NLP Timelines- Mapping your journey

NLP Timelines- Mapping your journey

Before we start a journey, we need to know where we are going! What is our direction? Where are we starting from? At some point in the past our ancestors named the directions; North, South, East and West. Directionality eventually became unified and standardised. So as a thought experiment, there was a time before the directions were named and someone made a magical decision to invoke directionality, and later into two dimensions as a drawing, to have power over it; in other words a map was created.

The NLP timelines are process developed by Tad James in the 1980s, they used the concept that we store memories in a linear fashion. However, things get really interesting when we use techniques such as dowsing or shamanic journeying, on these timelines which is not part of NLP.

If making a map is a magical act where you are going is also magical, NLP timelines create an imaginary map in time. To discover the directionality of your time think of something that you did yesterday, where is it situated as a memory? Is it behind you to the left? Or is it directly behind you? Now think of something that you plan to do tonight and then something for tomorrow, then connect those thoughts. Where they are situated to the thoughts of the past? This becomes the timeline that you can walk.

While you walk your timeline , experience the feelings of success with every achieved landmark this really adds something to the experience and the potency of what you’re doing. Now I have classified this as an NLP technique, but it is a magical evocation of time, space and events.

When you are walking your timeline, visualise and put the emotional data into the experience. Do not think about how long it’s going to take, just focus on each step of the way, with no thought to why or how it can work. Again putting yourself into a state of in-between-ness, or non-attachment to a result is very effective. I have no scientific reason for this only my own experience and the experience of others. As well as including the things that will ‘happen’ on your journey, I  also like to charge these things up by doubling the feelings in my imagination. I find this works very well; the process for this is very simple. Think of something you can easily imagine like being happy, think of an event that made you happy, and focus on the feeling. Has it a physical sensation? Where is that sensation? Could you estimate the ‘amount’ say on a scale of 1 to 10, and then in your mind double the feeling. You could even just say to yourself I feel twice as happy, it really is that simple. (You may go beyond ten in your happiness scale, all well and good!).

Recap

So the process is to ‘walk’ the memories and place them on the timeline. Think of things in the past to give you an idea of where that lies, and then think of some things that you are going to be doing in the future this gives you the trajectory of the line.

Memory Mansions

The Greeks used something similar to a timeline as a memory system for remembering complex details in order. The idea was to imagine something like a mansion or a large building that you can walk around in your memory. Take a mental journey around the building; placing triggers to memory on objects and walls will help you to organise and remember your thoughts. So, think of a place that you know and as you enter the front door imagine a notice pinned by the door handle, this could be the category that you want to file the memories under. Now walk through the door into the hallway and the first object that you see will contain the next memory that is required in that category.

You could use this memory system on your timeline to deepen your experience, placing events that are also symbolic as well as just visual. So as an example, you are going to be taking a guitar exam in the future leading up to you achieving your degree. So as well as imagining taking the exam and visualising the examiner writing excellent remarks on his report, you could imagine the number of the grade, let us say grade 8, as an infinity sign floating in the air, and printed certificates floating down like tickertape with cheering, marching bands playing outside.

Now if the Greeks had that memory system in place it is reasonable to assume that they learned it from somebody else. Like any  number of things that have been accredited to the Greeks, for example their mathematics, much of it came from Egypt and older civilisations such as Babylon or even earlier cultures such as the Sumerians.

Much of our understanding of ancient culture has been slanted towards the Greeks and the Romans as the West is a classical influenced culture. Much of this is based on Victorian and Edwardian ideas that the Greeks and the Romans were the originators of many innovations; of which they were not. It is becoming abundantly clear now that cultures such as the Sumerians and Babylonians set up the number systems that the Greeks used, and I would guess what we understand as psychology, that is usually ascribed to Classical Greece (even the word is Greek) probably was understood by their earlier Mesopotamian counterparts. Let’s face it they organised massive cities, and of course we must mention the Chinese, as they were at least the equal of anything from Mesopotamia and they would fill another book on the subject.

Cost analysis

Writing something down was very complicated particularly if it had to be embossed into clay, or one had to create papyrus or velum. Even then only a few people could write or read, therefore storing masses of data in your head was a good idea and cheap.

We know that the Homeric tales such as the Iliad were originally memorised and then transmitted orally. It was a few hundred years before they were written down. We also are not sure that Homer existed as one person, like many people in the ancient world, particularly if they were slightly mythical, may never have existed. Blind storytellers however did, having prodigious memories to remember massive sagas; we know this is to be true because good storytellers even now have the capacity for many hundreds of tales in their repertoire.

