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Hidden Curriculum VIP - Commentary

Hello my VIP and welcome to the commentary for ‘Hidden Curriculum’, this month’s topic, this month’s lesson.

Now, as you could tell in the video, I’m quite passionate about this topic, because I’m a teacher, because I’m an educator. I have very strong feelings about this, because I feel that our schools, not just English schools, all schools, are harming their students.

They’re hurting them, hurting them by programming these beliefs into children and adults, these beliefs that make them less happy, these beliefs that stop them from being fully successful in their life, these beliefs that stop people from helping other people. A lot of harm is done by the hidden curriculum and I think we need to change it.

Now, can we change all the government schools everywhere in the world right now? No, we’re not gonna’ probably do that, but we can change our own beliefs now. We’re adults and we can change those beliefs and if we have children we can teach them different beliefs. You don’t have to have children, you can just live this way and help other people eliminate the hidden curriculum messages from their minds, from their lives and, therefore, have happier lives, more successful lives.

I want to read another quote from Robert Kiyosaki, which I think is excellent. Here’s the quote. “Instead of the strong standing up for the weak, we teach our children to turn their heads and turn their backs on those who do not do well. The current system teaches us that the goal of education is getting good grades or high scores on a test.” He’s right, of course. He’s totally right.

In school there’s usually a very bad atmosphere, among the children, unfortunately. And if someone is struggling or having problems, what do the kids do, they tease them and make fun of them. Of course, the teachers don’t encourage them to tease them, but the whole system does through grading and tests.

I’d like to tell you a story about; really it was my second-to-the-last education job. I was teaching at a university, a quite famous university in Thailand and I gave a lot of A’s and B’s to my students at the end of the year and when I was grading their tests at the end of the year, I was very relaxed. If I thought they had a pretty good, pretty close answer, you know, I gave it to them.

Well, about a week later, my boss and a couple other people in the department had a meeting and they called me to the meeting and they all strongly criticized and condemned me for giving out what they said was “too many good grades.” I was giving too many good grades; too much success in my class. Can’t have that! That’s not good.

Then they lectured me about the proper system of education. They told me that in the proper system of education there must be an equal number of F’s and A’s in the class and there must be an equal number of D’s and B’s in the class and, of course, the largest number of grades should be C’s. They told me this was called The Bell Curve and that it was kind of a law of education.

Now, of course, I’m not stupid, I have two Masters Degrees. I was very familiar with the idea of The Bell Curve, but I argued with them that that was only one theory of education and that I felt it was a stupid and ridiculous theory of education and they didn’t like that very much.

We argued back and forth and, basically, I just decided I couldn’t work there anymore.

They told me I had to change the grades or they would fire me. I said I would not change the grades and I quit, but that really showed me the way the systems work. It’s not just Thailand it’s everywhere, this mentality – the hidden curriculum, right?

Where did these teachers and administrators get these crazy ideas? It’s the hidden curriculum. They learned them in school too, this idea that we have to rank everybody A, B, C, D, F and that the rankings, there should be certain numbers of A’s. We can’t have everybody getting an A. We can’t have everybody feeling successful. That’s terrible. It’s terrible.

Now I don’t have children, but, in fact, if I had children, I would never ever, ever send them to a government school. I would teach them at home myself. I just feel that the schools are so terrible. This hidden curriculum is horrible. It took me years and years to get rid of the hidden curriculum and have the success I have now; too much schooling for me.

You see, tests and grades are not the goal of education and learning. Well, they may be the goal of formal education, but not learning. Grades and tests have nothing to do with learning and certainly nothing to do with success and performance. I know a lot of English teachers who got all A’s in school and they suck as teachers. They’re terrible teachers. They are boring. They have no good ideas. Their students do not improve, but those teachers got good grades in school. It’s meaningless. It’s meaningless.

The goal is growth and learning. Improvement is what the goal is. Some students start out at a higher level already, obviously, right? Some people already have, for example, more athletic ability – some children do – so you put them in Physical Education class.

Some of the students are already a little stronger or faster. There could be many reasons why. It could be some genetics. It could be that in their house they didn’t really play roughly a lot or exercise, maybe they read more. You know, it was a different kind of family environment.

