What if Mozart became a computer science graduate?

In response to Sir Ken Robinson's vision of education for the future I wrote the article that follows the original TED Talk below:-

Is the Global Education system so entrenched that it isn't flexible enough to absorb such a vision as Mr Robison's?

If this vision of creativity equating in importance to science, mathamatics and literacy; could be adopted in schools now, it would also have to be adopted by society. There are few enough jobs now for the creative masterminds who sit twiddling their thumbs in classrooms waiting for the chance to escape and free their spirits. Geniuses are working in Walmart. The Mozarts of our day have been told not to study music, but computer science. The Michaelangelo's have had their mud taken away and been given equations to sculpt, or told to speed up on the factory floor.

I discovered, online a great thinker, through his comments on blogs and different news stories, and had been following him for sometimes; in my mind I had him dressed in expensive suits, a Director, an executive, a successful self-employed entrepeneur. It was a shock then when I discovered he works in Walmart stacking shelves. What a waste I thought; his hours should be spent teaching, writing, uplifting others with his insight which is great. Why isn't he running a newspaper? You can find his blog here
Only its not a waste is it; he has bread on his table and he has a blog where he does impart knowledge just as I thought, of course he does that's his destiny.
And there are a host of great thinkers, geniuses, literary master, sculptors, dancers, philosophers; all thinking, writing, sculpting, dancing and philosophising in their own time. I remember working in a health food store some years ago. My boss was a friend of mine he had a masters degree in biology and molecular science and could tell you the atomic structure of the Vitamin C and Creatine we were selling on the shelves. He opened up shop - he sold vitamins and supplements - he shut up shop - he quite probably would give you the best advice on your product choice that you could find anywhere.

So we need jobs for the creative. We need a different educational system that brings out the creativity in a student and nourishes it and allows it to bloom at the end in the form of a career.

A career should allow the blossoming Mozarts to create their masterpieces, rather than corralling potential composers into the objectives outlined in a company's Mission Statement. Unless that company's objective is 'To bring out the Mozart in you....'. And why not?

It is arguable that if the art is within you, it will out. But it is also arguable that the reasons there were Mozarts, Michelangelo's and Carravagios, is that back then their work was highly valuedand schools flourished in European cities where these talents were nurtured under the guidance of grand old masters.

What happens if within me is the answer to global warming, or the political/military genius to end terrorism or the inventive creativity to bridge the vast realms of space, not because I am a scientist but because I had a crazy idea that it was possible? Only because I have been corralled down an ever narrowing path of academia, only to come out into the open and discover there are no jobs. I get whatever work I can especially as I have a huge student loan to pay off, and I am too tired to share at the end of the day these ideas I had one day when I was dreaming.

How do we find potential and prize it out? How do we make the most of it? Life itself is a great university and now we have the internet which is like a great library. But how does the wisdom therein reach our environment, raise our society to greater heights and gently restore the earth so her rivers are clean again for our children to drink from?

Will the syllabus change? Will they allow a child to choose their own way according to their joy and passion as well as their abilities? Will the world change because the Creatives among us nurtured to a certain level of literacy and ability, force it to change by the same creative wellspring that lent us our existence in the first place?

I think of Star Trek; there is, in this futuristic series, a kind of utopian understanding; a harmony between technology and nature; an ideal balance. I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where you know your talents will not get lost. To grow up with every enthusiastic exploration encouraged and enlarged upon, so that our minds and our bodies unfold their greatness.

A computer as it is is a great resource, but it ties the body to it like a shackle. It would be good would it not, for life to be explored once again on its own terms and not second hand. I think we need another era of exploration. We need to find things all over again; the North Pole, the summit of Everest, penicillin. We need to awaken our inner explorers; we need those philanthropists back again, the Dr Livingstone's of today to help us put an end to slavery - it never really ended.

