From: L. Michael Hall
2021 Neurons #46
July 26, 2021
Introducing the Next New
Book from Neuro-Semantics
WHEN YOUR EDUCATION IS
INADEQUATE
You know your education was inadequate if you were not educated with the ability to solve problems, to think through a problem, and use critical thinking skills to figure out a solution. If you can’t do that — you have not actually been educated, what you call “education” was only being warehoused. They kept you in school and entertained you with facts about various subjects, but did not educate you on how to think or how to learn. Teachers filled your head with what to think, but failed to teach you how to think for a new learning.
You know your education was inadequate if you were not taught about how to activate your thinking executive functions so you could identify premises, analyze evidence, challenge biases, differentiate factual, inferential, and theoretical statements, create empowering meanings, and determine implications from statements.
You know your education was inadequate if you are not a passionate learner. If school turned you off to learning, if it left you with a bad taste in your mouth for reading non-fiction— then it failed to teach you how to make learning fun, enjoyable, and a meta-pleasure. If you did not come out of school with a highly developed curiosity, the ability to stand in wonder at the mysteries of life all around you, then your education was definitely inadequate.
You know your education was inadequate if you don’t know how to succeed in whatever ara is important to you. Success is a function of the right strategy, the right attitude, and the right effort. When you learn how to learn then you know how to approach any subject that you want to achieve or any problem that you want to solve. As a result, that gives you a “can do” spirit of optimism. So if you struggle with depression, boredom, anxiety, helplessness, etc— your education was probably inadequate for learning how to cope and thrive.
You know your education was inadequate when you struggle to accurately access situations. If you react when you should be pausing and delaying reaction for a more thorough due diligence of the situation, you haven’t learned lesson one in self-management. Reactiveness is a symptom of childish thinking, of jumping to conclusions with little evidence. And that inevitably leads to poor decision-making. If your education was adequate, you learned how to develop executive decision-making skills thereby giving enabling you to make superior judgments and decisions.
You know your education was inadequate when you tend to be dogmatic about your opinions, closed-minded to even considering contradictory information or the views of others. If you can’t be wrong, and have to be right, and you get defensive when someone disagrees— you were not educated, you were propandized. If you feel wrong for being wrong, then your so-called education failed to produce the scientific mind-set of experimenting and openly exploring when you are wrong.
You know your education was inadequate if you are always focused on short-term goals and objectives and you sacrifice long-term values and objectives for immediate pleasures. If you get overly upset about what’s happening this quarter in your business and failing to think in terms of development and capacity building, then your education failed to prepare you for real life.
You know your education was inadequate if you think that words are real and if you fail to recognize the limitations of language. If you don’t know that language distorts perceptions and don’t know how language is a flawed means of mentally mapping things— deleting, generalizing, distorting things, then you aren’t aware of how language inevitably slants and biases things or what to do to challenge language itself as a tool for thinking and not reality.
These are some of the most obvious signs that your education was inadequate. There are others as well. An adequate education puts you in charge of yourself— your thinking and learning. You are then able to use your highest executive functions as you make decisions about what and how to do what’s most effective. And that sounds pretty important to me!
Coming very soon — within days:
Executive Learning: Learning How to Learn (2021).