Education
While Rosenberg is most well known for his work with conflict resolution through his system of "life-serving" Nonviolent Communication (NVC), he has also made education reform a major component of his work.
Building on the ideas of Neil Postman, Riane Eisler, Walter Wink, Carl Rogers, and others, Rosenberg's contribution to this field involves reforming schools into "Life-Enriching" organizations, with the following characteristics:
- The people are empathically connected to what each is feeling and needing—-they do not blame themselves or let judgments implying wrongness obscure this connection to each other.
- The people are aware of the interdependent nature of their relationships and value the others’ needs being fulfilled equally to their own needs being fulfilled—-they know that their needs cannot be met at someone else’s expense.
- The people take care of themselves and each other with the sole intention of enriching their lives—they are not motivated by, nor do they use coercion in the form of guilt, shame, duty, obligation, fear of punishment, or hope for extrinsic rewards.
The goals of such schools being
- make life more wonderful
- get everyone's needs met
- connect with self and others
- motivate through the joy of natural giving, i.e., contributing to the well-being of others
- learning how to receive freely from others
This is in contrast with traditional "domination culture" schools which
- prove who's right and who's wrong (e.g., grades)
- teach students how to obey authority
- dispense labels, evaluations, diagnoses, and moralistic judgements (e.g., Learning disabled, Special Needs, Emotionally disturbed, Culturally disadvantaged, Hyperactive, ADD, etc.)
- Motivate desired behavior through punishment, reward, guilt, shame, duty, or obligation.
Rosenberg borrows the phrase "Dominator Culture" from Riane Eisler and builds upon Walter Wink's theory that we have lived under a domination-culture paradigm for about 8,000 years. Rosenberg says this culture utilizes a specialized language and system of education to allow a small minority to rule over the vast majority of the people, so that the majority is not serving their own life-needs, but serving their masters'.
Read more about this topic: Marshall Rosenberg
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“In my state, on the basis of the separate but equal doctrine, we have made enormous strides over the years in the education of both races. Personally, I think it would have been sounder judgment to allow that progress to continue through the process of natural evolution. However, there is no point crying about spilt milk.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)