TrueLife - Educating the artists of tomorrow, today!

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry Born from the blaze The poem is Angels with Rifles The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini Check out the entire song at the end of the cast Ladies and gentlemen

Welcome to the True Life podcast I hope you have a fantastic day Hope the sun is shining And the birds are singing I hope that you get all that it is you're working towards. I want to talk to you today about an idea, an idea about education, an idea that has come out of the COVID pandemic

that I think will help shape the future of our children's education. If you have young kids found yourself in an interesting position with this COVID situation, like I did. You began thinking of different solutions. You began thinking of what the future of education may look like. And here's some of the things that I had thought about. Some of them good, some of them bad.

It was fascinating to see children learning from a distance. Some of the negative consequences I thought were that children were unable to experience, experience the felt presence of the other. Do you know what I mean by that? When you and I sit down, when you sit down with someone you love or when you sit down to have a conversation with another person and you're close to them, the communication that happens between you is much different than the communication that happens between a video screen. Let me give you a few examples.

If you're attracted to someone and you sit down next to them, the person can usually pick up on some nonverbal cues that you are attracted to them. One, you'll notice a girl may play with her hair or a boy's face may be flush. It may be difficult for him to speak. He may be nervous. The same for a woman. And there's this beautiful interplay of actions that happens between people, this certain Geneseiquard, whatever the heck those French people say.

You know, there's this attraction, this magic, this electricity that happens between people that you can actually feel when you're in an engaging conversation. When you're a student and you're in the back of the class slacking off, All the teacher has to do is walk close to you and give you a look and you know you're in trouble. You can feel it. None of that happens when you're on a computer screen. In some ways, the mechanistic environment of the computer strips away the humanity from the learning environment. And that is a big problem.

I think the idea, the... good intentions of people in positions of authority were that wouldn't it be nice if we could reinvent education and everybody could have a great teacher and everybody could have access to a learning environment that was the bill of goods that was sold but once you peel off that layer what you see is a greedy selfish corporate structure that doesn't want to want to pay teachers that doesn't want to pay for rental space you know they just thought wow we don't need any of this overhead we can just you know we can just do this with a handful of teachers from around the world and they can strap on their goggles and kids will be fine and while it

sounds beautiful and part of it may be I'm not against some sort of hybrid however much like a lot of great technologies or ideas, they shouldn't be forecasted by those who make the technologies. I believe it was in Tameas that we learn from our friend Toth that he who creates a technology is usually the worst person to forecast what that technology is going to do. And so I agree that education is in a bit of a pickle. And that's why I think it's upon the teachers, the facilitators, and the parents to come together,

to create a better education system. And let me tell you my idea. I think that art is an amazing way for our children to express themselves, to express their ideas to the world, and to make the world a better place. There are some tremendous artists out there. And at my kids' school, I thought, wouldn't it be amazing? I was actually talking to the art teacher, or one of them. And we were talking about Shepard Ferry.

For those of you who don't know who that is, he's the guy that does the obey clothing. And his pieces can be pretty political. And he's got a really good message behind his artwork, I think. But more than that, this gentleman thoroughly understands the power of vivid imagery. he understands that the subtle beauty and power of the artistic image. You know, if you look at some of the Chinese propaganda, not in today's world or whatever, but if you go back and you look at the artwork of Mao Zetong and let me try to paint you a picture. Imagine a giant mural and on that mural is your great leader and his head is slightly turned

up to the right and he's looking up into the sky. Think about that image. Okay, first and foremost, here's a giant picture of your leader. So already the picture is bigger than life. And when you look at the picture, you must lift your head up in order to look at him. So your body is sending a message to your brain. I look up to this person. Whether you think that in your mind, your body is doing that. You're physically looking up to them. And think about the words we use when we explain stuff. Oh, I really look up to this person. What does that mean? That means that you admire them. So a great artist can subtly, unconsciously get you to admire somebody by the way they paint them, by the way they place their picture. And that's just,

I mean, that is just barely scratching the surface of some of the tips and techniques a really good artist can do in order to get you to think things. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and a good artist can make his mural worth a million. And I think Ferries in this category. The guy's brilliant. Long story longer, he ran into some trouble a few years ago when he went to a foreign country and painted a piece that he thought was one thing but turned out to be something different. I'll link the article below so that you guys can check it out and read it. It's fascinating.

So my child's school's teacher and I were talking about this particular incident. We were talking about this concept called creative destruction. In this particular idea of creative destruction, I was trying to not impress her, but impress upon her. not only is she a phenomenal art teacher, but through her doors walk the future artists of tomorrow. The next fairies, the next Banksy's, the next Rembrands, the next Van Goghs, all these young children with the whole world ahead of them. And she's such a great teacher, and I really wanted just to inspire her, to tell her how much we at the school are thankful for her and how important her job is.

And as we continue to discuss different artists, I thought to myself, wouldn't it be amazing if we could get someone like Ferry or, you know, even there is tons of different street artists out there that are so talented right now? Wouldn't it be amazing if we could start like a sort of residency program where we contact an Arthur? What the heck is an Arthur? We contact an artist and we tell them about our school. And we tell him that we would like him to come and do a residency for maybe a month or two weeks or whatever sort of time frame we decide. The artist could come to the school. Perhaps we could find a place for him to stay. If he had a family, maybe we could, maybe there's a place that we could Airbnb for him.

