Accelerated Learning - The Feminine Education
Did you know that the people who put together the first compulsory educational system in the US in the 19th century Massachusetts were all men?
Women had absolutely no input into it. The system was, from the beginning, a guy’s thing, reflecting male perceptions and ways of dealing with reality. Not only the administrators, but all teachers in the new compulsory education system were men. “School Masters” they were called.
Women did not become teachers until later when men discovered that they would work for less money. Once you realize that the structure of public education in the West was an exclusively male invention, everything else begins to fall into place and make sense.
Western culture is Male leadership oriented – as if you hadn’t noticed. It has tended for centuries to emphasize “male” sensibilities over “female” ones. And this over-masculinization has had a profound effect on all our education institutions in the West.
Here are some differences in the education system between Male Leadership principles in education and Feminine Leadership principles in education:
Male Leadership Features
• Exclusiveness
• Competition
• Emphasis on hierarchy
• Dominance behaviors
• Sequential thinking
• Logic
• One right way
• Rigid & dogmatic
Feminine Leadership Features
• Inclusiveness
• Collaboration
• Emphasis on community
• Nurturing behaviors
• Simultaneous thinking
• Intuition
• Many right ways
• Flexible & conditional
If you look at the failures of education and training today, you have to conclude that, there is just too much Male Leadership in the system.
We need a feminine touch in education and training. It’s not a matter of abandoning the masculine but achieving balance – balance between the male and the female, balance between the right brain and the left brain, balance between control and nurture, balance between yin and yang.
Accelerated Learning is a way of bringing in some of the Feminine Leadership features into the education field. As more corporate learning professions and collage teachers bring more of the feminine attributes into learning, the more our approaches to learning will achieve a healthy balance – and the better will be the results.
Accelerated Learning does not say “Eliminate the masculine!” but “Bring the feminine up to the same level as the masculine!” Good learning and healthy life is a mix between the two. It’s never a matter of either/or, but always a matter of both/and. Balance is the key and that is what Accelerated Learning is doing.
