this show, when he was invited to take his work to the United States, he was frankly shocked at the massive decay he noticed there.
He wrote a number of books about it, most notably Liberation of the People, Work and Capital, and The Decay of America. One essential aspect of his critique centered around the misguided policies of Reaganomics. Keppe noted that the policies of speculation being promoted by Reagan and Friedman, the economist who oriented him, was moving America away from producing goods and into making money with money.
This makes money more important than work, an inversion that seriously weakens an economy. Because nothing real can be built on speculation only. This actually creates an inflated virtual economy floating above a non-existent foundation, which used to be based on work and production. So Keppe organized trilogical companies based on disinverted principles, such as workers owning the companies, payment occurring based on production, not the money you have invested, no one making money off the work of others.
And one of the businesses we run this way is Millennium Language Schools here in São Paulo, where we employ Keppe's studies in psychosociopathology to teach people, with great effect, I might add. Luciana Avelino is a Brazilian teacher who's worked here for over ten years. In addition to her teaching duties, she now conducts workshops to help teachers and students understand themselves better, so they learn better.
Luciana, in your workshops, what are teachers telling you about what they have to deal with every day, and how do you help them?
Luciara Batista Avelino: Richard, we have a lot of problems in education. Private school or public school teachers, they have a lot of problems in classrooms. For example, what to do when you have a very difficult student, when he or she comes to the class without material, when they sit in a not in a very good position and look at you despising you.
What to do in this situation. We have many other type of problems, like how to deal with indiscipline. When you prepare a very good class, for example, and then the the students they they don't like, they just say why I'm learning that or something like this, despising totally your class.
Richard: These are common problems that come up I think all over the world probably in classrooms, and teachers are probably listening, or even parents, or even students, and thinking, well, this is sort of normal.
I mean, this is the way it is. But you're finding something very different in your work with teachers, right?
Luciara: Yes. We are working with psychosocial pathology. That is science created by Norberto Cappi here in Brazil. And he discovered a way to treat the emotional problems. Because if you think, Richard, the teachers, for example, or any profession, we are experts in our field.
For example, the carpenter knows how to work with wood, but how to deal with a difficult client? So I teach French, for example. I know French, I know how to teach, but how to deal with problems, student problems, how to deal with difficulties in learning, for example, when the student, they are totally blocked. So we are dealing, in any profession, we are dealing with emotional problems.
And those emotional problems, they are very difficult to be solved because we have problems as well in this field. The teachers. Yes. So how to deal? Normally, we send the students to the principal of the school. We send it to a coordinator. We send them, we expose them. So that's the big thing. Dr. Kapp discovered a way, a science to deal with emotional problems.
Richard: Okay, so let's talk about that because this is very beautiful and we're seeing this in Brazil in a number of schools now. Teachers asking us, how do you do it? How do you help in these situations? And we have experience in our language school here directly with students in this way. Talk a bit about what we do. How do we do this?
Luciara: So, I work in the Department of Education in International Society of Analytical Trilogy in the field of education. So, there we are applying this science in schools. Here, I teach French in Millennium Language School. We apply a different methodology to help the students learning faster and how to deal with blockages, timidity, shyness, or things like that. So we have a special methodology to treat this.
In schools, regular high school or university, we are doing a special program for them. For example one school close to São Paulo, we are working with them now. It's our first year, 2007 was our first year there. We are teaching this science trilogy there in the field of philosophy, and we are teaching directly the students this science, and we are doing workshops with the teachers once a month, Richard.
The results they are incredible. I know
Richard: they are, and I've seen some of the videos, and I want you to talk about those in a minute. But what are we teaching? When you go there, what do you teach? Because you say that you're teaching the teachers once a month, and also we're working as teachers inside the school. So what are we teaching there?
Luciara: For example, we teach one of the Dr. Kappi's discoveries that it's inversion. Every human being has inversion. That it's like to see good things as bad things. To see bad things as good. For example, do you think smoking is good for the health?
Richard: No, of course not.
Luciara: So, but why people smoke then?
Richard: It's a great question.
Luciara: So, we have something inside of ourselves that see negative things as positive things.
Richard: Somehow we make the negative a positive. I remember talking to a smoker in New York City, a friend of mine. I asked her, why do you smoke? And she says, well, I know it's bad. I know that. But why? What's the reason? She says, well, it really helps me with my stress. So immediately we can see that she's made the bad thing good.
Actually, she feels that it's a good thing inside, not a bad thing at all. So there may be this inversion about education,
Luciara: right? People may feel that learning something is kind of boring or not cool somehow. Does this happen exactly, exactly. Learning something very bad, difficult, tiring, boring, and doing something bad or stay overnight drinking, having sex or drugs or all this alcoholic drinking and etc, this is cool, this is very nice.
