[whistles]

It was created by someone else, and it was actually...

All of this was designed, like the school system was designed, it was like, there's that quote, was it John D. Rockefeller? Was it said, "I do not want a society of thinkers- Yeah ...

I want a society of workers." Yes.

It was designed to create product, children being the raw material- Yeah ... and then honed into the product required to make this society function the way that it is.

Um, so none of it, none of it was about education whatsoever.

It was not about, uh, fulfilling human potential even a little bit.

Mm.

Mm

... and we're not gonna do that." Because it is your job to protect your children to s- from certain, um, negative influences, from dangerous situations.

Um, you don't just let your children do whatever they want, otherwise they would be dead by now.

Um, if they were to just walk out in the street and a car is coming, are you gonna say, "That's their choice.

That's their freedom.

I respect their individuality, and if that's what they wanna do with their life is walk in front of a bus"? Or without even a thought in your mind, are you going to grab that child back to safety? So it's, it's not a mental process.

I feel like oftentimes people are trying to mentalize so much and analyze so much this idea of where is protection versus-

Yeah

[laughs] Mm-hmm.

Like, they might be, they might be witnessing something you're not even aware of.

But instead of being open and curious and present, you just ru- like, you just completely smothered them and, and, and, and just took them off of their track.

Like, they might be on some other totally magnificent track.

Like, I don't know, maybe there was an insect in that bug that caught their curiosity, you know, that could've sent them onto a thought process about like how, why is this bug attracted to this flower, and what's the chemical compound in this flower that's attracting them? They might have gone in a totally different direction, but you hijacked their experience.

Mm.

You completely hijacked their, their train of thought and tried to direct it in a direction you thought it should go, that has nothing to do with this moment of reality that we're experiencing.

And, uh, and I, I just think that that's incredible that, that we don't- We just don't even ever stop to question that.

It, in my opinion, ought to come when the child's already initiated something.

Encouragement isn't you initiating.

It's when a child initiates and then you're encouraging of the thing that they're already doing, that they're wanting to do, um, which is very different.

It's like I started taking hula classes when I was eight 'cause I wanted to.

And it's not that my mom didn't offer things.

It was just very natural.

I like that.

And maybe, you know, and I feel like, yeah, possibly in the society that we've created, maybe you can't if you want to live in that system and be successful in system, maybe you can't.

Sure

... anyone else's structure or anyone else's path.

I was never, um, yeah, I was never controlled in that way in the learning, so it was up to me even from the time I was little.

And not to say that I was, like, on my own, like, "Well, learn whatever you want," you know, like, I was very much supported and my mom was very much involved, and, uh, it was really like a partnership and we were like a little tribe, my family.

And, uh, so it's not like, "Oh, you're just on your own." It's not like that at all.

It, but it is very much like it's alwa- it was always my choice, because it's my brain.

It's my life and it's my brain, and it's, it's no one else's.

[laughs]