Braindancing Bytes: BRAINS ENCAGED OR ENGAGED? by Dilip Mukerjea

Our most challenging barrier is no longer the reach of our imagination but our inability to order, make sense of, and connect everything that demands our attention. We are struggling to make the complex clear. The raw tonnage of what’s coming our way makes the Big Bang look like a firecracker in a thunderstorm.

CONSIDER: Our educational systems are rooted in Intellectual Feudalism.

KNOW THAT: One impassioned teacher is distinctively better that a staffroom full of the rest merely there…but disconnected.

The child’s brain is a construction zone. Stimulation, not stipulation, is needed to help it evolve. Learning must thus be forged, not forced; only then can well-being and resilience emerge.

So many educators show up for work everyday, but most of them are sleepwalking, sleeptalking, sleeping…partisans of obsolete paradigms. In this new age of incessant innovation, we have to extract wealth and energy from minds, not mines.

Great teachers possess everything, and…are possessed by nothing. Where can we find them? In large numbers…where?

The distilled wail of students hungry for learning, left hungry…their palpable heartbreak no different from one suffering from a deep and consuming bereavement. This must never be allowed to happen. We owe it to the Children of the Third Millennium to liberate them from the uninspiring, stenographic terseness of soulless classrooms…to ensure that their brains are no longer encaged.

Great teachers must be given great incentives to remain in their profession… every child can then enjoy the finest flowering in an ambience of effulgent enthusiasm, ever ready to compete, connect, and collaborate. Only then can we tap into their creative and innovative capacity, their entrepreneurial spirit, their aching desire to learn…and to keep learning, to move from confusion to clarity.

Simplicity is: the power to do less … of what doesn’t matter, and the power to do more … of what does matter.

Great teachers offer simplicity, serenity, success…to draw forth greatness from their students.