So this is we have a very big inversion. So when we teach this for students, for instance, we teach, we give examples, we give them some films, some parts that show this, and we try to disinvert, to show the students that this big inversion that they have. And sometimes they say like it's oh my god I never thought about this, I never thought that way.
So it helped them to see. And one student, when they are very lazy, when they are in a very big opposition to studying, so we try to do a kind of analysis with the students, asking them why they are, what they think about studying, what they think about to be there in school, and then they say. So we show this inversion that they have.
So this is a psychological work that we do not only with inversion, but we do it with envy, projection, idealization, and Richard one very important thing is the energy. When a student is in a total opposition to you, when you show them that the opposition is not to you, towards you, but the opposition is towards knowledge, is towards life, love, things like that.
So the change is very big.
Richard: Do you have some specific examples that you could give us of what students have said when they've gone through this process? And then I think we need to talk about the teachers, because it's not just a problem with students, right? If this inversion exists inside the students, I'm assuming it exists inside the teachers as well. So give us some examples of things that have happened in these schools that you're working in.
Luciara: For example, one teacher told us once that he came to the class and one student was sitting on a chair in a very relaxed, too relaxed way. And the teacher got very irritated with that, very irritated. So we analyzed the situation in our workshop and he said, I don't like this, this student is very lazy. So this teacher entering identification with this laziness of the students, it means what?
The teacher is lazy as well. Of course, not lazy as much as this student.
In
Richard: the same way, right.
Luciara: Yeah, because the teacher is there, he's teaching, but in his house, his home, he's very lazy.
Richard: Maybe preparing the classes, he's
Luciara: not so conscientious. Yeah. So the teacher is very angry with the students because the teacher is lazy as well. So working with this emotional problems, so we diminish these conflicts that we have a lot in schools because sometimes teachers, they fight physically with the students.
Richard: You know, Cláudia Pacheco was talking last week in our program about how we need to study this science, that there is a science of psychosociopathology. And I've been talking about this for over a year now in this program, that the human psyche has been mapped. We have some final conclusions about what's happening in the human being because of Norberto Keppe's work, and that we need to study this and teach this to people.
And so you go into the classroom and you teach them about psychological inversion, about envy. We teach them about how our will, our desire is sometimes, many times, against what's best for us. We think we're doing the right thing. We're actually doing the worst thing for ourselves. I see this in the school all the time. A student will come and say, Richard, I have to stop.
I haven't got time. I haven't got energy. I can't continue to study English or French or whatever at the school. And I'll say, but what do you associate the school with? What kind of experience are you having here? He'll say, oh, my gosh, it's changed my life. What I'm learning here is changing the perspective that I have. And I'll say, so why are you stopping something that's so good, something that's changing your life?
Do you perceive that you have an attitude exactly against what's good for you? Are you perceiving that? If we can help to make people conscious of this split inside us, we don't always want the best thing. How do you see this in the education field?
Luciara: Also, Richard, when we don't want to see one problem in ourselves, Normally, we put this problem in something else or somebody else.
When a student comes here to learn French, for example, they are going to face problems. And when the person doesn't want to see a problem in himself or herself, normally they project. We call it projection. If you when you see a problem and you accept that you have a problem and you deal with this problem, then you grow. Because you know you have a problem, you have to study, you have to do this and that, then you grow.
But when you don't accept, because of the perfectionism, because of the arrogance, because of many reasons, you don't accept that what happened, then you have to project ah you know I don't have time now to study. I don't have money. Oh, you know, the teacher is not very good. The methodology is not that
Richard: good. It's hard to find parking around here. The traffic's really bad.
Sometimes it's
Luciara: raining at night. I don't feel like coming. I've got a new boyfriend or girlfriend now. You can find thousands of excuses to stop what you should do because you don't want to face your difficulties. But we deal with that here in our school. And also, we are doing a special course, and we are going to do that by internet as well very soon.
We are preparing a course especially to prepare psychosocial therapists. What is that? It will be a professional that has the ability to work with emotional problems. This, Richard, will be a very important key in our society today, to work with difficult problems. It seems sometimes to be unsolved problems in education. But now, with these two that we have, with these elements that Dr.
Kapp gave to us, we can solve, like, conflicts in the work. We have a lot of problems between teachers, between the owner of the school and teachers. We have problems with stress. We gave a special workshop for teachers, and one teacher came and said, look, this saved my life because I was about to leave my school because it was so difficult to stand the stress, stress of the school and the stress of teaching.
Richard: And what was the thing that helped this person the most? Which element of Keppe's science most helped them?
