Perception is Reality

This video has blown up all over facebook. At first, I wasn't going to watch it because I figured that it was just another mindless Facebook phenomena but the people that were posting it were people that were consistent in sharing thought-provoking things so I decided to take a look...

Suli starts off by repeating the phrase, "Education is the key" but then goes on to question what exactly qualifies as education and questions if it is what society says it is. He lists some "statistics" which mention some of the wealthiest people in our country like Oprah, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson, who don't happen to have a higher education degree. He questions what it means to be successful. He then mentions Jesus, Malcolm X, Mother Theresa, Beethoven, and others, and asks if any of those people were unsuccessful or uneducated. He says that education is about He goes on to say that, "If education is the ket then school is the lock." He talks about how it doesn't develop your mind, it simply teaches you to take a test. He says that, "education is about inspiring ones' mind, not filling ones head." He brings up that books cost more than your rent and the idea that you just go to class in order to sleep to catch up on the sleep you lost cramming for a test the night before, that you studied simply to memorize answers that keep you in the same box you check off.  He claims that he doesn't think school is evil, he simply wants you to reassess what you think of when you think of education. He says, "Redefine, how you view education. Understand its true meaning. Education is not just about regurgitating facts from a book on someone else’s opinion on a subject to pass an exam. Look at it, Picasso was educated in creating art; Shakespeare was educated in the art of word that was written. Colonel Harland Sanders was educated in the art of creating Kentucky Fried Chicken." He closes with talking about David Beckam and how after Suli watched him play and watched him calculate what it took to make a goal almost effortlessly. After watching Beckham play, he thought about how he needed to "reevaluate what it meant to be an educated man."

Now, I don't necessarily agree with everything that Suli had to say but I do agree with the idea that we have socialized our kids into believing that education can only happen in school, through testing and rigid curriculum, instead of encouraging the fostering of creativity and testing knowledge in a way that is more that regurgitating facts. It brings to the table the idea of social capital and its value, as discussed in McKnight & Block's "Abundant Community". In their book, they discuss what it means to have an abundant community and question whether or not society's idea of what a thriving community looks like is what an actual thriving community looks like. They question the systems that we've become dependent on and question whether or not those systems are necessary to have a thriving community. 

With all of this talk about perceptions, I couldn't help but wonder what this means for the Broken Windows Theory, which happens to highlight the idea of perception. It talks about how perception is extremely important and that sometimes it outweighs reality. Based off of these debates on perception, however, I wonder how reliable a theory based on perception is. The video questions what it means to be successful and educated, McKnight & Block questions what it means to be an abundant community, and Broken Windows Theory questions what feeling safe does to a community. When, at times, 'perception is reality', I wonder what that means for our communities and I wonder how my perceptions differ from theirs.

What do you think about perception? How do you think it affects your interactions with the community you're working with? Do you realize that you might be coming from different starting places?

For additional resources, check out:

The Socialization Process and Its Impact on Children and Learning for an in-depth look at the socialization process of children and the increased role education is playing in that.

Social Capital Research in order to get a better idea of social capital and the impact it makes on a persons life.

Letter from disgusted teacher: ‘I quit’ which is, in fact, a letter from a disgusted teacher, and explains what they believe teaching has come to and claims that teachers are no longer allowed to teach anything other than how to take a test.