So the concept of the map and the timeline may be more to do with our cognitive processes in regard to how they work than about the map itself, just as computers reflect our memory, this reminds me of the biblical term’ God made man in his own image’. This is true when it comes to humans, as well as God, that we create the concept of journeys and time and distance, maybe these things actually don’t exist as such, that’s just how we perceive the world. A little while ago it was inconceivable to think of time as being ‘unreal’, but now with the scientific exploration of quantum physics we realised that time isn’t as we think it is, and space isn’t what we think it is either. I think a lot of people understand that time is strange; we haven’t quite got around to the thinking of distance being strange yet. Apart from walking in a straight line around the world you would actually end up back at the same starting point. If we consider the universe as a hyper sphere not only are we unknowingly moving in a circle in directionality, maybe we are moving in the circle of time as well. Therefore our relationship of time and space are truly a function of our minds, and not reality as such.

Reverse Time

Think of all the self-help books who talk about visualising what you want in the future as if it has already happened. Many of them use the NLP process of working back from the future to your position now, a sort of ‘reverse time’.

So the question here is if they are all using a similar concept can they all be wrong, considering many are involved successfully in sport psychology, and in the case of Anthony Robbins(love him or hate him), who is active in coaching successful sports stars and business people; he has a great following who can attest to the effectiveness of his ideas.

So for the sceptics there are many people who have highly successful results using these methods.

One case in point is Robbins’s work with Andre Agassi, who had dropped from in the seedings to lower than 200 to return to the top five seeds within a year after being coached by Robbins.

So within a thought experiment lets name all this ‘magical thinking’, although psychology shies away from this label, an NLP only masks this, although Bandler and Grinder published a book on NLP entitled ‘The Structure of Magic’, and Garner Thompson’s book about using language within the medical profession was called ‘Magic in Practice’. Understanding that words are magical and we use them to cast a spell, whether that is in advertising, politics or courtship is exactly what using words is doing, we are spelling them. Magical thinking is free, therefore try it because if it works then that is fantastic, and if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost anything.

So continuing our thought experiment, let’s look at a typical map and see what it contains. Now think of your time with those map elements added to it like hills and valleys shown as gradients. Think of the land marks that you can place on your timeline to represent things that need to be reached on your journey. Draw it out and make it real, then in an open space walk your timeline. Be creative, place signs which you have written out on the path to represent the places on the map that you have drawn. Feel the hills and valleys and places that you have created.

This brings to mind the rock art of the San people of South Africa which dates back thousands of years. They were possibly drawing out the spirit world, there are ladders leading to the other world drawn on to the rock. It looks like it is the place they go to call for rain and for the Shaman to talk and be at one with the spirits, similarly the Sami people of Scandinavian lands drew the map of the spirit world onto the drums that they used for their shamanic journeying.

Ritual

This is an aspect of human consciousness that goes back into the mists of time. We ritualised many things that we do, from how we get dressed in the morning, how we clean our teeth, to how we do the washing up, or who goes to the bathroom first, it is all a ritual, it is more or less the same every day, why do we do that?

Firstly we need patterns we are pattern creators, and pattern finders. Again this says something about us, but if we make a ritual in the fullest sense it really kicks us into another gear.

So if you ritualised what you’re doing, it seems to have a multiplier effect on your consciousness. The ritual can be anything you want, you could create the spirit of the map in your mind that you make an offering to. The offering can be a glass of water, a piece of bread with some salt. A glass of whiskey or a glass of vodka, anything that you feel has some potency to your ritual. If you are inside a house you could light a candle, burn some incense, put some flowers out, offer prayers, sing a song or dance wildly. But most of all use your imagination.

When I was doing my NLP Master Practitioner training in London many years ago, I was talking to a young Sikh about Muhammad Ali, that he would tell the story of the fight that was coming up. Muhammad Ali would go through each round saying when he was going to knock his opponent down and that he was the greatest. Even as a kid I noticed that the fight would often go exactly the way that he had said. It transpired that Muhammad Ali was future pacing the event by imagining the fight in advance. My friend who was on the course said that was exactly what the Sikh Warriors used to do before battle. They would go into the future and fight in the spirit world to ordain the outcome of the conflict.

