When kids express higher levels of maturity [Part 3]

This post is about a story that started in March 2004. It was one of the first times I deeply appreciated the potential of what an enlightenment context, i.e. Andrew Cohen's  Evolutionary Enlightenment perspective, could bring to the field of education. I was asked to help a group of five teachers at a small resource school. They were in deep crisis and nobody knew how to respond, including the administrators and the psychologists. In a culmination of events eight students had taken over the school, smashed the windows, climbed onto the roof and threw stones at the teachers.

Was this the Gaza Strip? Was it Lebanon? Was it Bagdad? Was it Addis Ababa? No, the place was Malmö and the kids were 7 to 12 years of age. But wait, this city is in Sweden, not on the West Bank.... So why has the Swedish education system ended up in such a bad situation with countless stories like this one?

As I have written previously, the Swedish culture and education system is trapped in Green pluralism, what Don Beck refers to as Egalitarian Collectivism, or what Ken Wilber calls "flatland" a culture having no higher perspective of morality, maturity, ethics, philosophy, or spirituality. Everything is equal and thus reduced to the lowest common denominator.

As the teachers lacked Blue authority they rang the police to regain control over the children. The school was then closed for three days, which is when I was asked by the one of the cities Heads of Children and Youth to help.

When in crisis you need a map. When I looked at the situation through the Spiral Dynamics lens I saw that the teachers were trapped in negative Green and the kids in negative Red. When I used Kohlberg and Gilligan's model of moral development I saw teachers who had no idea  as to how to raise kids trapped at level one "Might makes right! to level two "Treat others as you would like to be treated." When I used Ken Wilber's four quadrants I saw total fragmentation between all the quadrants. When I used the Mats Edin's Leadership Pyramid I saw a total absence of natural hierarchy, with the teachers at the bottom. And when I used Andrew Cohen's models of ego and the authentic self, I could see that everyone saw themselves as victims.

In an interviewed with the headmaster, he said, "After seven years of trying everything we have reached the end of the road. If we fail this time to find a solution we will have to close the school."

What an awful mess! Nobody saw themselves as being responsible.

What I had to offer was a perspective that came from Andrew Cohen. And the simplest way for me to convey this perspective was through the model "It's your choice!" (see above).

But it wasn't until the evening before my first meeting that I was sure what to do. I took part in an Enlightened Communication discussion at the EnlightenNext centre in Copenhagen and realising that more fundamental than any of the Integral models I could bring was the paradoxical perspective of emptiness: of knowing nothing and wanting to know.

And the only way to do that was to be it: to be totally present. To not pay attention to what was going on in my own mind and only pay attention to what the teachers were saying. When I listened in this way I found that I had a capacity to point out what was fundamentally higher and what was fundamentally lower, and when I pointed it out these distinctions to the people speaking they were able to see it just as clearly as I could. I later discovered that even three year old kids have this same ability, to make basic distinctions between right and wrong and higher and lower. But when the adult culture pretends all perspectives are equal and the kids can distinguish between levels of maturity you have a modern day version of the Emperors New Clothes.

And this is the revolution that will and is happening in Swedish education.

I remember the first morning I visited the school after it reopened. We were four adults and three children sitting at a table eating breakfast. One of the first things I noticed was that the adults talked constantly about all the problems they had. It was true that two of the boys at the table behaved rudely, but what struck me was that nobody noticed or said anything to the third boy who asked politely for something to be passed to him. When I pointed this out to the staff they replied, "Sure, but he just wants attention." This marked the beginning of a change in perspective. For if we want development towards higher levels of maturity then we have to stop dragging each other down and seeing ourselves as helpless victims. We have to change where we put our attention. I was not there to listen to their sensitive selves talk about how they felt. If I had done so they would have collapsed in tears and been emotionally incapable of doing anything for anybody else.

Instead I began with a very bold and radical statement. "Don't take what I am about to say personally: I DON'T care about how you feel." I repeated it and added, "What matters is what you do now." After ten hours of this sort of counselling, the change was radical and tangible. But I was taking a big risk and going against Swedish political correctness. I could have been seen as being a very uncompassionate person and lost a client. But I was able to transmit a perspective that gave them confidence in me and what I was saying, so that when I told them what they had to do, they did it. What mattered most was getting results, and when they saw results after two weeks everyone's confidence continued to grow week after week.

The staff transformed from a position of being caught up in unhealthy Green, seeing themselves as victims and promoting a victim culture, to recognising the necessity for hierarchy, authority and taking responsibility. They also recognised that there was no neutral ground to stand on anywhere. The model "It's your choice!" made this very clear. You are ALWAYS choosing. You are either helping development, or you are violently stopping it from happening. There is no neutrality.

The teachers realized that they had to take responsibility for what they were saying and doing in every moment and developed healthy Red and Blue environments for their students. They gave them clear choices, rewarded their positive behaviour immediately as well as holding them accountable for any negative choices and giving consequences. In a Green culture where these things do not exist we had to design them and come up with tools that would work.

The staff also demonstrated that those who lead must be the first to change their thinking to more mature levels. It wasn't about the kids changing first; it was about the adults maturing.

As part of my research I interviewed a mother who had a nine-year-old son at the school. He is diagnosed with ADHD, hyper activity and receives amphetamine medication (Ritalin). She described how her son's behaviour and thinking had changed significantly, as had her own attitude, way of thinking and parenting style, when the teachers had begun using the model "It's Your Choice!"

She explained how she, much like the teachers at the school, had been very tolerant of her son's negative behaviour and how she had now become very tough and consistent in order to help her son.

The mother had been expressing a negative Green leadership style. She described how difficult this change in attitude had been, partly because of her son's extreme behaviour, but also because what I was saying, despite making sense, was not found in any books or talked about by the Swedish child-development professionals she had been in contact with. After two and a half months, her son's negative behaviour and bad language had radically decreased. As an example, his ability to sit still and concentrate on a task such as maths had increased from five to thirty minutes.

The teachers and parents created a structure of order, healthy Red and healthy Blue, that had clearly been missing. Once this structure was in place, dynamic harmony and "going up the ladder" - as this nine-year-old boy expressed it - become the norm rather than the exception.

But the point that stunned me the most was hearing from everybody I spoke with just how much this child developed and matured. When I first met this young boy he sat at the breakfast table trying to provoke everybody with bad language and aggressive behaviour. He was constantly getting into fights and couldn't concentrate for any period longer than five minutes. Two months later all of this had stopped and one morning he amazed his teacher by asking "If this staircase is going up, then where is it leading?"