I Am Not A Product

Close your eyes for a minute and just listen to my voice.

How does it feel to be surrounded by strangers in the dark? Are you holding on to someone? Are you afraid?

Think of a time when you held on to a child's hand and led them into a new classroom or a new place, or when you went to school for the first time. Can you remember how it felt having new eyes staring at you, making their own judgments of you, without talking to you — just staring at you, prejudging your ideas, your dreams, your way of thinking? Like a product waiting to be sorted and boxed.

You can open your eyes.

What kind of memories did that stir up for you? For me it was one of fear: leaving my parents' hand and going into a classroom for the first time with a person I did not know and children I had never met. I remember running — well, actually sprinting — back to the car, not wanting to stay, hoping my parents would take me by the hand and say, “Jillian, it's okay, you don't need to go to school.” Instead I was gently marched back to the teacher, who gained my trust by taking my hand and allowing me to sit or sleep in the corner of the classroom with my blanket for a while, until I felt comfortable to learn.

That teacher connected with me and understood that for me to learn I needed to trust her and be comfortable. By understanding my learning style, the teacher, Ms Hafferjee — like my parents — became the water that developed, motivated and inspired the seed in me to start growing.

How we teach now

But times have changed, and instead of education evolving to meet the need of the child, it has evolved to meet the need of finishing a curriculum. So now this is how we teach our children: we place them in our classrooms like products on a shelf. We tag them as potentials and problem children, then grade them all with the same exam. We take no time to examine their feelings of fear, excitement or self-belief. Instead we expect them to be more than we were, without listening to them, seeing their dreams, and hearing their emotional outcries.

Education and self-belief are so intertwined in how we develop that it is becoming increasingly impossible for students to learn within schools. Not only does the educational system not connect to the belief of the child, but it instils a false base from teachers who become disconnected from the learning need of the child.

We are all unique, with our own set of ingredients that connect to others and cannot be grouped and lumped together. This idea of “unique learning” began on the shores of Durban during apartheid with my great-grandfather, Reverend BL Sigamoney, who first opened a boxing club with Nelson Mandela, then started the first Indian boys' school, St Aiden's; my grandmother, Marjorie Sigamoney, who was the first female Indian principal; and both my grandfathers, Reginald and Desmond Sigamoney, who developed thousands of students in their home in their own style of learning.

Their passion continued through further generations, including me as a young pre-med student over fifteen years ago, through the idea of: how do we learn? And over 3,000 students later, from around the world to my home soil of Africa, the ICanLearnProgram methodology practises the idea that love needs to be at the centre of the educational journey — so that the child is developed through his or her own understanding, motivated through self-love, and inspired through his or her own dreams to be the world changer and contributor to society.

I strongly believe education should evolve to understanding the child by changing how information is received. It is not just about throwing it out there for children to grab onto — education is about allowing the receiver to take in the information and make it his or her own. And it is in this evolution that it has to evolve from our homes to the classroom.

Asher's exam

A few weeks ago my son Asher wrote an exam, and the question on the exam was: what is the cause of family problems? He answered: one, having too much money. Two, making others bleed. Three, not caring.

So I asked him why he answered the question this way. He said: “When I have a lot of money and I want to buy something and you say no, obey me — because we will have a family problem. Or when I hit my brother and he bleeds, then you say I am making a family problem. And if I don't care to listen to you, you say being disrespectful is why we have a family problem.”

I had to smile, because with that answer he was not wrong. He took the information into his environment and made it his own — nothing in the textbook matched for him. And that should be the goal of education.

Product X

When I think back to my schooling — which was a long time ago — my teachers had no idea which group I needed to be in, because I was a Product X that could not fit their mould. I was the artist that wanted to jump over the moon, and maybe explore for a while and build a treasure there. Some of you may know children like that. So, me as a product: I did not fit the mould of an artist, a sportsperson or a scientist, but instead I was a combination of it all.

I was so misunderstood as a learner that at age eleven I was proclaimed a slow learner by one teacher, simply because I was too shy to read aloud or give a speech. The sad reality was that I was not afraid of reading in front of my teacher, or talking aloud to her — so she thought she was correcting my learning problem, when in fact she was simply making me believe that there was something wrong with me.

But my parents took the role of being more than just observers with a list of wrongs that schools were doing. They became part of the journey that developed me beyond the classroom. They stepped into the chaos and evolved education from our home to the classroom. They became the bridge that filled the gaps with love, and motivated and inspired the seeds within me to grow beyond my own expectations. Thank God for parents that see the potential in their child, because they make the best cheerleaders and are the building blocks of a child's future.