When Muhammad Ali was beaten by Joe Frazier his explanation why he lost was that Joe Frazier had dreamt the fight better on that occasion.

Tools for life, let’s go for £10,000!

Henry Corbin the French philosopher and an expert in Sufi mysticism wrote the Mundus Imaginalis; in which he explored the idea of the imagination as a real place that can affect this world. His work was a great influence on James Hillman, and possibly Carl Jung with his ideas on ‘active imagination’.

The imaginal world,as Corbin stated, has been believed by all cultures through time, apart seemingly for our own. Over the 200 years we think of this as progress, or for the majority of the people on the planet it is considered stupidity!

For many it is the central point of belief which makes sense to their life, and also gives them some form of control of the vagaries of life. In other words it becomes a fundamental tool for life like some sort of compass and sextant that would have been of use to navigators. Let us consider this as a fundamental tool for creative people. It lies in the ability to navigate the imaginal realm, without which you may not be able to create. So how and why have we arrived at this form of poverty, discussed many times, that the creative process does not exist within the intellectual rational aspect of thinking; that it is the role of the editor in the tidy up, but in contrast creativity lies in the imaginal landscape of the unconscious.

Where would the film industry, music, dance, forms of artwork, storytelling, myth telling, religion or your own narrative of who you are, be without imagination? This for me is a crucial question! In this day and age it is not so much a case of who you are, but what can we imagine ourselves to be, or better still what do we imagine ourselves to become!  So let us try a little experiment, imagine that we are £10,000 or $10,000 better off. Do not imagine that you can get it tomorrow or the day the day after, imagine you have it now! Imagine that you have just banked the cheque, see it in your bank account,  in whatever form you find and easy to experience, plan on how to spend it. What are you going to get for the £10,000? What would you do with it to make you feel good? The more emotional content and sensory input that we give to this , will assist the experiment.

Then once have you used your imagination forget about it, but accept that it is on its way just like you have made an order for something, and you are just awaiting its delivery. Over the next few weeks see what transpires, generally what happens to me is a lot of peripheral things start to fall into place. I start noticing the things that I thought about spending my money on in bizarre ways, I start seeing adverts for it, articles in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room; it might be a program on the radio talking about something connected to what ideas I have put out.

For our experiment make sure the alleyways are open for that money to manifest, so that fortune may shine upon you. Now a word of caution; I experienced receiving money virtually down to the last pound to what I asked for, but in my case it came as a result of an accident and I suggest that you have a way of that money arriving, like you do a few competitions, you may have premium bonds or some other lottery involvement, you may be applying for a raise, but just keep an open mind to what you have just done, and see what happens.

If the £10,000 doesn’t turn up, but some other peripheral weirdness happens through this creative process, that is cool anyway! This is because it starts to point to the fact that creative processes can walk reality, and bring things into being, even if it is only the weird stuff, and if it doesn’t you have not lost anything, so it is worth a shot!  For those of you who have success with this little experiment, think about what you’re going to write your next song, play, poem or choreography about? It will certainly be more optimistic!

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk three days playing in a rock band now in its 14th year, held in the UK

Are you feeling lucky, punk?

I have often pondered whilst creating music and teaching creativity, have we got it wrong?

Is it possible that from the age of Enlightenment onwards it’s been a race to the bottom, have we inadvertently thrown out important elements of thinking and attempt to be rational?

We are conceited, positioning ourselves above those from the past, and being superior to traditional people, because of our education.

We are born into countries that are modern and then away we are lucky, but have we lost something that people living in simpler times and in societies that we would look at as being rather backward have not?

I am not trying to sugar-coat what life is like in these communities or that we would be better off returning to those times or those ways of thinking but there truly seems to be something missing in our modern Western society. For me the evidence of this is the deep unhappiness that sits within people. There is a definite chasm that has opened up in the people who live in the United Kingdom because of political allegiances and possibly this is true in America with the people pro Trump and anti-Trump. But the evidence is also found in the high levels of depression and suicide amongst the young. Where is the love for life? It seems to have been replaced by a feeling of angst, whether this is due to pressure within the education system to achieve such an early age, our loss of spiritual identity due to modernity which might explain the rise of paganism both here and the US or whether there is a feeling of hopelessness that to get on your gonna be saddled with so much debt that you would never be able to afford your own home, this is a shocking indictment and shows the farce of progress.

