Ki and Education (1) Everyone is engaged in education

I teach Ki principles at Ki Society’s seminars to over 1,000 people a year. Besides this, I conduct seminars and lectures for business persons. I can learn much through these various seminars because each participant is very different.

If the theme of the seminar is education or development of human resources, I never fail to ask the following question to participants:
“Are you engaged in education?”

Is your answer “yes” or “no”?

When I ask this question, most of the people answer “No”. It seems people imagine that I am asking if they are a school teacher when I say “engaged in education”. This is not wrong, but this perception has a major hole, because it is too narrow a definition of “education”.
Actually, we are all engaged in education in one way or another.

Not only school teachers or educational experts educate people. If you have a child, you educate your child. If you have followers, you educate those followers. If you do not realize this, you may think “Education is irrelevant to me”. Therefore, you may not be interested in correct education.

To be able to drive a car in Japan, we go to a driver’s school and practice driving for many hours. Perhaps we should take more time to learn the correct driving principles. However, we do not have many chances to learn the principles of driving in Japan.
When we become a parent or an employer, we have the responsibility to educate others. However, if we have not been interested in how to educate, we do not know how, and sometimes we teach others in the wrong way. This is the same as driving a car on the road without knowledge of the principles of good driving.

This can be very dangerous.

Recently, I counseled the head of a company about development of human resources. The content of this counseling was “executive officers are often not aware how to educate others.”

I asked him if he helped executive officers to understand their role and if he trained them specifically to educate people. He said executive officers just took over the process from their predecessor. He did not train them how to educate people. This is the same as asking executive officers to drive a car without knowing how to drive.

This head of a company should define “ability to educate people” specifically, and then train workers who want to be executive officers in the future, how to educate people. Those workers will then start to be interested in education. Once they are interested in education, they will be able to realize what is necessary for education by themselves.

We tend to educate others in the same way that we received education in the past. If one was brought up with getting a scolding emotionally, then one tends to educate in this same way. How you educate others will always be decided by what kind of education you received. For instance, if you were brought up with a lax education, then you will tend to let others off too easily. If you were brought up with an inadequate education, then you have much to learn from this bad example set by others.

I think it is necessary to review our own education which we received in the past. By doing this, we can have a chance to make the correct use of our past education.

Of course, there is more than one right way of educating others. We cannot say which way is correct, which way is wrong. However, the essence of education always has right and wrong.
(To be continued)