I knew something was amiss with the education system when I could see that the major problems of the world weren't being solved but added to and expanded upon and new ones constantly appearing. A flaw of ignorance runs right through the middle of society; if you want it to stop at your doorstep, or in your neighbourhood; that is no one else's job but yours.

Those who can change the education system are the educators, but also the students and parents of students. And those who can change the manner and method of employment are all of us. You can be beekeeper, landscape architect, inventor and astronaut. We can make it possible for dreams to come true, and we can reroute the education system so it optimises the potential of all who pass through its gates. The question is which piece of this puzzle is your sphere of responsibility.

In my mind we have some priorities on this planet. The same way that if you're in a survival situation your priorities are shelter, water, food. It is not hard to see where our efforts are needed. Sir Robinson talks about 'human ecology' and he quotes Jonas Salk the inventor of the Polio vaccine 'If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50years all life would end. If human beings were to disappear from this earth, within 50years all life would flourish'.

So in a way a measure of our positive/negative effects, would be to determine our level of creativity; how much life we cultivate and nurture around us. Are there gardens in our midst, or concrete jungles that do not give us breath? Do our actions extend life; are all creatures nurtured by our day to day actions?

I can tell easily if we are progressing or not. I just look and see if the starving are still starving, if the homeless are still dispossessed; if races of people and species of flora and fauna are dying needlessly. And I look to my own back yard; has my life here brought new life or less?

People tend to think of wealth in terms of things. I don't. I think of it, in terms of life. The most precious commodity there is is life. Life is held up, not by GDP, your annual salary or insurance. Life is held up by the diversity of microroganisms in the soil. Life is held up by people striving everyday to lessen the violence of human kind against, against what? Against none other than our own self. The air you breath is lent to you, by trees and plants. The blood in your veins you borrow from rivers and rain. Your flesh and bone is made of subtle compounds and elements intertwined with one another; into our nervous systems into our thinking and feeling machines.

I should think it a grave error to educate a child so that they do not know from where they derive their existence. To educate them so that they have no concept of 'environment'. So that they do not want to walk on grass because it is 'lumpy' as a child I was teaching once indicated to me - she had come from the city and had only ever walked on pavements.

It is a grave error to educate a child thus, but an even graver one to sustain the myth among adults.

You should go out and find out the journey of air, water and food to your body. Really find out what your body is made of. That would be an education.

Education is related to the word educere; 'bring out', 'bring forth what is within, 'bring out potential'.

What is your potential? What is our potential?

Better late than never - answer to a two year old comment

This is a letter I wrote to someone who left me a comment 2 years ago which I only just found now:-I'd like to know what do you think?

Hi Isabella,

You wrote this comment on my article 'The Creation of Fire' like two years ago! And you asked me a question

"Death makes all of our attempts at life utterly meaningless, laughable, ridiculous almost, yet we continue, most of us with our singularly particular neuroses."

i'm curious why someone like you, who spends so much time in nature, would say that? isn't death just part of the cycle?'

which I never answered because at that time my father was dying of cancer and my mother was recovering from injuries caused by him crashing the car the day he found out he had cancer... so I was kind of preoccupied.

It's a lovely question and I wanted to say a belated thank you... In answer to your question I go on in the article to say:- 'Nature has a wonderful perspective on death, one that it is continually sharing all the time, it does not consider it either bad or good. Death just is, death just happens, the same way shit happens. Nature does not personalise it, it is us who take it personally. Nature does not ignore life or avoid it, or desire it. Nature simply is and does...' Which in a way is a reflection that as you say death is part of the cycle.

The point I was making is that in any moment our life can be extinguished which renders all our 'activity' fairly redundant and apparently without import - it's a leveller. I say apparently without import because we confer great meaning on our unknown spans of life, of course we do - but we fail to attach great meaning to death; we thrash with and flounder in and fight with it, but in many of our day to day lives it doesn't bear thinking about and perhaps it should. The nature of nature is impermanence. It gives me great freedom to know that I can be plucked from my reality without a moment's notice, and also I consider a sane perspective; that death balances the gift of life, like the apex of a pendulum's swing. When we fail to grant death its place in our day to day life, we fail to have truth and we fail to give life its import; life is so precious when standing next to death. When we deny death and avoid it and live with our eyes shut we are automatically neurotic. Which was why I pointed it out in this manner as rendering 'our attempts at life as meaningless, laughable and ridiculous', like our discussing of the price of peas when someone is pointing a weapon at us.

