My Heart, My Mind and My Hands

Education has an amazing strength of bringing out skills, healthy character and a productive mind from the person who is been educated. The intent of a good education is not to pour into or perhaps force things inside of an empty brain but it is to guide out and to lead the student to a place of his/her natural affinity and ability. Such guidance must be carefully planned to train the total person.

The essence of a human being is not just a body. Everybody has a physical material part called the body (The brain inclusive). The training of this material part is what is referred to in this article as the training of the hand. In the body is the mind; the thoughts of the brain, the perspective, comprehensions of complexes, associations and innovation development are called mind trainings. Training a person in these two dimensions of his/her being will no doubt produce a fairly beneficial individual but there is a part of a human being that is neither his/her body nor mind and its development does not depend on hand or mind training. This is the spiritual part of a person and developing such a critical part of a human being is referred to as the heart training. Total transformation in education is only achieved when a person is engaged in hands, mind and heart to develop an experience of truth for him/herself.

 These separate parts of the human being speaks in different languages and it is the purpose of education to teach a person to understand and express his/her full individuality and purpose. We consider below how education could target and transform a whole being by leading the genius out of the hand, mind and heart.

The Heart Training: The language of the heart is Faith. As part of our assumed progressive nature we have tried to eliminate issues of faith, God, morality, from our trainings and developments as much as possible. Funny as it may be we have replaced it with an idea of self gratification and the individual as a law unto him/herself. The complexities and sensitivity around the subject of God must not make us to hide from talking about it. Theology is not only an academic discipline but a human need. Every person must be trained to verify and know the truth about origins, purpose, character and the existence of things more exceeding than his/her eyes can know. This is not to spun a superstitious education regime but to necessitate human's search for meaning and to tap into the source of human's essence. All that exist now is a product of somebodies faith. It was a seed of someones faith that has given us everything now, great people who leaves legacies saw these legacies in their heart when no one else could see them and they lived to exemplify their faith. Faith gave us automobiles, light bulbs, electricity, beautiful architecture, wonderful gardens, pens, chairs, aircraft, mobile phones and the list goes on unending. Faith is the only thing that produces! Human beings are not products of chance but we are the effect of God's cause such that we may become the cause for a great world. The training of the heart gives three key things: Hope, Faith and Love. These three lessons are fundamental building blocks to any great education and society.  The training of the heart must be woven around these three central themes and given as much attention as the other forms of trainings.

The Mind Training: Our education focuses on what is popularly called the 3R's. This concept has become the key concern of education in Africa. As important and critical as arithmetic, reading and writing is in mind development, it is not all there is it to mind training. Training the mind is positioning a person to dig into the myriad possibilities of faith. Mind training should pursue with much importance, logic, Multidimensional analysis, creative problem solution, Mechanical-Conceptual-Physical Reasoning, Visual/Spatial Processing,and Associational/lateral thinking. Education should not focus only on how well one can read, write or do arithmetic but we should begin to develop keen interest in how logical people reason, how well do we train people to associate things taught, how clear are students spatial reasoning, etc. What we are trained and tested for makes us inadequate to solve the real world complex problems and it is time we focused and taught our minds to fully develop.

The Hand Training: A fully developed spirit and mind lives in a body. Under developing the body is a sure way of limiting the scope of operation of the full being. In hand training we refer to training that teaches the hand to do. It will be best advised if physical training and apprenticeship training are not considered as appendixes to education but are looked upon with equal importance. Two other key dimensions to the Hand training is social intelligence and emotional intelligence. Education must bring people to know that no man is an island and that humanity exist in a complete and yet complex interwoven strands of interactions with each other.

This is the new pattern we must educate ourselves. There is enough time and resources to develop our geniuses if only we will appreciate we have been limiting ourselves for far too long. These courses of education is what The Eagles' Wing and this blogs stands for; To wholly educate every single person on planet earth.

We bear a torch lighting each others corner, turn the next person's light on with true education today for we are our own educators!

Innocence and Curiosity

"Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people."
Leo Burnett

Leo Burnett was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Leo was an advertising executive who helped many companies sell their products to the world. He helped consumer as well discover products they may otherwise not have known without his creativity. He was essentially an asset to the world, left behind a company that became the 10th biggest advertising company in the world and he had great influence. The pressing question of this article is, what kind of education produces these kind of people?