There are lots of reasons, but the point is in a typical class of children some will be physically stronger and others won’t be. Just as some will already, even at kindergarten level, have a higher level of reading maybe because their parents taught them a lot or maybe they just have a natural liking or love of that and others will have lower abilities.

It doesn’t mean the lower ability students are stupid or there’s something wrong with them. There’s nothing wrong with them. They can learn to read just as well as the students who begin at a higher level, absolutely. That’s been shown through research, Science, definitely.

The problem, however, is that our school systems, from the very beginning, will label those children. Those children who start at a little bit lower level of reading automatically are labeled slow or low level and then this labeling affects them psychologically. They start to feel like there’s something wrong with them. They feel like they’re maybe a little stupid or, you know, they can’t learn as fast as other kids.

That belief will actually cause them to feel more stress and anxiety about learning, in this case, this example, reading, which will actually cause them to learn much more slowly and then over years, over several years, all the teachers keep labeling them. Oh, they’re slow. They’re not a good reader. They’re slow. They’re not a good reader. And then it comes true.

They leave schools as adults and they feel like they’re a little bit stupid or something.

I’m not very smart. It’s bullshit. It’s total bullshit. There’s nothing wrong with those people. I could take them as adults, in fact, with English at least, I could teach them to read very, very, very well. No problem, absolutely.

And, of course, you probably know of some psychological studies where they randomly tell teachers that certain students are very smart and other students are not, they’re slow, but it’s not true, right? It’s actually not true. It’s just random. It’s like they flip a coin, but here’s the thing. At the end of the year, the students that the teacher thought were smarter, even if they weren’t, but the teacher thought they were, they actually learn much more and perform much better.

By the end of the year, those students actually are getting much better results, reading better, everything better and the students that they tell the teacher are slow, they perform less well. They learn more slowly during the year. It has nothing to do with their intelligence. It’s the teacher’s attitude and belief that gets transferred to the students.

It’s a very famous research study and you may know about it already. It’s not just children, its adults, it’s everybody that this happens with and it really upsets me as a teacher. It upsets me a lot. I hate to see it.

You know another thing, another part of the hidden curriculum, I didn’t talk about it in the video so much, so I’ll talk about it now, is this idea of learning happens when you sit still, quietly and passively. Now, as you know about Effortless English, that is not how we learn. I like you to move.

If you come to one of my seminars, one of my live events where it’s a three-day event and I’m doing mini stories live with the class, with the group and I’m teaching you about learning ideas and theories and research and we’re doing movie technique lessons we do a lot of different things, we do some pronunciation things – one thing you will definitely discover in my class is that we don’t just sit there all the time quietly and passively.

In fact, many of my students joke that it’s a workout. That they’re sweating during my class; that they’re losing weight. It’s like an aerobics class and it’s true. I have my students jumping, moving and shouting, constantly. The energy level is always very, very high. There’s always a lot of physical movement happening and there’s always a lot of strong, powerful emotion, because I know that the research shows that physical movement actually helps learning.

When you move your body as you learn you remember more, especially if you connect the movements to what you’re learning, which is why when I teach new vocabulary in a live seminar, I usually have a gesture, some kind of movement that suggests the meaning of the word. So I’ll shout the word and then everybody in the class does the gesture. I shout it again and they do the gesture.

Every time I say that word everybody in the class does that movement. It helps them remember. It triggers the meaning in their mind. It’s better than me just telling them a definition. They remember it faster and longer and then they can use it more easily too.

It’s the same with positive emotion.

See, the usual emotion in most classes, in most schools is, I don’t know, what, boredom? If it’s positive, if you like the teacher, maybe it’s relaxation, mild interest, but not usually excitement, enthusiasm, tons of energy. That’s not usually what you find in most classes, not with children, not even in college or university and yet, again, we know that strong positive emotions actually make your brain work faster and better. You remember more when you’re feeling great. You remember longer what you learned when you’re feeling great as you learn it and you can actually use it better too.

So the normal hidden curriculum classroom, if you’re looking through a window and you looked at it, you would see a bunch of people sitting in little desks in rows, not really moving very much. You’d probably notice a few people in the back with their head down, you know, kind of maybe napping a little bit. You’d see a lot of people kind of looking bored.

You might see a few people at the front of the room kind of looking a little more eager, taking notes, just listening passively and you’d see a teacher at the front lecturing, just talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, writing on the board, talking, just fact, points, fact, point, fact, point. That’s the normal hidden curriculum class. Stay quite. Do what you’re told. Not much emotion.