We have just been adopted by a cat, everyday she brings us various bits of mice and birds and leaves them on our doorsteps as offerings. Mice who up until their early demise in the jaws of a cat were busy fetching food and building nests for their young - the difference between mice and men is that the mice are much more aware of the cat in any given moment than we are of death. I guess still not aware enough though. Death shocks us all, death takes us by surprise; it is amazing how often the dying man's face, including my father's has a look of surprise on it - as though we never knew.

Had we all known perhaps we would make different choices about what is important and what isn't... When do we never know really, that death is bearing down upon us? Would I stand there still and wonder for as long about which make up looks best, or whether to paint the dining room green or lilac? Would I spend more time with my loved ones, would I help more folk that crossed my path?

Thank you for your comment, it's prompted me to think about this a bit more. I hope this answers your question and I'd be interested to know your thoughts. I like your blog and your poems.

Warm regards,

Louise Brookes

PS - you wrote...

'very interesting article. reflecting deeply on who we are - cells and all - how we extend ourselves into our surroundings, are how we are all part of nature is something that we don't do nearly, nearly enough of. (well, obviously YOU do, so perhaps i should exclude you from that "we" :))

by the way, you say

"Death makes all of our attempts at life utterly meaningless, laughable, ridiculous almost, yet we continue, most of us with our singularly particular neuroses."

i'm curious why someone like you, who spends so much time in nature, would say that? isn't death just part of the cycle?'

Isabella Mori answered my letter here on her blog in an article called 'Of Mice, Death and Neuroticism'. She is a a psychotherapist in Vancouver, Canada. She has been working in the field of mental health, counselling, psychotherapy and movement therapy for 15 years and enjoys helping people build better lives.

Edurelief Global Giving Challenge

"Dear Edurelief friends and supporters,

"Our goal in 2010 is to start 10 new library projects in rural areas. To kick off this initiative we're taking part in Global Giving's (www.globalgiving.org) Open Challenge. Our challenge is to raise $4,000 from at least 50 individual donors in 30 days. Completing this challenge will not only get us well on our way towards funding 10 new libraries but it will open up the door for us to qualify for Global Giving matching grands, corporate donors, and other sources of funding. We could really use your help completing this challenge! Whether you can give, $10, $25, $50 or more, every little bit counts. Please share this with your friends as well and together I'm confident we can reach our goal.

"We've spent the last two years in Mongolia now, visiting schools, starting new projects, and investigating the situation of education in rural areas. Good school libraries are an urgent need and make a huge difference in their communities. It's proven that access to a school library and textbooks boosts school attendance, improves grades, and motivates new interest in learning.

"This month let's work together to fund our first two school libraries and then we can work towards the other 8 we have planned for the rest of the year.

"Please give via our Global Giving Challenge page found here:
http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/school-libraries-for-mongolia/

"Thank you for your support!

"Sincerely,
Jonathan and Marielle Renich
Edurelief"

What will you tell your Daughter?

Hyperbole or a very real answer to your prayers?

Did you know that Essiac or Caisse tea can cure Breast cancer?

But the pharmaceuticals don't want you to know that. You can find out about Caisse Tea and Rene Caisse here:-

and watch a film about her life here...

