“There will be no white flag above my door” and Ricardo Semler

When I play "Wake Up" by The Living End on repeat in the corridor where I work and think …

Suicidal education
It got sold to our generation
Wake up to the manipulation
Wake up to the situation
Suicidal education

… the other occupants in the house know that I am struggling with identity, wrestling with who I am and what I do … they know that I despair of the real experience of school for so many kids and for other more grown up players charged with manipulating the edu game. 

They suspect that, (like Grandpa locked up in the level 3 dementia center), I mean to escape - especially when I join in karaoke style with the chorus – and they are not far wrong.  If they knew about Bill’s Nietzschean inspired Abyss coffee shops  they’d know that I was framing a proposal to take on the New Zealand franchise.

The problem is (and always has been) that thinking about “learning” is something I cannot surrender.  I am in love with ideas about learning …and always will be

“There will be no white flag above my door ““I’m in love and always will be” “- “I will go down with this ship” –  “I won’t put my hands up in surrender” Dido

I love learning because I know so little about it – I am in truth constantly surprised/ excited by my ignorance – Every time I think that I might be “ontoit” I am kneecapped – which is why I cannot let "learning" go

I know you will laugh but I had never heard about Ricardo Semler until "cj" outed him as an “interesting thinker” in an Artichoke blog comment today …

I checked him out and fell in love all over again …

“For nearly 25 years, Ricardo Semler, CEO of Brazil-based Semco, has let his employees set their own hours, wages, even choose their own IT. The result: increased productivity, long-term loyalty and phenomenal growth. ”  April 1, 2004 Ricardo Semler: Set Them Free

… he's turning his attention to something grander - shaping Brazil's next generation. Education without compulsion... The man who believes in managing without managers wants to teach without teachers. His Lumiar primary school in Sao Paulo uses tutors and 'masters' instead. The masters are architects, astronomers, painters, musicians real experts chosen by the students themselves to come for weeks at a time. It sort of helps if they are not teachers. The thinking is that children want to learn and that ordinary schools stop them.

There's a lot wrong with traditional education. The real question is why do we think we have anything to add to that field and what we find is that the adults that come to us after being uniformalised and homogenised over the years and calcified in the school system, they come to us ready to follow orders, to understand what it is we want them to do, and we've realised that the only way to change this, and it's very expensive and difficult and long to change it with the company, the only way to really change it is to start working at the moment that society does all the harm to them which is really at two. RICARDO SEMLER

In 2003, Semler did what we all blog_yearn about - he stopped talking about what was wrong and "founded the Lumiar School, a democratic school where children aged from 2-10 learn only about things that interest them."

How can I persuade the Magnet that we need to get to Brazil next year?