In the ideal class it’s totally the opposite. Here’s what you see when you look into one of my classes if you were looking in the window. You would see people jumping and shouting. You would hear loud music playing bah, da, da, da, da. You’d see me, the crazy man at the front, jumping and shouting and pumping my arms up and down and running around the class.

Then you would see people sit down with huge, big smiles on their faces, but even after they sat down they wouldn’t be passive. I might be telling a mini story. You’d see them shouting answers, the whole class at the same time. Yes! No! They’d be moving their arms and their faces and their whole bodies as they shouted. You’d see me teaching vocabulary words with actions. You’d see the whole class moving and doing the gestures as they learned the vocabulary.

At other times you might see the whole class standing up, running around, talking to each other, doing very ultra-fast conversations. I call it speed talking. It’s another thing we do at our seminars. It builds fluency. It makes you speak faster without thinking, without translating and, again, you’d see a lot of emotion. People would be moving their hands and jumping around, lots and lots of energy. That’s how we learn best.

Finally, let me complete this commentary in the same way that I finished the video, which is on the topic of helping people, cooperating. When you’re playing football or sports or something, yeah, it’s fun to compete. You’re playing a game; sure, it’s fun to compete. When you’re in business, yes, you may need to compete, but not in learning.

Learning is not a competitive sport.

It’s insane to think of learning as competitive. It’s cooperative. The human species learns together. We should help each other. We should teach each other. We should learn from each other. There’s no cheating. The whole idea of cheating is bullshit and, of course, “bullshit” means totally wrong. It’s one of my favorite words. It’s a little rude, but I like it. I absolutely think this idea of cheating is bullshit.

Okay, in real life there’s no cheating by helping someone else. In real life if I have a business and I have a friend who has a business, if I help them with their business, they’re not cheating and I’m not cheating, right? They’re learning from me and as I help them and I look at their business and they have some different situations than I do normally, I’m also learning something new. We’re both learning together. We’re both teaching each other a little bit.

Likewise, if an accountant helps me with my business, I don’t understand the accounting completely and they do some of that work for me and they teach me about it, I’m not cheating and they’re not cheating. It’s called being intelligent. You see how different the real world is from school?

So we gotta’ get these ideas out of our head that we’re all alone in this and we always have to learn alone. Especially you as a VIP member, I want to finish this commentary by saying help other people. Any way you can teach other people. You don’t have to be a super expert to teach someone else. If you just know a little bit that they don’t or maybe you just see something a different way than they do, you can teach them.

Don’t think of this idea that the teacher is above and the student is below. They’re equal.

The teacher always learns something by teaching and the student always teaches the teacher in some way, even though they might not realize it.

We’re all teachers. We’re all students. We should all help each other. We should all teach each other. We should all share our knowledge with each other. We should all encourage each other. We should celebrate each other’s successes. If someone else does something great, don’t feel jealous or envious. That’s crazy. Be happy for them.

Celebrate with them. Great job, yes, fantastic.

All right, that’s my final message and I guess that’s what I’m gonna’ leave you with this month as homework. So just change your beliefs. Really look at the beliefs, some of these hidden curriculum ideas that you got in school – that everyone gets in school and make a decision to start changing these beliefs and, especially, get rid of this idea of cheating by helping other people.

Helping other people is not cheating. Don’t teach your children that, it’s crazy. Yeah, they might have to follow the rules if they go to a normal school, but explain to them these are the rules at school, but in real life helping other people is good. Please, please, teach them that.

Just go out this month and just try to help some people. You can get on our VIP site and just encourage some of the other VIP members. You can go to our normal Effortless English forum. Just help somebody who has a problem or encourage somebody who’s feeling discouraged.

You don’t have to do it with Effortless English, do it in your own life. A friend, a family member, a coworker, a stranger, give some encouragement. Help in just a little way if you can. Teach somebody who needs to learn something that you know and I would really love it if you would then come on to our VIP site and tell us about your experience. Tell us in what small or big way you have helped another person this month.

All right, well that’s it. I hope you enjoyed this topic. I’m very passionate about it. I love this topic and I hope you do too. Have a great month, help other people and I’ll see you again soon, bye-bye.