I once read the case notes of all her patients treated with Essiac. There were people with Oesophagus Cancer in its advanced stages, all breast cancers and also a variety of other cancers and illnesses. Essiac helped all of them. Rene herself had breast cancer and had had one surgery and was planning for another when she met a woman who had a healed breast cancer scar and Rene asked her how; the woman answered she had just got a tea for it from the medicine man of her tribe and that tea was Caisse Tea. Rene developed tested and then sold Essiac to the Pharmaceuticals in the hope that it would be more widely shared - only they buried it, and she had to go underground to make and supply it and continue to help people.

I also know that in 100% of Leukaemia cases treated with Pau D'Arco in South America, all the patients fully recovered.

Pharmaceuticals are in it for the money, western medicine has become a business. Doctors aren't necessarily to blame because it is the pharmaceuticals who supply them with the tools they use to treat people

Recently there has been a swathe of deaths due to the side effects of laboratory drugs; we hear about some of them like Heath Ledger and Michael Jackson. My father was also severely weakened by the drugs he was given. I believe he would still be here had he not taken any.

Personally if I had breast cancer my first actions would be to stop having milk or dairy as since the addition of Bovine Growth hormone to cows to stimulate their milk production breast cancer has escalated. Also in China before milk was culturally introduced, there were the least cases of breast cancer. Milk is an unnatural human food; its a bit like cows drinking human milk - see - that's just plain weird. Also the milk is pasteurised and therefore doesn't have the enzymes we need to digest it.

I would take Essiac Tea and I would concentrate on improving my lymphatic drainage through exercise, massage and changing my diet so it contained more raw foods and superfoods.

I personally would not have radiation or chemotherapy as these weaken your vital energy to such a degree that your life can be shortened whether or not the cancer is put in remission. There's a strange weighing up in western medicine that suggests for example that it is ok to prescribe say an anti-psychotic like Risperidone to many people with minor mental illnesses or nervous system disorders like PTSD; even though the side effects will cause Prolactinoma (tumours on the pituitary) or Hypergonadism in men potentially causing impotence and even tardive dyskinesia which is an incurable potentially fatal disease, as well as diabetes and a host of other possible and usually worse symptoms than the original that presented itself.

Also they are not treating the original symptoms, but suppressing them - they rarely if ever address the cause of an illness.

I would only consider western medicine as a pathological form of treatment i.e. If I was about to drop down dead and also for their diagnostic abilities and there are their empirical successes like insulin for diabetes and penicillin- which work too!

So yes getting diagnosed early is so important.

But when people die unnecessarily because of the arrogance of western medicine to not even consider what works, the empirical results of thousands of years of indigenous knowledge that have proven cures without side effects - then this is a step backwards.

In the 1840's a Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that there were less deaths of pregnant women in the midwifery ward compared to his own where young male doctors worked. The only difference he could see was that the male doctors performed autopsies in the morning before delivering babies and the Midwives were not permitted. He realised there was a connection because his doctors were performing autopsies on the women who had died the day before. He developed cleaning agents like Chlorinated Lime and made the doctors wash their hands; the rates of death dropped from 18% to 3% in only several months. He published papers on it but was scorned by the medical community even after he published again twenty years later. A Dr Charles Delucena Meigs retort was 'Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen's hands are clean'.

My point being that the relief of suffering has been put second place to arrogance and narrow mindedness; not necessarily even because of science as science is not to blame only the scientists that wield it; certainly profit and the monopolising of profits from insurance and development of treatments is directly responsible for people's unnecessary and premature demise.

If herbs and alternative medicines like Caisse Tea and Pau D'Arco, and the powerful effects of raw foods and superfoods were given the credit due to them and their powerful results - there would be an amazing change in our society from one of dogged ill-health to one of incredible well being. We have to focus on the means to create health not just suppression of the symptoms of illness. A chinese doctor was paid to keep the body well, like a mechanic who keeps the vehicle running - you attended a physician so you wouldn't get ill in the first place. That's a whole different spin on the idea of preventative medicine.

Doctors are still arguing these days about the benefits of fruit and vegetables - that is medieval. Of course if you build your body out of the best ingredients, like building a dam with the best quality concrete; you will have the best health you can. The purer and more vital the food, the soil its grown in, the water you consume, the air you breathe, and your environment - the healthier you will be. Its not rocket science.

