Introduction

We started this project on education in 2007. We saw different trends. Children — and their parents — are compelled by law and penalties to attend school in a disciplined manner. In the Netherlands parents with children who arrive late at school get a fine and must take responsibility through a legal process. This is different in Brazil, where there is much more tolerance of punctuality. In Japan these laws don’t even exist. 

The second thing we saw was that children aged 14 and over are more concerned about social issues like peer groups than with getting a diploma for their future. Most children in the lower income groups, we found, already gave up. School systems did not address this except through punishment. Both phenomena reinforced each other. We decided to design a program in which this repression and this loss of motivation was addressed and made programmes that we rolled out at a school in the Netherlands and in Brazil. 

The program worked wonderfully well. The children gained more space for themselves and started to be more actively engaged  in achieving something at school. 

In 2010 we published the book Dromen Doen in the Netherlands. The copies were sold out quickly.

Some findings

Educating our children shapes our society. For the most part, education systems sustain the current cultural structure of society. To make education a powerful instrument for personal growth, targeted interventions are necessary. Interventions that influence how children perceive themselves, the world, and how they can contribute to the world around them with their talents and energy.

A child enters school curious and playful and leaves it with a serious expression on his face, ready to be part of the workforce. He learns to sit quietly, accept and obey authority figures and institutions that even have the right to punish him physically. He learns not to bother others and not pay too much attention to them. He learns to arrive on time, and so on. Bureaucratic organisations require this kind of obedience. Senior management tells the workers, “We think, you do.”

In “The Politics of Experience” (1967) R.D. Laing said: “…we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them.” Families and more specific schools are the institutions through which we achieve this.

As advisers, we have developed and implemented an educational approach for young adolescents that places their self-esteem at its core, because young adolescents often struggle with this. It started with the question: what do you want to be later in life?

Want to know more?

Visit www.doingdreams.org