The System Comes First

 
   When I first started martial arts training when I was 16 years old, I was drawn to Bruce Lee's philosophy. In a nutshell, he was against styles and systems of training, in that they would come first, forcing an individual to conform to the system.
   I was reminded of all this yesterday, in a school meeting. I cannot go into any specifics, but I can say it certainly roused my passion against the "classical mess" as Bruce would put it.  I saw, clear as day, the system coming first, before the student.  Quite frankly, it made me ill.  As I thought more about it, I realized how many students are alienated, how many are counted as an "acceptable loss".  So many students, especially those with "learning disabilities" are thrown off the cliff by the system.
   I put disabilities in quotations for a reason.. Please understand, it is not to downgrade any one's learning challenges.  To me, in my experience, the labels are often just another aspect of the system. The student's come to accept it, and then, well, you know the rest....
   I so often get great results with students so labeled because I take them as individuals, not as parts of the system.  I unlock them, I use their strengths to their advantage.  It should be about the individual, after all.  The disability is often that the system never got around to figuring out how to teach the child, period.  Again, I am not saying that there are not genuine, organic disabilities that affect learning, but there are not in the numbers I see.
   The late Dr. Don Blackerby, from whom I learned a majority of what I do, laid out presuppositions that the system uses.  They are negative assumptions, and I still see them rampant.  What the system fails to see is the emotional component of learning.
   I recently counseled with a high school student who confessed to me that she had an abortion over the summer. She is now an emotional mess.  Tell me how any of the latest and greatest curricula or methods will make any impact at all until her emotional state is cleared and balanced?  They won't, they can't.  So simple of a concept, isn't it? Yet so often overlooked.  This is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the educational system of all.