I strongly believe every child born to any society is very innocent. One of America's finest Congregationalist theologian, editor and author, Lyman Abbott, puts it this way, "Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice."  A person of virtue or vice is therefore not a product of chance but has become what he/she has been taught in innocence. Education takes advantage of  innocence, cultivates  and heightens curiosity and produces philosophies and patterns that becomes the foundation on which experience, exposure and further learning are strengthened as one goes through the course of life. 

In Africa, we leave a lot of things to chance. Educator presume, at least by my experience, that traits of creativity and productivity are inborn and therefore have no clear structure to make children curious or to productively engage their innocence. The worse part is that, curious children are taught to shut-up and swallow as it may be given. Reasoning, brainstorming, task-finding, debating and problem solutions have very little attention in our current system. The educational structure emphasize a dependency mindset and robs the schooled of the blessing of finding knowledge and the beauty to make it useful to society.

We are good at teaching all the things that are impossible, all the things that should not be done, all the limitations and reasons why children can't and shouldn't think differently,  or dare to do things differently. The philosophy I guess is, if the preceding generation couldn't do it, who are you to think you can do it? Children who pursue to do and stay curious are branded, 'Too Known' and deprived of their gifts they have to offer. So what kind of education produces, social assets? It should be:

1.  One that establishes 'The Why to Know as much the What to Know and the How to Know': The driving questions of the innocent is Why? What? and How? The need to know I believe is founded on the truth of innocence. If someone realizes how little they know what they ought to know. They begin to learn the how if the why's are compelling enough. This is a sure gateway to be educated. Anytime these three fundamental questions are not well answered, one is sure to be ill-educated about a subject.
2. One that fans Curiosity and Interest: You can only educate someone to the level of his/her interest you can sustain and how thought-provoking you can engage them. Sustaining interest and allowing for participation is education. Questions best solicit answers, so education teaches the arts of asking question and finding the solutions satisfactorily even through experimentation if need be. Proper education keeps the educated always wanting to know more because it teaches the first basic lesson of life- always stay hungry to know for that is the sure way to know!
3. One that target the Whole Person: Educating the mind, without the heart and hand is a deficiency. Producing a social asset is deliberate. It engages the whole man (We will consider this into details in our next article), but before then, the question is how well targeted are the lesson been taught?
4. One that the lessons taught does not end in the classroom but only begins there: The true essence of education is not the classroom but the real world. If a student after a lesson cannot relate it to any thing in the real world  then the lesson should not have been taught at all. Route learning is not the point of education. These facts and equations can always be verified with a click of a button. It is how well this memory learning can be adopted to the real world that matters.

 It is not per chance that Harvard University has some of the well-known and prestigious alumni in the world, neither is it be lack that Yale produces some of the best graduates in the world. The Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge and Stanford students are produced deliberately. Their innocence are engaged productively and they are taught to be curious and to think!

I guess it is time we woke up from our stupor and taught ourselves to great gains. It is time for the African to be educated not only schooled. The light of renaissance shines and we must therein bask, bathing in such for an enlightened mind, strong hearts and mighty hands.

Long Live Africa!

Education Overhaul

As I thought of writing this article, there were a number of titles running through my mind. My inclination was towards a topic that would encapsulate my central message; Education is the key solution to Africa's problems. So I tried to combine the options of key and education as much as possible. Good as the options were, I was not satisfied until, Education Overhaul, appealed to me more especially because quiet a significant amount of schooling is going on. I share this mental exercise I had to go through to get this piece started because that is the essence of education: the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next.

Education is the power that underwrites all other forms of innovation and creativity. Education effects the way one thinks, feels, and acts. The central theme of education is TRANSFORMATION.  The ancient language of Latin has given. us a good word, education,  which is a derivative of  ēducātiō (“a breeding, a bringing up, a rearing).  From this word I can infer education as a breeding grounds for great minds, the bringing up of a whole being from one who knows little and rearing someone until they know what they ought to do. Education therefore is intended to create what ought to be and the best one ought be. Education grooms unto a known end of a wholly beneficial person to the society.

Judging from the above discussion of what education is, the question becomes, Is the African child being educated? The African is now relatively schooled but is he/she been educated? Schools and formal educational institutions are built as the general body of knowledge grows with the growing diversity of cultures and the increase in varying experiences. A school's purpose is to bring together educators and learner to a platform where experiences and knowledge are shared for an ultimate aim of transformation. Curricula are designed for order and universality sake with each item on the curricula intended to pass on a skill to the learner in line of his/her thought, emotions, language and actions.