So can we bring back some of these elements that we have thrown out with the bathwater? Can we believe again in luck and what’s more can we start to tip probability in our favour by believing in it? Dr Wiseman wrote a book about being lucky, in this book entitled The Luck Factor. Richard Wiseman conducts experiments on people who consider themselves lucky and those who consider themselves unlucky and he finds evidence that the belief enables the lucky people to find things that the unlucky people do not.

The anthropologist Eduardo Kohn who studied magical practices within traditional societies said that there is more than more instances of magical events within traditional societies who believe in magic than in those who do not. To the rational mind that sounds like people deceiving themselves. But are we beginning to see that the rational mind is actually deceiving us?  because what it isn’t allowing us to be aware of is that the unconscious moves in peculiar ways, chance happenings chance meetings that fulfil ideas that are in your head, none of these are logical and many of these statistically improbable but they happen.

Now I spent many years writing and teaching people to become successful musicians and if you look at the statistical probability of these people succeeding it is virtually zero the numbers of bands that exist chasing after success, and these people need an irrational belief that they will succeed in order to survive and gain any form of success.

So let’s put luck back on the agenda and let’s start viewing things optimistically in order to at least have a chance to succeed. Maybe that belief in luck might increase your chances of things that are probabilistic I like somebody’s definition of probability and possibility, ‘there is a rich man in a car, it is possible for him to get out of the car and dodge traffic and come over to you and give you £1000 but he probably will not’, unless you increase the probability that he might, maybe this is where luck comes in.

So the question is, ‘Are you feeling lucky, punk?’

Vic

Come to blues camp running this year in July in the lovely Tonbridge School in Kent visit www.bluescampUK.co.uk for full details

See you there

What would you do if you knew couldn’t fail, would you write about; if you knew that a song could create a reality?

The first part of this question is a premise from NLP, designed to focus the mind about change.

For change to happen we have to either believe that it can, or better still suspend our disbelief , because it is our belief systems that tend to hold back this is often enough. Taking this idea further if you are a musician what would you write about if your song could create a reality? Just for a moment allow the possibility of this being plausible, so that we can create!

My guess would be that the writing about lost love or  how difficult life is would not only create a cliché, but it also might set the mind on the course to look for that situation to fulfil.  For a change to happen we must write something far more positive, for example about having money,  or having happiness.

Interestingly successful artists do tend to write positive songs! The most obvious who spring to mind are The Beatles, who wrote about love and quoted the word more times than any other band in existence, and they seemed to do quite well in reflection! But along with those, are artists like Robbie Williams, Bob Marley, Abba, Queen, Neil Young and Michael Jackson.

Whether or not the Beatles were in the sub zeitgeist of the time, or whether they actually helped to make that ‘Love Movement’ happen in the 60’s is obviously debatable, and obviously they were not the only ones! But, there is an interesting interaction between art and reality; as in the quote’ life mimicking art’. So it must happen enough times to be obvious to the general population, that there is a certain amount of conjuring the future through art.

I think the unexpected outcome of this is the fact that we end up with interesting pieces of music. I have been experimenting with this concept with people at Bluescampuk,  and private pupils for couple of years. There is something in that creative process that is worth pursuing , and in some cases produces some weird results. It doesn’t have to be a song, it could be a poem; just  create something that focuses the mind in a different direction than just rambling through some crude clichés!

I would be interested to see some of your results; which you can send either at my website www.vichyland.com blues camp website which is www.bluescampUK.co.uk

Let the process begin!

Vic

Is it the beginning of the end for the fee paying schools in the UK, or just being able to teach musical instruments in them?

This is a question which I have pondered quite a lot in the last year or so, from the perspective of the visiting music teachers because they are an important part of their income.

Let’s face it the public schools in the UK have survived two world wars and although many went bust there are a number that have survived since the time of Henry VIII, but maybe the Internet is a bigger threat than Nazi Germany! Technology has already managed to dismantle the music industry, and also the world of the newspapers; it is also doing a good job taking on the world of publishing!

I read a little while ago an article by Lorena McKennitt, about the effect that technology had on the music industry with open full-scale piracy being the norm now for public schools. It’s not so much piracy, but the fact that education can be undertaken on the Internet for very little money. Schools have become part of the childminding industry as an unintended consequence for some, they have developed this as a side-line business with breakfast clubs and after school activities.  What would you do with your children when you go to work everyday? If you can have a school activity to put them in that solves the problem.

So what I’ve seen recently is a squeeze on lessons from the point of view of cost, and of time; these are some of the games that are played on the peripatetic music staff.

