Is Our Educational System Broken? Maybe Not - JW Wilson

Welcome back to Your Brain On Positive. All the love and support you need is residing inside of you. And we're going to make it easier to turn it on.

When it comes to intelligent conversation, I don't have to look very far, all I have to do is reach out to JW Wilson. And sometimes it's an intelligence level beyond my vocabulary. And what I love about talking with JW is that he can bring it down to what I can understand and digest. So thank you for being here. JW. Glad to be here. Thanks so much. Here's what I want you to do. The one thing that we're known for at the Make it a great day book is the story of a day where you stubbed your toe, but you didn't let it stop your life is in fact, it ended up being your inspiration for what you're doing that. And that's the story I'd like to hear from you. See, the challenge Jay jabya with you is that you don't have a memory of stubbing your toe very often apparently. Most people can to answer the question on the journey to be who you are now, to be doing what you're doing now to be making a difference in the world with the topic you're talking about. Now. What went wrong? What got bad? What got painful? You flirted with this when we talked once before?

Yeah. Oh, well, what happened was I'm dyslexic. And I'm also ADHD. So when I went into the school system, I didn't fit. And I wasn't the only one that didn't fit. All I needed to do is look around the room at 24. And recognize there are a lot of other people it didn't fit.

Hold it. What did it look like? Smell like feel like I don't want you to tell me about your worst day. I want you to take me into it as if you are reliving take us to the day that you realized you didn't fit.

Well, I was probably day one.

Basically.

Okay, I'll make I'll make it easier for you. Take is to the day that you realized you not only didn't fit, but that somehow that made you wrong? Broken. Or

that's not me. I didn't I didn't do that. Okay, I thought they were wrong. I didn't think I was wrong. I thought they were screwed up, not me. I recognized that didn't fit the system. And I recognize that was painful. But I didn't sweat

it. I recognized that it was painful. Would you take me to little tiny JW on the day that it was painful. Because you're very good at not making anybody wrong. But you're also not allowing us to come into the story and be on the journey with you. Because you went on a journey. Live we all do. You had some ups and downs. JW your worst day might be the day that you didn't ask somebody out for a dance in high school or junior high school. Yeah, or you did and they turned you down? Or they said yes. And you realize that was a mistake, you've

got a construct in your head, and I'll try to dive into it. And then and then follow it.

Well, what I'm trying to do is help people relate to you. So I want I'm trying to pull a story from you that other people can see themselves in with some kind of common character. And because you are not a common character. It's not it's something that I'm going to be playing with. And this is an actually this is going to make for a great story. Just this discussion.

Yeah, I mean,

okay, so let me ask you this. Are you married? Yes. Okay, how long have you

been with God? 40? Some years. 45 years?

Kids? Yes. Cool. All right. So on the assumption that your kids were never in trouble and never trouble and you never had sleepless nights, or had any of the disconnects between how you thought to parent and how your your wife thought to parent, what does go with that assumption that your life was perfect, and that your kids are perfect, and you've never had any Charles, and yet you've tackled one of the biggest challenges in the world, which is why are people in so much pain every day? Why are our kids taking their own lives? Yeah. Now I'm going to go where angels fear to tread there, there's something I'm missing about you taking on this particular pain point. While it may not have been painful for you, because you got that

the system was wrong for you. And you were okay with that. The rest of the world came

back. But yeah, I didn't necessarily think I was totally a mess. I just thought I didn't fit the system.

And you didn't think that meant you were a failure?

No, I meant I didn't fit the system. I didn't like the system anyhow.

I didn't want to be nice,

memorized, and all that stuff. I didn't like any of it. I didn't like sitting still for 12 hours a day, or seven or whatever. So I just didn't fit the system at all.

And you didn't make either one wrong.

That was no at the time I was young, all I was trying to do with survive. And, and so yeah, it wasn't until much later, until I really, I read these books on the back in the 80s, about accelerated learning, learning on both sides of your brain mind mapping, I started to read those. And that's where I got to look back at what I went through in school, why I didn't fit in why other people did in different degrees. But I found what I really found was that the struggle was that we identified a system which we think works for everybody, which indeed does not. And this is what is causing the learning failure in the world. And this is what is causing the failure in people's financial life, their emotional life. And it's what's causing failure between countries and why they want to kill each other. Instead of cooperating. We learned all of that in school. Now, we didn't learn to kill each other necessary in school. But we learned how not to cooperate because the ACE students don't mess with the D students. And so what we've done is we've created a world from the education system that forces us to see ourselves as separate. And then we need the system itself in order to become educated, which none of those are true.