Luciara: He could interiorize. He could see that the problems, in fact, the problem is not the students. The problem is not the owner of the school. The problem is inside of myself, that I couldn't deal with that. That's the big key. The problems, we have a lot of problems.
They are not from outside. If I am calm, if I have a good energy, I can solve any problem in my life. But if I am nervous, if I am irritated, if I am angry, a small, small, little, tiny problem I cannot solve. So the problem is inside of myself and I have to solve this. I have to treat because one bad thought, one bad feeling can poison your body and your energy, your life, much more than a poisoned food.
Can you imagine that?
Richard: Interesting that. Let's talk about a specific problem that I see happening in the classroom a lot these days, Luciana, that a student comes and they don't want to study. They're resistant. They think it's a boring thing to do. They'd rather be playing computer games or doing whatever it is that they want to do. How do you deal with that in the classroom?
A student that just plain doesn't want to study, doesn't have enthusiasm for it.
Luciara: Well, the students, they have a very big resistance. But this resistance is not only with language. This resistance is with every good thing in his or her life. The person has this resistance in learning everything in life, in having contact with something good to develop in life. So sometimes we don't start from learning, we start for other things, with how many courses you start and you stop.
So then you can see the resistance of the person in having this learning in life, and then after we start in the learning.
Richard: This is the psychological aspect that's very important in Dr. Keppe's work. The problem is not the thing, the language in our case, the language or the whatever the course is that you're studying in school, it's what that represents in some way.
It's like a has a symbolic meaning in somebody's life. And so if we can see what that, what that is symbolically, maybe studying English for example or French, if they come to our school, that they're doing something that will develop them, that will give them more opportunities in work, more possibilities in travel, all of these kinds of things, and that's really what they're resistant to.
The language is just the focal point for this deeper resistance.
Luciara: Right, yes, exactly. I I have an example of a boy, I was teaching French, and he was very resistant. And he said, teacher, I don't want to study. I said, but I will talk to him, try to see if he could open. And I said, let's say if you wouldn't study, what would you do?
Ah, I would take care of my father's boat. I said, okay, good. So this student was seeing that learning is something very bad. Why does he need to learn in school? Cool. Anything is cool. If he wants to take care of his father's boat. And then I showed him that for him to take care of his father's boat, he needs to open his mind to even to listen to people that would be inside of the boat.
And he said, Oh, my father, he has very intelligent friends. And said, Yes, you see, because And I showed him that for him to accomplish what he wants, he needs to study.
Richard: What are the biggest skills that teachers and parents need to understand in order to help their children? Because this is not just a problem with the children, it's a problem in the teachers and the parents, of course.
So if we have parents, teachers listening, what do they do to help their kids to learn better and to help themselves, too? What do they need to understand about this science of Norberto Keppe?
Luciara: For parents, I would give some examples. Dr. Keppe discovered the question of idealization. In general, parents idealize a lot the children. I have a friend, she has a school, and she said that each mother who goes to this school with a child, they say like this, oh, look, my child is special.
My child is like a small genius. So my child is very important. So please take care of him or her. So each parent has this idea that their kids are special. But when they are at the school, they are the same. So they are not genius. They are children, normal children. So if the parents see this, this big idealization that they have with the children, this will help a lot.
When they don't see the children as they are, the school will see this. And then when the school tells the parents what's going on with them, then the parents got surprised. How come? Or if they use drugs or if they drink. The parents, they are shocked. It's because of this idealization. I could ask you, why do parents idealize so much the children?
Richard: Because they want to idealize themselves, too, right? They
Luciara: imagine themselves as being. I am such a big and nice and important parent, so my child is big, important, and nice. So the parents, they could help a lot.
Richard: I can really see, Luciana, that this study of Norberto Keppe's psychosociopathology is important for everybody to have. But let's end with a question for you.
What's your vision of education? What could education be if we understood more of this science that we're talking about in this program? What's your vision of what it could be?
Luciara: It's a pity to see what is going on now in the education field. The whole world, we see the crumbling of educational system. And it seems sometimes that it's something provoked, forced to happen.
Because if we teach the students to develop their consciousness, to develop themselves, to not teaching them only to be a multinational employee, not teaching them to be only a technician for something, as is happening in India nowadays and China, forming, I don't know how many thousands of professionals only to work in these fields. We are not forming any more human beings. If you study like this, you don't think so much.
You are not an actor in this society. You don't do something to transform society. So if you see education in a big view, I would say that we should form people who could develop themselves, develop the society, to develop as human beings. The education system, now we are forming machines.
Richard: Keppe's work is based on trying to elevate humanity to its rightful and true place in the universe.
And that's something that's very high. Very beautiful work, this. Stay in touch for more information. Rich at richjonesvoice.com. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Talk to you next time.