If the measure of education is how many skills have been learned over the educated time period and how much transformed the learner is, then very little education is being achieved in Africa where I come from. We go through the motions of schooling from Nursery through Kindergarten, Primary School, Junior High School, Senior High School and ultimately university just fulfilling all righteousness as it may be to passing an exam. Certificates are our emphasis and not transformation. I have very little memories of my educators relating concepts or theories or any of such academic things to practical and applicable social terms and context. I don't even remember once when anyone had interest in my strengths and interests and educated me in those field as I may be best suited for. As far as Education is concerned in Africa, there are standards basically imported from the west (Our supposed ultimate rule) and we must conform or fall out.
 
One question I have never ceased to ask is why some of the most prominent people, people who changed the course of society drop out of formal education if it is the ultimate path to success and positive social change? These people are not less educated but they may not have completed the routines. Africa must begin to embrace the philosophy that education is more than building schools and getting everybody to the classroom which is a good thing. But the mere fact of getting people to the classroom will not guarantee education. We must seek to understand what education is and how to achieve it.

We will consider in a three-pack series a new educational road-map for the African child in our subsequent blogs:

1. Innocence Capitalization and Robbing of Curiosity
2. My Heart, My Mind and My Hands
3. Courage for the uncharted waters

 I know Africa can rebuild its broken wall but a clear examination of the damage and ruins must be done by curios minds and people who believe it is possible to rebuild. The mind must be taught to think, heart, taught character and hands equipped with skills to pursue our curiosities for healthy social contributions.

Above all education is useless if it fails to inspire the student to be productive. If education does not eliminate fear and encourage pro-activity then I guess it was not education at all.

Stay with us in the next three posts as we engage ourselves for a new way to educate ourselves and to solving our problems.

LONG LIVE AFRICA!

Africa's Turning Wheels

Last week was an exciting moment sitting in a conference of African Business Leaders. It was a gathering of Leaders from across Africa and other parts of the World. It was more exciting for me because it was an opportunity to look and carefully see into the minds of the hands that wield influence, power and money on the continent. There were interesting observations and resolutions I would want to share with you because it has so much bearing on the African Youth and the future which can not be less than now. 

1. There is a wide-spread conviction that Africa is the land of HOPE for the world: It appears quiet a strong conviction judging from all the sad realities we see and hear everyday. It at face-value appears very optimistic and could be considered as words hoping against hope. Yet the convictions are strong, the evidence and statistics are compelling. This was only a confirmation of a conviction I had only believed by prophecy, Faith was my basis for this same conviction but there are growing evidence now.
2. It is only an opportunity we have, One that presents challenges to build rather than a falling fairy: The very obvious interpretation of Africa as the bearer of the torch of hope is the fact that, it brims with numerous opportunities (at least so some of the expect say). For those who have the money, influence and the ability to 'see', opportunities abound! Yet reverse are the words of the African Youth, reverse is what appears true! Even in such do I wholly agree and sing the same opportunity chorus although it may be hard to believe the opportunity claim but honestly we as a people have great opportunity to create a new Africa.
3. Africa has opportunities but can the African take advantage of them: Quiet obvious among the challenges of Africa is the African. It was quiet an emphasis that the major problem with Africa is the African. The African grows with very little passion to learn hence mostly limited education, bad attitudes to work and corrupt in many instances. Corruption was a single problem that resurfaced time and over again. For me the obvious question for the conference was, can we maximize our lots and take advantage of a time such as we have been trusted with by God?
4. The call is for LEADERS: A need for strong and ethical leaders who can produce results is Africa's cry. The continent's die need is for leaders who can build strong institutions. Leadership is the strongest call if we must take advantage of our opportunities.

The African must be educated anew, the sons and daughters of our dear continent must embrace a new thought pattern, a new philosophy, a new 'Modus Operandi' and new ethics. The new African must have a teacher who believes in Africa's call in this time. Teachers with the heart and mind able to prepare the land because destiny smiles at us, beckoning us to a place of influence and affluence.

To this teacher I pledge my essence, to this same cause The Eagles' Wing Foundation will be there to travail until we say the birth of the new African in this new envisioned Africa.

Let Africa prosper, Let the African renew his thoughts and ways, for a New United Land of Warriors is being born. A new land full of milk and honey, one we must trust is given to us by God and thus we must endeavor to create for ourselves.

Long live Africa!