Say that list again, for me.

So basically, we've done a couple of things we've looked at the education system is the only way to succeed. And we treat everybody if they don't do well, in the education system, they're not going to do well in life. When you look at the research, it's not true at all. A lot of the people that didn't do well in the education system are kicking butt and corporations and medicine and research and all sorts of varies, it just means their brain didn't fit the system. So what we've done is we've we've given power over to a system, which is broken and doesn't give us what we need. We what we need is to be filled, fulfilled, peaceful and joyful inside and said, we come out of the education system stressed fearful, and not sure what we're going to do with the rest of our life.

All right, take me back to JW. Sir. Yeah, take me back. Take me back to you surviving through high schools surviving through elementary school, junior high high school, you know, you don't fit the system, you make it out alive. That in and of itself, very inspiring.

Yeah. So what happened was, I was in a prep school, I played football. So I was in a prep school. And basically, they threw me out. I was about 1413. And then, and they said, I'll never forget, I went to the headmaster, and he said, Son, either ship up or shape out, and I was gone. I shipped out, shipped out. And so I ended up a military school. And I really chose military school because I needed more discipline than I had. My parents were both had trouble with drugs and alcohol. And they were kind of a mess. And I knew I needed more structure. So I took the initiative to find a 13 Find a military school to go to, and my parents didn't care, you know, less for them to worry about. So I went there for three or four years. And that made a huge difference. However, because I got to start fresh, I wasn't in the mood when you have a family environment where people are not functioning well. The stress goes through the roof, not just for the people that aren't functioning well. But for the poor kids that are living in that mess. And quite frankly, we become damaged when we live in that mess for a while. And we have to do things that can heal us and even at that young age I recognize that the longer I stayed in that environment, the more I would become damaged like my parents, and I needed to get out in the hurt. That was at about 13.

level of self actualization or self awareness.

I'm not so sure it was that it was at the high level of pain and watching people, I mean, even, I mean, watching your parents fight over the Christmas tree can punch each other out. And you know, there's a fire started in the living room, I couldn't wait to get out of there. This Christmas, those were the good days.

Got it. So military school gave you a way out.

And what they did was, I didn't have all that other stuff going on in my life. So all I had to do was study. And I went from flunking to second grade and the sixth grade, in seventh grade, I became the number one kid in the in the junior school at Stanford Military Academy. That was all in one year just because they took me out of my house.

So you lived on campus or lived in a

Catholic thing and went home once or twice a year. So yeah, so basically, I could go to a whole new world, and really reinvent myself, which is what I did

you know that one little peek into your life, where failing second grade, they now have done the studies that being held back a year, is incredibly damaging to a child because of the belief systems that can be formed around that. And that happened, do you not want that twice?

Well, let me tell you what, you didn't want me in your classroom either. It was like the devil, he didn't want me in your

classroom. My guy Mark was the kid that was given the notes to run up and down the halls to take the principal's messages. Yeah. Yeah. To keep them moving. Yeah, well, sitting still is not the natural state of any child.

No, but here's Jackie is what really the important part is, I may be, you know, a verbal example of someone not fitting the system. But really 95% of us don't fit the system. The system was designed by people that are primary left temporal lobe dominance and did great in school. So they design a system for everybody that has their same brain. But literally, their brain plan, teachers brain plan only represents about 5% of the brain plans on earth.

What I really want to help you get about this, and what I want from you in our conversation is not how the science works of only 5% of the brains in the world are easily adapt and thrive in the school system. Because I trust me, I get that. And there's a challenge if you're one of the 5%. Just like there's a challenge, if there's a story about how not to interview someone that will probably come out of our conversation. Because here's the deal. From my perspective, you hit upon a really, really key point, and I don't want to lose it. The point is that you created, you took advantage of what most people would consider a disaster being thrown out of preparatory school, you took and created an opportunity out of that, to put yourself into an environment where you had the potential to do something different, to create a different outcome, a different experience of who you are. So now you're not the kid who got held back in second grade and got held back around sixth or seventh grade. Now you're the kid who's at the top of their class. And so what in love was studying, because it beat the alternative. I'm sure you probably still struggled with studying, given your history, given the way your brain is uniquely designed. But you were motivated. Because studying was your ticket out? Well,

really what it was was, it wasn't I didn't, I didn't need a ticket out. I was already out. I didn't care. I didn't need the education system. They needed it. It was something the world decided it wasn't something I needed.

Okay, so you had 13 had other options for where you could get room and board away from your parents.