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Find your way out of Trauma:- The Survivor Warrior Workbook

This powerful workbook is used as a teaching tool with therapists, support groups and community education programs. It was inspired by Angela's Removing the Sword of Trauma events. It is for survivors, warriors, advocates, loved ones and supporters ready to move past pain and suffering and reclaim joy and happiness. You can use the workbook in a group, on your own or with your therapist.

This workbook is 117 pages long and is a DOWNLOAD. Thank you for your commitment to healing BUY NOW $9.99

'Prepare to be Raw' by Matthew Warner

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Please check out and have an amazing life. Thanks.

Copyright 2010 Louise Brookes

Proposition H8 takes a vacation

They raised like $80million right to fight for the right and to fight against the right for some folks here to declare they love each other and be together when they're dying and belong together in a state of marriage.

That's $80million that could have fed some starving, dying, bleeding broken folks some place like Haiti or Somalia or Florida when the winds come blowing through.

Personally my law comes through the leaves beneath my feet, flows along rivers, in my hair on the breeze, in bird song and the way the ocean leaps in Spring. If I say 'I do' that's it settled, the sky heard me and so did all eternity and if a hospital told me I couldn't come in because I'm not family, I would dig a tunnel through its walls, I would climb up the outside and in through a window, I would wear a white coat and steal a badge, I would suddenly remember we are cousins, we have always been cousins - no piece of paper would stop me, no subjugation of a human right disguised as law would stop me and no policemen would stop me being with the one I love when they are dying.

People should attend to history, the origins of law, the ideas behind marriage - how subjugation is tied up in it more than love, how its about property, the price of a wife. The whole damn thing needs changing if you ask me. The law needs an overhaul like cars need M.O.T's. Victims need protection.

The good thing about impermanence is that ignorance is dying - after a while it just gets old and grey and arthritic and it rolls over and dies. Women finally get the vote (its not over yet they've not got the vote EVERYWHERE yet), religious fanaticism and crucifixion go on a cruise into the sunset together and we are left in peace to notice something else needs fixing instead like the garden fence, or the washer dryer. Which is how it should be, but which is how it ain't, not yet, not everywhere, and certainly not now.

I can't wait for the day when a woman or a guy who realises they are gay in Iran or India or Saudi Arabia, are able to come out to their family and they CELEBRATE - 'Celebrate good times come on!...' Like they would if a girl met the boy she fell in love with and they'd welcome him or as it would be if your son met his boyf, 'Come on now, come on in, would you like some tea?' It's not hard is it...

Or if it were a girl born when her parents found out they'd had a girl, - 'It's a GIRL. Yay! Party! Yay! Thank God it's a beautiful girl'

One day that is going to happen, in Alabama, in Tehran, in Delhi.

I heard a friend of mine telling his son not to be a 'Big Girl'. I told him not to be rude - that this was a compliment, women hold the world on their shoulders - they are the ones that give birth to human beings for gods sake; show some respect, get it round the right way.

Proposition H8 has to go - where's the love guys - come on out of the middle ages and join in the fun... and the grace...

I'm going to change the world with my conviction; like Gandhi had that India would one day be free. Like Martin Luther King had that equality would reign. Like Jesus had that Heaven was eternal. When he said 'Love your enemies' he actually said 'Ahebw labwheldbabaykhun' (Guys he spoke Aramaic, a mystical language with multiple layered meanings) which really translates into this :-

'From a hidden place,

unite with your enemies from the inside,

fill the inner void that helps them swell outwardly and fall

out of rhythm; instead of progressing, step by step,

they stop and start harshly,

out of time with you

Bring yourself back into rhythm within.

Find the movement that mates with theirs - like two lovers creating life from dust.

Do this work in secret, so they don't know.

this kind of love creates, it doesn't emote.'