Abe, and Alrod

Let me tell you about Abe, who was told by his teachers that he needed to be moved to a special learning class and be put on a drug, because he was not fast enough for his regular classroom. His parents refused both ideas. After working with him, it was clear to see that his thinking was rather advanced, and his slowness was more boredom than a learning difficulty needing medication that makes zombies out of our children. Because he was advanced, he struggled to understand his emotions — his excitement in learning overwhelmed him so much that he tensed up and at times froze.

Not one of his teachers at the time tried to see his learning point of view; instead they made him a default product and made him believe something was wrong with him. When he learnt to understand himself and adapted his learning to his environment, he went on to achieve more than expected. He completed a code camp and created an app, he was confident enough to make the cricket team, and he recently finished third in his class and sixteenth out of seventy-five students who participated in the international exam.

Why do we do that — make children default products because we don't understand them? Children can adapt, and so with all bravery our little ones adapt to an outdated, uninteresting, unencouraging school system with over-stretched curriculum structures and expectations that make them believe there is something wrong with them if they don't achieve to the level of their teacher's or parent's standards. This has been the heartbreaking saga of many teen suicides — believing something is wrong with them.

Then there's Alrod, who came into my tutoring centre. He had gone from school to school and was on the verge of being asked to leave the school he was in. His mother was beside herself, but she knew he had possibility and the ability to learn. At nine years old he was reading three words a minute and was unable to count beyond twenty. On average, a nine-year-old should be reading over eighty words a minute. He had taken in the belief that something was wrong with him, and had no self-esteem.

But he was brilliant. With curly red hair and a smile to melt your heart, he had a brilliant mind for invention. He loved trucks and could tell you every part in a truck, including how to adjust a hydraulic system so it would lift the truck bed higher — all this at age nine. If one of his teachers had taken a minute to understand him, they would have realised he learns by seeing, touching and feeling, like most of us do in Africa, and that they needed to teach him from a place of visual understanding to written, and not the other way around. It was in understanding himself that he learnt to adapt in any learning environment, and within a year he was reading 102 words a minute with 100% comprehension. He is now a qualified mechanic and still has a passion and love for trucks.

Love as the solution

So our educational system fails the child, the teacher and the parent. But it is just too late to point fingers in a failed system — and it is never too late to inject love as a solution into a failed system. By doing this, the child becomes an individual in a learning plan that is more balanced at nurturing his or her needs. The Product X is then transformed into the contents it holds.

Love starts with the idea of teaching through understanding, teaching through no pain, and teaching with the idea of failure. “Perfect love casts out all fears,” as believed in the Christian Bible. But from what I have seen in classrooms today, learners are not given opportunities to express their ideas as part of understanding the child, teachers still hit children, and children are not taught to fail and to learn that failure is part of the process.

Love is the one pure emotion that can bring life to a lifeless system and transcend it beyond itself. The marriage of love within a school system or educational facility removes the robotic idea that everyone thinks the same and can thus learn the same. It breaks down the idea of a child “must learn” into the idea that a child will be inspired to learn. Love instils the words “you are uniquely made and beautiful in perfection” and destroys the words “something is wrong with you”. Ultimately, love re-knits self-belief and education, which gives the power back to the child to trust his or her journey, and connects the teacher to understanding their learning process.

Love combines and understands all the elements needed to grow the child: from cultural differences to tolerance of all facets of life, from techniques that worked for our grandparents to new technologies, activities, sports and pathways that work for the “new child”. Education married with love tweaks and re-moulds learning, so as to inspire no limitations that make them believe something is wrong with them.

The seed and the soil

Education intertwined with love is like the soil that covers the seeds, and how that soil is watered is vital to how healthily it will grow — the seeds being our children, the water being the teachers and parents. Seeds can grow in any soil; however, some seeds can't grow without water, and some very rare ones can. So when you're planting, it is not about the soil, it's about the elements that are needed to grow that seed: how deep you need to dig the hole, how much soil needs to cover the seed, the amount of sunlight and water that will grow it and not kill it.

But in the end, you could do everything correctly in planting this seed, and if there is no nurturing, no instinct to motivate the seed to grow, no love in the process, the seed will die and not grow. But oh, how amazing this plant develops from a seed when all the elements are in place. And that's when the excitement begins.

It all becomes so exciting for me, this idea of combination and collaboration. It instantly throws out the textbook, because it is too limited, and opens an exciting prospect of exploration: getting your hands dirty with mud and paint, drawing symbols of ancient worlds, chasing dinosaurs and discovering words you can't even pronounce, connecting on computers with people around the world, using technology to bring educational thought to life, removing barriers that once blocked learning with their limitations, and exploding it onto a canvas way beyond the stars.

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Now step back into the darkness — and what do you now see through the eyes of a child?

“I Am Not A Product” was delivered by Jillian M Sigamoney at TEDx Gaborone in 2017. This is the text of the talk as she wrote and gave it, lightly punctuated for reading.