In my own mind, sure.

Okay, there we go. In your own mind, I get it at 13

I'd already worked I worked in a in a textile factory all by myself alone when I was 13 in the mountains of it Virginia. So I was used to being on my list a long time ago, this a 50s.

I get it, I get it. Those of those of us that come from what you so generously called dysfunctional families were at Damn, I'm not sure how old I was. But I looked around. And there was not anyone working at a higher functioning brain than mine was, I was eight years old. There wasn't anybody I could depend on, but me. And so that's the story. JW is that when we are children, and we are not able to stay children, we're not with that community, we were outside of the village without it being our choice.

It's rough on kids. I mean, I mean, one of the reasons I'm doing this work, is because I see how important not only the school life, but the family life, and really the social life of our children in our because just like cookies, we come we don't come fully cooked into the world, right? Is as as we grow in age and everything else, basically, we get baked a little different way things get baked into us. But what we haven't really done is we've created a system, where the people that have A's are the good guys. And the people that have F are the bad guys. And there's no good guys or bad guys, here's, there's no Russian bad guys are American bad guys, there's people that have beliefs that don't serve them. And what we've done is we what we've done is we've created a world with the education system, we start separating the beginning, oh, you're an F and you're a D student, let's keep let's keep these guys separate, you guys keep yourself covered. Don't hang out with a D students only out with a students, you know, we create our own separation. And really the only reason that the F students were F students was their brain clan didn't fit the system.

I think what most people are starting to get, but still struggling to believe

is what you said so eloquently a few minutes ago, which is that the education system is not an indicator of success. And you know, interesting study, Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to have hobbies than any other scientists. It's not working harder, that makes us creative and able to solve problems. It's actually playing harder, perhaps. And my first thing we do is tell kids to stop playing around. Yeah,

I mean, basically play is the primary mechanism of learning. Look at baby animals, what are they doing? Even guppies, they all play with each other, they chase each other around, they do crazy stuff. So what basically we are designed to really learn with more freedom, not less, because then that allows our, we have a time period within our DNA, which slowly releases over time and inactivate certain brain structures. And so when you're a child, and you're young, and you don't have everybody telling you what you ought to be, and you get this, you get support to figure out who you want to be. It changes everything.

So I'm gonna bring you back cuz she said something, I think that is like I stood at, okay. You go to military school, when you aged out when you graduated, when you left that very specific environment. Did you go into the military?

No, I don't want to go into the military.

That would have been shocked if you had but you know,

here's the reason why, though, I would have gone to the military. When I left college, Vietnam was finishing. And back then they had a draft. And my draft number just happened to be 360. Which means either never taken me. So I decided to finish college, and now it's going to go to Vietnam. But when I decided to go back to Vienna, because a lot of my friends did. And so I was going to join the army and go to Vietnam. But what happened was the war was over. The war was winding down and people were coming back. So I joined the Peace Corps. I said I'll do the opposite. So I ended up going to Africa and learning after a couple of languages in African dialect, and got to be an athletic director for a company country. It was great. This is a 24 years old. I would never gotten that chance anywhere else.

The power of freedom because that was what was key for me. You were talking about being in this very structured Military Academy, dormitory environment. And then you were talking about the key to learning being freedom. And I'm like, I need a bridge, I got to get for where you were that highly structured environment that gave you freedom from the turmoil of your home. It's freedom

from what is what, yeah, it may not look free to somebody else, go into voluntary school, but look pretty free to minute.

I think that that's really the biggest aha is that every single value, every single meaning that someone could assign to their life is 100%. subjective. It has an individual definition. And yet, we are trying to live in cultures and countries. And you're right, we've set up a culture of competition, we've set up the war story,

in this war story is not going to end pretty if we don't understand the neurobiology of what happens when you take sides. When you take sides, you literally cannot see reality. And this is what we got in the world right now. And the more we keep that crap up, the more we're gonna kill each other. And the more this world is going to separate,

alright, your path away from that story. Okay, because I don't think annihilation of the human race and possibly the planet is a story that most people really want to live out. Okay, no matter what their tendencies are, it's not a story that most people would actually consciously choose. And yet, collectively, we are choosing it. That's the new story, you believe requires an understanding of neurobiology to to motivate, I believe the opposite. I don't think that most of that understanding neurobiology will motivate most people. But I do believe that understanding their emotions, and how their emotions drive their actions, and that they can have choice. I don't need to understand which chemicals are in my brain to understand that I feel better when I choose A versus B. And to become more and more aware of that.