 The cost of lessons is increased to the parents, but remains fairly consistent to the music teacher. Now I experienced this first hand with one of the fee paying schools that I worked where the rate was only going up (if it did go up) by a percentage point per year , but the parents were paying significantly more each year. The cost reached £50 an hour  of which the music staff were only getting  (with everything included such as pension payments and petrol and supposed holiday pay) £30 an hour maximum. Now the reason behind this I fully understand from a business perspective, because the school suddenly had an unexpected increase in costs from the Church of England. They owned the land that the buildings sat on, took the pepper corn rent thousands of pounds in a year, adding this to costs of government guidelines on child protection and the increase in the employers contribution to the teacher pension fund they were looking for as many soft targets as possible.

Time that staff contribute for free

The other game that is played is when the pupils cannot have lessons, so that could be the whole of the lunchtime, church services and if the school is attached to a cathedral et cetera that becomes even more pronounced. Lessons where the pupil is taken to play sport or there’s a school trip, and often in these cases the teachers are never advised in advance. So like a zero hours contract if you are not teaching, you often are not being paid.

Streamlining timetables 

The so-called streamlining of the school timetable where the lessons have to coordinate to the timetable which will mean there could be up to 10 minutes lost time per lesson; the academic lesson is 40 mins the music lesson is 30minutes which means there is 5 minutes for a pupil to arrive at the beginning and 5 to leave. This results in a significant drop in the income of the peripatetic teacher.

Now I’m not sure whether the streamlining effect is something to do with inspection bodies suggesting better use of time et cetera, and then the school tick boxing by doing this sort of thing. But I feel this all comes from a perspective of desperation on the part of the school administration, because even a successful school with plenty of staff still has to take these jobs to already stretched employees in order to cut costs. 

Often these schools are in old buildings 

Most of these independent schools are in old buildings which brings with them a significant problem of upkeep. This is part of a problem that in some cases they may also be in listed building, which increases the costs considerably.

Who is paying the fess?

So now factor in who are the people paying the fees at these schools, and if these people are also under pressure financially because of problems in the workplace 

You only need to have one highly successful state school in the catchment area of a public school and they are in real trouble because if that school are getting results that exceed the public schools, which they often do, and they are not a grammar school (although the effect of the grammar schools in the Kent is significant) and there is no bullying, and there are no fees it’s a bit of a no-brainer. 

Back in the day being educated in a public school had real kudos the ‘Old School Tie’ effect, and it was an important way of getting into seriously good employment because of the connections that your school offered, but unfortunately that does not exist anymore. For those people reading this in the US that is similar to being able to state that you came from an Ivy League College

So, we will wait to see what will happen! I no longer work within this sector, however many of my friends do and they are already saying that the numbers are dropping off for lessons. We have already  got quite a heady cocktail, so for those of you who are involved in education and teaching in schools it might be advisable to find a few more baskets put your eggs in, just to be safe!

Vic 

Www.bluescampuk.co.uk

Three days of rocking and rolling playing the blues and reggae and jazz and funk, what more could you ask for!?

Heart attack and stroke, music to the rescue

It is close to a year since I had a heart attack and stroke, and what has music done for my recovery? 

At the end of January last year I had a heart attack, two days later a stroke.  Fortunately the heart attack was at home, my wife was there to call an ambulance; the stroke happened while I was still in hospital. This will explain to those of you who follow the blog why there has been a considerable break!

I obviously recovered well from the stroke, and although the lasting effects are quite subtle these are significant because they affect certain elements of my musical memory, and performance capability.

Most of this is to do with multitasking and learning new songs. It definitely takes me longer to process, particularly if I am playing and singing. However, what I want to focus on today is how I have found that learning and playing a musical instrument helped, and ultimately sped up my recovery.

First of all I was able to play, but the way it affected me was I felt very rusty and when it came to reading music it was like reading through a fog! However, by focusing on the small aspects of the task in front of me for example, reading a couple of bars of music very slowly,  I found after a short period of time that facility improved enormously. Likewise with playing, I found that regular short periods of practice enabled me to improve rapidly.

Another area that I found interesting was my cognitive ability particularly when it came to using a computer keyboard; I was affected in such a way that I couldn’t recognise certain letters on the keys. I had to relearn how to spell a number of words, it seemed as if I was reapplying my memory in another place and once this developed, that memory stuck.

