Education without Fear and Comparison
Vicente Hao Chin Jr.
North Caloocan City, Philippines: Golden Link College; 209 pp., paper, $14 plus shipping. For ordering, go to publishing@goldenlink.ph.
Teaching is my inner calling. I come from a family of teachers. I remember holding my grandmother’s hand, walking with her to her class of elementary children, and how they gathered around her, smiling. I learned from her how to bring joy to a class. Every time I start a new class, my first sentence is, “Let us find joy in learning.”
So you can understand my excitement when I received Vic Hao Chin’s book, which talks about nurturing individuals and giving them an understanding of human nature. It is a transformative approach.
After my detour from being a teacher for thirty-plus years of working in industry, I went through a certification curriculum to become a high-school teacher in America. The state of Illinois has teaching standards for areas such as content knowledge, learning environment, student management, and professional conduct and leadership. Chin discusses the missing ones, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, self-development, human relationships, and meditation.
The principles discussed in this book have been in place for more than twenty years in schools established by the Theosophical Society in the Philippines, with the main campus being the Golden Link College in Caloocan City. As of 2020, there were six such schools in five cities.
In these schools, the key driving element is character building that is not based on fear, competition, or ranking. There is no punishment for making a mistake. The school is a community where everyone respects everyone. The canteens offer healthy vegetarian food.
Education at any level is also about building relationships and resolving hurdles, academic and emotional. “The Golden Link schools, therefore, incorporate lessons in self-transformation in their curricula—how to eliminate fears, resentments, hatred, depression, anger, and similar distressful coping behaviors,” writes Chin.
It is not my intent to compare these methods with education systems in more developed countries. In America in the seventies, I was personally involved in an innovative engineering education program. The curriculum involved self-mastery: students studied core engineering principles on their own and passed assessment exams designed for mastery without ranking or punishment. Projects were designed to teach teamwork. It was a precursor to education for the twenty-first century. A reader of this review can understand my passion, then, about Chin’s book.
He poses a fundamental question: why do we send children to school? Why aren’t schools a source of wisdom and enlightenment? He asks the reader, “If you had the power to mold your children into anything you want them to be, what top five qualities would you like to see in them by the age of 40?” One can guess most of the answers: have a stable income, be responsible, have a happy family, and so on. Chin asks, how about happiness?
The answer is, of course, a resounding yes. But are our educational systems designed to teach children to become happier people? Chin wonders how many of us have used a quadratic equation after leaving school. (The math teacher in me paused for a second! A course in trigonometry replaced by a course in serenity 101 or introduction to integrated vision?)
Chin acknowledges that such systems exist in other parts of the world, with examples being Montessori, Theosophy, Waldorf, Summerhill, and Krishnamurti schools. The country of Bhutan aligns its national educational goals with its national goal: gross national happiness (GNH) rather than economic progress.
The twenty-four chapters in this book cover topics like understanding human nature, the goals of education, character building, life aspects of education, teacher training, and intelligence. This book explores areas we may not have thought much about as educators, and Chin nudges us to do exactly that. His approach brings a wholesome energy and balance to the classroom.
Two chapters in particular touched me to the core. The chapter “Difficult Children” talked about “resolving the root cause and not suppressing the symptom.” If children are violent, there is a reason. I taught in a school where instances of violence caused frequent lockdowns. My approach to violence in class was to only offer patient love. Nothing else would have worked. At the end of the year, a student left a tiny note in my mailbox that said, “Thank you for not giving up on us.”
The second chapter that drew me was “The Regular Practice of Silence.” We are driven by deeper layers of consciousness rooted in our conditioning. The capacity to be in touch and aware of our inner being must start at a young age, before even more conditioning builds up. A regular practice of silence for young children helps them become aware of their emotional, mental, and bodily inclinations. It teaches them to respond to their inner voice. True satisfaction lies in the ability to respond to life in that manner. It need not be a formal meditation practice, but can be a skillful journey into silence guided by the teacher in the classroom. Chin provides practical instructions akin to guided meditations that can be easily used in this context.
The principles invoked in this book are global in nature and offer a real ability to transform. The teacher in me is saying, “Thank you for your teaching.”
Dhananjay Joshi
Dhananjay Joshi is a professor of statistics and has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. His book No Effort Required; No! Effort Required contains anecdotes from his years of spiritual study.