And that's a perfect example of how we're all different. Some people need the neurobiology very gradually, in order to make a change. Other people just get the idea and they can do the change. It all depends on your target audience.

That's really fun. Okay, so let's play with this. Because I love spectrums. I think that everything can be put on a spectrum. And what you just described was a great spectrum, one is grasping the concept of, hey, where we're headed, I don't want to go, how do I change. And for me, it's understanding what leads to action, which is emotions, drive actions, and actions drive results. So that was the only concept I needed to get. for you. It's much more concrete. It's the, these are the chemicals that create the emotion. So you go one step further into the biology, or maybe,

also, if you're not controlling those neuro chemicals, you're trapped in your reactive space, in what

you call it controlling neuro chemicals. And I call it redirecting my own emotions, being able to choose my emotional state, I think works for you. Yeah, the experience is the same. Because the emotions are nothing more than neuro chemical combinations.

Right. And what we're maintaining at the Institute is one of the problems that Freud has had problems. And, you know, all of our great psychiatrists have had problems is because we don't understand the neurobiology of what we do in psychology. And in education, the results aren't what we want. And so I discovered that, yes, there's a thing called the innovation adoption curve. What we're doing at the institute is not for everybody, we don't really want everybody. We are focused on the innovators and early adaptors on all new ideas. There's a curve in at the beginning, those are those people that can see the change before everybody else. And so there's, there's about there's about 11% innovators and another 7% 7% innovators, and about 11% early adapters. If you've got a new product or service, and you try to sell to the majority before the early adapters buy, they won't buy it. Yeah, so we did we do a thing called the neuro genetics of marketing branding. And when we went back and reverse engineered our target market, it were the people that were the people that understood what on understanding the neurobiology of how we learn and motivate ourselves. We're going to be trapped in our old world. It may not be true, but that's what they believe. Even that is who our target is. So this is why we tend to lay heavily on science. Because when people haven't relied on the science before, it hasn't stuck the way we wanted it to.

Got it. You believe that understanding the science and that the people who are science driven, that those two things together will create your beginnings of a curve, that if those two groups grasp that this is a science based shift, that breaking everything into because breaking everything into the pieces that your brain can actually digest, is very different. It's a very different way of educating kids compared to stuff in them, like Thanksgiving Day, turkeys are like, is the learning system that I was most familiar with, and I still prefer intensives. To this day, go ahead and let me just grok the whole thing. And then I will be able to function with all of that information. And I know that puts me way down here on this end of the curve, because I can absorb the information really quickly. I'd also put me on the wrong side of the curve when it came to mathematics tests, because I could look at a math problem give you the answer. And if you insisted, I would slow down enough to show you this depths. Because my brain didn't need to think them through for the most of the things that I was doing. It put me way outside, and it was not a comfortable place to be.

So we're talking to talking about Jackie, whether you fit the system, or you fit it to well, like you do. Right. So on

that one topic. Yeah. But what

happens is the minute we start treating every child in the room as if they're the same, we're in trouble. We're in trouble right from there no two neurons in any two of this of the 7.5 billion brains on the face of the earth, there's no two neurons in any of those 7.5 billion brains that are hooked up exactly the same way. There's not two, wow. And we all think and act differently because we need to, because if something changes in the environment, and we all think the same way. And we all go to the next water source, and it's empty, and we all thought of the same round, there's no more species, we have to think divergently to make sure the species survives. Our education system has failed to enhance the diversity of thinking within our species. And therefore we've got the problems that we've got. They're trying to make us all think the same, and blaming us if we don't think like the teachers. And that's a recipe for disaster. And we're experiencing the disaster right now. Say more?

What are the signs and symptoms that we are experiencing the disaster?

You can start with Ukraine?

How does the Okay, this is the question. Let's let's bridge that gap. How does the educational system contribute to the conflict in Ukraine?

What were the Russians told they're the greatest country in the world? Well, Americans thought we're the greatest country in the world. The minute you take a position, you've got to protect it. That's It's simple. It's biology. So what we've done is we've got a belief system, the belief system for the Russians is Ukraine's mine the belief system for the Americans is Ukraine isn't yours? Can we got a war, we're not really going to the underlying reason of why you have a belief system, what all families want are the same thing. They want their kids happy and healthy. They want their family healthy and happy. They want to have a good time and live a meaningful existence. We've created a world and an education system that does not give people that, therefore they try to find it in other ways that are inappropriate.