Or maybe the school has a residence or maybe he could stay like a foreign exchange student and stay with a family that had an extra room. And he could become part of the community. For the month that he was here, he could teach some classes, tour the campus, and ultimately, I thought it would be amazing if he could sit down and give the kids a lecture on art theory, not only explain to them and demonstrate to them and help them, but collaborate with them and create different pieces and sign his name and their name on different pieces. Maybe hopefully it would be all the kids, but maybe it was a hand. of our best, most promising kids.

But that's just the icing on the kid. That's just the beginning. So let's say that we could get an artist to come out here. You know, maybe we, maybe we have three residents. Maybe we have enough artists to do this year round. The artists stay with a family. They teach or help teach a class. They instruct.

And also on our campus, they paint, maybe they paint a mural together. Maybe we have a section of the school that is designed. for the artist residency program. And this could be the first year. And so the kids and the artist could paint this amazing mural together and understand what the mural stands for, what was happening this time of year. And it could be something that lasts.

It could be a gift to the school that every new class, every new year could look back and understand what was happening. Sort of living time capsule. But that's not enough. Then I thought to myself, what would make that better? And I thought, wow, wouldn't it be great if we had that happen? But we also told the artist that we are partnered with this gallery or these three galleries in the state of Hawaii. And while the artist is on residency here helping our kids, he also has his collections available for purchase and or a

available for the gallery to put on display. But it gets better. What if at the end of his residency, he created a new collection to be on display at the galleries? And in his collection was the collaborative pieces he did with the different children of the school. But it gets better still. Now the parents can come in. There could be an auction because obviously the artists that we have are going to be people.

that are worthy, are good, and people will want to buy their stuff, especially if there's some sort of collaboration pieces with the young kids. Can you imagine what that would do for the world of art for the future? Can you imagine what that would do to the well-being of a child to see his creation, his hard work, and his collaboration with a world-renowned artist, or one that will soon be thereof. Can you imagine if we could take some pieces and digitize them and make them NFTs? Non-fungible tokens. And now this kid or these several kids have been taught by a premier artist who loves the world

and loves the planet and loves art. And because they collaborated together and because it may have been in the form of an NFT, these children could potentially graduate. with a residual income for life. Can you imagine how amazing our world would be, how fantastic and how many problems it would solve? If every kid's education, part of it was when you graduate, in today's world, when you graduate, you get a diploma.

But what if you were taught the skills necessary? What if you were taught how to change the world? What if the school that you went to guaranteed your child a residual income for life. I think that this is plausible. I've been trying to put this plan in motion. And I think the whole world is trying to put this plan in motion. It's a beautiful idea.

And the world needs us more than ever. I think it can work. Another side road that I have been going down to is, while I have talked to some people about it, some of the feedback I got was to talk to the higher ups. at the school and see if there's a potential budget for it. And I can understand why that would be, in fact, that was my first idea too.

Like I should take this to the people at the top and see if they want to help me implement it. However, what I have found is that the people at the top usually are pretty busy with their own projects. And it's difficult for them to not only acknowledge that your project is good, but to stop what they're doing and expect them to help this other project that they don't really know a whole lot about. And even if they do help, even if they do have a budget for it,

here's the thing about asking for a budget or here's the thing about asking for money. When you go about asking people for money, two things happen. The first thing is, nobody wants to talk to you. No one wants to talk to somebody with their handout. Number two, when you do find somebody that wants to give you money for your project, as soon as they give you money you seem obligated to them and usually not always but usually

the people that give you money as soon as they give you money then they want to also give you their less than creative ideas and they want to invite their less than creative friends and that is the beginning of the end because that's when the project starts to begin

less interesting so rather than fund it through donors that you have to beg for. I think it's something that could be a community building, family participating, new idea. There's a lot of people that feel alienated through this whole COVID situation. And what better way to to rebuild, reimagine and reestablish education in our world than to recreate it. And this is a way for the parents for like-minded parents, like-minded teachers, like-minded faculty members to come together

and create something that's never been done. This is a way for us to fundamentally change education. Like why are parents not the main contributors to the curriculum? Why is it that the most parents don't understand what's in the curriculum? And why does it seem like, A large number of educators don't want the parents to know what's in the curriculum. I don't know if that's true 100%. However, I do know that I don't thoroughly know everything in my kid's curriculum. And I should. I should be better at that.

And this is a way for us as parents as involved individuals in our community to create the curriculum. And the way my hallucination is, is that what if a group of like-monger, people. We could go to the park and share our ideas about this. And once you begin sharing your ideas with people, you begin building the foundation to build the idea on. And the kids get to see it. They get to participate in it. They get to see the entire transition from vision into reality. They get to hear people say things like, oh, it'll never work. We don't have enough time. It's too expensive. And then in the end result, they get to see us overcome all the naysayers. And I think that that is a level of education that most kids don't get to see. It happens in the background quite a bit.

However, I think that it's something they would truly benefit from. Well, that's what I got for today about education. I love every one of you. And I'm curious as to what you think about this. So I hope you have a fantastic day. I hope that you participate more in your child's education and you come up with some great ideas to influence your child's curriculum and you should steal my idea. Find artists around the world and paint the town red. All right, I love you. Aloha. All right. So let's get up and get at them.