Mindfulness and Empowerment: The Twin Pillars of A Different Path in Education

(Author’s Note:  Christopher Quirk, Director of Easton County Day School, graciously allowed me to work closely with him on a proposal for a sustainable education community.  Part of this collaboration centered on a K-12 school.  The continuing arguments set forth here were a culmination of that collaboration in January, 2012.)

The core problems discussed as “knocks against the way we school” can be addressed by recognizing an altered schooling structure that would make it impossible for the problems to take root, an organization built on the twin pillars of Mindfulness and Empowerment which in concert produce self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization which in synthesis result in mental wellness.

Mindfulness, a meta-cognitive property of mind, is a by-product of the child’s self-observation of the consequences of the strategies employed to work through situations and is critical for the development of self-regulation.  In formal learning situations mindfulness is consequent to the self-analysis of the results knowledge engagement occurs.

As Holt suggests, “Children’s first hunches about anything are extremely faint and tentative, the merest wisps of intuition that a certain thing may be so.  Each time children test one of these faint hunches and have it confirmed by experience, the hunch becomes a bit stronger.  What we might call a 5 percent hunch becomes a 10 percent, the 10 percent a 20, and so, slowly, all the way to the point where they will say with conviction that they know that such and such is true…” (How Children Learn, p 138)   Children continuously and unconsciously survey the consequences of their hunch testing, noticing regularities and patterns from the noise.  They begin to ask questions, to make deliberate experiments, sharpening their own awareness of the interplay of action, environment and results and in the process cultivate a reflexive self-regulation. 

But to develop the degree of self-regulation needed to intentionally obtain formal learning objectives children’s meta-cognitive abilities are required to move from the unconscious to a conscious awareness.  Bringing self-observations from the inner sanctum to a conscious level is undertaken through the continuous actions of play and the constant conversation with other children and adults within informal situations, not in classroom “discussion” where children tend to be guarded.  Conscious understanding develops in continuous play as the multiple experiential, immediate needs of social interaction or of individual engagement with play objects and with classmates unfold processes, applications and results and as children take particular notice of it all.  Conscious understanding in constant conversation develops when the child ready to reveal to others what has been uncovered makes connections among processes, applications and results as the child internally composes his and her speech.  

Indeed, as the meta-cognitive skills sharpen through play and conversation, self-regulation, which is built on them, increases, after all,  “Self-regulation means that a person is metacognitively, socially, motivationally and behaviourally active in his or her own problem-solving processes using self-observation, self-judgment and self-reaction to attend to information…”(“Self-Regulation”,

http://www.mindmatters.edu.au/resources_and_downloads/staff_matters/the_thriving_self/useful_information/self-regulation.html

Empowerment, a motivational predisposition of a power-felt psycho-dynamic, is a consequence of a positive developing self-esteem/self-advocacy dynamic.  Self-Esteem is about the deepest affective definition of self along the worthy-worthless spectrum which is the foundation of the ultimate survival sense continuums of hopefilled to despair, of actualization to suicide.  These self-judgments precondition self-efficacy.  Such is the case that Holt could say:  “How much people can learn at any moment depends on how they feel at that moment about the task and their ability to do the task and I might add how they generally feel about themselves, whether they feel empowered or powerless, competent or stupid.  When we feel powerful and competent we leap at difficult tasks.  The difficulty does not discourage us…When people are down it’s useless to push...or urge…; that just frightens and discourages…more”. (How Children Learn, pp. 50-51.) 

Using the Holt formulation and extending it, the following can be said:  When we feel powerful, that is, when we judge ourselves worthy and hopefilled, we feel highly self-effective, and, thus, we leap at tasks, difficult and simple; and working through a heightened sense of self-efficacy, observing the positive consequences we feel our hope and our worthiness validated, which in turn generates a greater confidence in our abilities. And with greater confidence in our abilities we seek engagement, we self-actualize.

Thus, children when allowed their worth and effectiveness will be self-actualizing.  And when consistently children self-actualize over their schooling residency, they will, by habit, graduate as self-actualizing young adults.

The twin pillars of self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization, Mindfulness and Empowerment, emerge to their most potent in children when they are a consistent response to the learning environment, rather than through compliance demanded of children by the adults in the class rooms.  A schooling structure where Mindfulness and Empowerment emerge within each youngster as a constant environmental reaction to being within it is one allowing the growth of children in their own way and in their own time, one premised on redressing the full range of individual need, that is, in a Democratic Education system.