WHAT PREVENTS PEOPLE FROM LEARNING? 

1: Teaching too often involves ideals, shoulds and lofty moral values that don't reflect experiential, everyday reality.  The gap between the real and the ideal is often ignored, creating a tension that many people find intolerable.   Even more important, most offenders and criminals have shame-based personalities.  The imposition of ideals and shoulds creates the need for rage and violence, even though it may be kept hidden from the teachers of morality.

2: People often don't learn because information is too abstract -- they have no way to organize it spatially, to determine how different pieces of information relate to each other.  This lack of internal organization severely limits the capacity to take in complex information, to problem solve, or to think creatively.

3: People are emotionally constipated and can take nothing more in.  Derepression is the psychological phenomena by which people are acted upon violently but are not allowed to re-act and must internalize their natural and appropriate reactions to whatever is acting upon them.  Eventually these people have a great deal of hatred and anger stored up in them and are unable to react even to positive or supportive stimuli, should it be offered them.   The people affected by this have a greater need to hate or be hated than they do to learn.  They need emotional circulation in order to break out of this log jam and be able to learn freely again.

4: We don't trust people to make informed choices, even though we live in a democracy.  People are not provided with the information they need to make good decisions and thus they often don't make good decisions.

5: The learning process is severely inhibited by a cut-off, regressed psychological core.   The state of the psychological core effects both concentration and absorption.  It also transforms educational efforts:  they either end up "flushed" out of sight, in one ear and out the other, or, they become "training," organized information that has no effect on the integrity, morals, values or experience of the student.  The "core" needs to be involved in all educational efforts.

WHAT WOULD HELP PEOPLE LEARN BETTER? 

Our culture tries to teach ideals, values, and moral principles to the ego identity, hoping it will seep down into the heart and soul and create a conscience, but it doesn't work.  Trickle-down education is no more effective than trickle-down economics.  Nor is "beefing up" the educational system, or, locking up the ones who don't learn a solid, long-term solution.    Teaching that is all aimed at the ego only reinforces the fundamental flaw and never gets to the psyche, or personality, as a whole.   To counter these problems, our organization has come up with a four-pronged attack:

1: "Real education" packages that provide gritty knowledge about sexuality, relationships, conflict and violence.  Ideals are important but the majority of the people we most need to impact feel unable to attain those ideals and experience themselves as inferior to or resentful towards people who appear to measure up.  Our "real education" packages are designed to address the gap between the real and the ideal and help people make real movement towards fundamental change.

2: The use of HERMES' WEB as a teaching tool makes the abstract accessible and addresses the fundamental flaw at the same time.  It helps people learn how to learn and also spatially organizes their thoughts and ideas.  This way they are able to make sense -- their own sense -- of their own experiences and of their own personality structure.  HERMES' WEB is a small, inexpensive, folding plastic toy developed by Bradford Hansen-Smith, a mathematician from Chicago.  It can be used to demonstrate how the flaw works and how to work around it. 

HERMES' WEB represents the psyche as a whole and it various parts, as well as the simple geometric principles they embody, readily lend themselves to organizing complex thoughts and establishing relationships between ideas.  It is essentially a user-friendly, hands-on visual aid.

3: Methods of education that are not ego-centered are needed, ones that don't depend so heavily or exclusively on intellect and make more use of imagination.  Arnold Mindell's Process Psychology, the Roy Hart Theatre of France's voice-body-emotion connection methods, and drama therapy tools and techniques are three mediums our organization uses for this purpose.  They, combined with the other three "attacks," provide the possibility of education that really works and can change societal problems in a positive direction.

4: A democratic atmosphere.  People need information and they need freedom of choice in order to feel respected as individuals.    People may still choose wrongly, but given access to true democratic freedom (access to information and choice about lifestyle), some may choose differently than they are now.  Our organization acts out of a democratically-driven style.  We will lay out choices for people by providing them with clear information about various issues-- choices they are already making for the most part, but probably just aren't aware of.  Once they have awareness of the choices, options and consequences, they may opt to act differently.

5: Both students and teachers need to recognize the primacy of the psychological core in the educational process.  Students need to focus on meeting the needs of their psychological core or else they won't be able to absorb new knowledge and skills, much less mature as a result.  Teachers need to strategize how to engage the psychological core of their students and tie the objectives of the educational process to the underlying needs represented by the state of the students' cores.  Avoidance of this subject dooms educational results to the realm of the trivial and animal training.