So then I started doing some of my private lessons online using FaceTime or Skype I found that multitasking, such as listening to somebody play and watching them whilst typing  on another keyboard and remembering what it was I wanted to say when the person finished playing, speeded up my recovery  and cognitive repair.

I still get very tired when doing mental work, and I have to break my work down into small sections of time. I’ve also reduced the amount of work to only two days of actual physical face-to-face teaching which could last anything up to five or six hours. After that I definitely need to shut down, and I do this by meditating or power napping.

The experience of this has not been all bad, infact I have learnt a lot about certain states such as dyslexia from this experience. It has also given me chance to step back from what I was doing , and evaluate my work. This has led to me starting a  music charity, and focusing on podcasting.

As usual Blues Camp will be running next year,  but we did have to cancel this year. Part of the franchise moved to France, this will be running as part if it next year which is incredibly exciting!

So to sum up I have recovered well and my experience wouldn’t be the same as somebody else who had the same medical condition. However, I truly believe that playing a musical instrument, particularly when it is something you already do, can greatly benefit your recovery. This is because it is using existing memory and learning something new within that framework, which helps the brain’s elasticity. I’m not sure how easy it would have been to have learned an instrument from scratch after having stroke, but I tend to think that reassessing something that is already in the mind even if it is something that you did as a child has real potential, and this is often shown in studies of elderly people with dementia.

So, I will be back next week with another perspective about music! Please check out the podcast either on YouTube or iTunes podcast this is called ‘Creative’, There are a number of interesting interviews including Adele’s guitarist Ben Thomas, and a storyteller called Andreas Kornevall. All of these people have great ideas explaining how they became successful in their fields, and how they use creative thinking.

Remember Blues Camp for next year!  Please visit www.bluescampUK.co.uk for details

Vic

The Hidden Curriculum

"I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor."

John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

It is a fascinating phenomenon within school education although on the surface it appears to be about teaching skills to people but it is more about the undercurrent of making people conform to a way of thinking. I have always been fascinated about the history of teaching and education and historically the state did not want people to know what was going on, that is why education was restricted first of all to the rich and ruling classes and only to the males. The timing of when education expanded to include the less noble classes firstly the middle classes and then the lower classes and then also to include women is a thing that fascinates me the most.

This tells us a lot about what education does because the drive to get the poor into schools was partly driven by the industrial revolution but mostly driven by what the Germans  and the French were doing. As the Germans got all of their working classes into schools we started to follow suit. This goes to show a cynical aspect that it is not really about educating people but about training and keeping up with the competition.

Today what passes as education is box ticking of things set by government and looks less and less about the old idea of opening the mind but more like binding it to the doctrine of the government think tanks. I liken it  to considering the education system as some form of thinking entity that overpowers the good intentions of teachers and even  pupils. The biggest damage that is caused by the education system is exactly what is implied in the above quotation, this idea of limitation, conformity and restriction. It is like the whole system has cast a spell over people making them feel that they cannot go against what they are being told as if it is some sort of rulebook on how to live your life and how to think. I am not sure whether we are going to get to the point like the emperor’s new clothes where we see things as they are and are able to change. It is quite likely that the system will change because it will fall apart at some point.

That falling apart may happen sooner than we imagine and it might hit independent schools first because of the rising costs incurred and charged by them. I have written about this before but there is an interesting similarity historically to the rise of the internal combustion engine, that when cars were being produced in great numbers the skills of the leather maker, the production of saddles the breeding of working horses many other skills related to the old transport system became obsolete. In reflection we can look at that and say why didn’t they see it coming. This could well be the situation in the education system at the moment. in the near future people will be taught at home or in some sort of electronic cottage which does not require teachers or staff just somebody to mind the kids and to some extent. in the US that’s already happening and in the UK if you speak to teachers much of their time is taken up in social administration and not education.

We should be able to see this coming, a change that will seem so obvious in the future but not clear to us at the moment, everything is there in place, everybody can be taught online now I do not necessary think this is a good idea because this is more of the same, the only to get out would be home educate your children.

So let’s take this back to the creative musician and teacher, what does that means for us?  The psychological benefits of learning a musical instrument may attract the type of people and parents who see that this is a way of developing thinking in their children and themselves and maybe that is our salvation, maybe the above quotation is an expression of the problems with the system generally and that we are beginning to see how much of a house of cards modernity appears to be.

Vic

www.bluescamp.uk.co.uk

come and play in a band see what you really can do, three days of fun and mischief.