All right, let's give the list of inappropriate ways that people are seeking. We got a country song here. All right. Well, we'll come to the country song in just a second. All right, give us the list. What are all the wrong places to find meaning

outside of yourself?

All right, so anything outside of my own skin now you're you're being you're doing a Jackie, you're giving me the answer. And now I'm gonna make you go back and work the steps. What are some of the things outside of myself that you have observed people going to that are not creating the outcomes they want?

You know, the happiest people with what they have and who they are. Tell me. They were happy before they got it. There we go. So happy to see we've got this. So here's the this gets a little you know, you get a little wobbly when I go into the science but the lower part of your brain is your ego too.

Okay, pause, pause. It's not that I get wobbly when you go into the science, it's that I cannot relate and my audience does not necessarily relate when what I asked you for is, what could I see in my kid that would tell me that they were looking outside of themselves? I need what I could see as an observer. What are the symptoms that I could observe? Because I can't see the neuro chemicals in their brain, you might be able to see the neuro chemicals in my brain. But I can't see the neuro chemicals in the brain of my kids or my grandkids, what would I see J w, that would let me know that maybe there's some neuro chemistry, I want to be paying attention to the minute they're unhappy, really, just the minute they're unhappy,

or when they're sad, unhappy, stressed. Anything that the amygdala is stimulating your stress hormones or your neuro chemicals to make you feel bad. And what we're doing is we're taking a lot of children that don't fit the system. And what we're doing is we're producing high stress hormone levels,

okay, hold it, we're taking a lot of children period. And doing this, it's got nothing to do with the system at this point, because our current day and age, even the kids who quote would normally have thrived in the system are dealing with high levels of stress, they're dealing with unhappiness, the ones who have the most markers of success based on what society thinks are markers of success, are among some of the highest suicide attempt groups in our country,

the most, a lot of times are the most unhappy because what they did was a perfect example, part of the one of the problems of suicide is I'm not worthless, I'm worthless. And part of that is because I'm not doing X, or I need to be more or whatever it is, right? I'm not what I should kill myself. So you know that world better than I do, but what we've done is we've created an environment where people are striving to be things they think will make them happy, that won't

JW you've got a bigger ball here. What we have is a world that birds of a feather flock together and misery loves company and the true isms of our culture are leading us to create the cult of the unhappy. It used to be that being busy was like a sign of success, when really, it's a sign of being stressed. Because when we're not stressed, we're not busy, we're productive. We may be doing a lot of things, but we don't have the sense of busyness or hurry that we get when we're stressed. So there's a bigger even picture here. I'm going to shift in assumption, what if no one's brain fits the system. And it's time for the system to system. Thank you. Because every time you said somebody problem is that their brains don't fit the system. It makes it sound like some people fit in and some

everybody fits better, you know, think in one area or another. The reason your house doesn't look like your neighbor's house, is because your brain is different. You know, the reason you know the way you cook is different than your neighbor is because your brains, we do everything different. What we got is an education system that thinks we're all the same when in reality, all we got to do is look out the window and see we're all different.

Whether it's the education system in school, or it's the education system of any organization, individuality.

One time, I ran one of the largest corporate training companies in America. And literally we went in this is what got me into this. I went in and looked at the way we had a very unique way of training. We use games to help people learn chess, right? And when and this helped me with this research, I went back anyone Whoa, what is the game doing neurologically biochemically that the classroom is and that's what I started with. There was a thing called the accounting game, a company called educational discoveries design. A guy really named him I think it was I forget Marshall Thurber was involved too. But it was incredible game that people could learn a semester of accounting in a day by playing the game. And when I saw that, I looked at the neurobiology of it, and what are we doing neuro biologically that we could get to have children enjoy and adults enjoyed learning all that as if it was a game.

So we're going to have this discussion as I am looking at how to bring gaming and gameplay into the conscious transformational coaching world and into the positivity movement. So this is going to be a lot More fun

was really I wouldn't mind that I there's some really interesting things we could do with suicide with gaming, that you and I'll have to talk about some time.

Yeah, we're gonna talk about this about the interesting things we could do with preventing suicide. That's what I'm telling you think gaming. Yes, there was just a word missing from your sentence. So yeah. And what's going to be fun JW is we're going to have lots of other opportunities to talk.

Yeah. I appreciate it. Jackie. Thank you. And I do love your picture back there.

Thank you. JW. Yeah, I knew you'd like that.

I'm gonna look that painter up. Yeah.

Terry resume at RIZZU TTI. Right. That was the Double T

or LC Jackie. Thank you.

Thank you. JW. Have a good afternoon.