Welcome to the second episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Lina Ashar, the founder of Dreamtime Learning. We discuss how to shift from transactional to transformational teaching.

We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik.

The AI-generated transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency.

Highlights:

* “We do not [as society] design the education system or the learning sessions in the way their brain actually works. What we’re doing is like a factory model. It’s like compliance, not curiosity.”

* “I keep teaching kids about their brains and their behavior in every session. Because if kids can master their brains, their thoughts, their actions, and therefore their behaviors, they’re going to be successful. That’s a given. But if they master only what is calculus, or what this is and what that is, even though they may get an A+, success is not a given. Because you can master content, but if you have to master yourself, you’re lost.”

* “If their whole school time is spent on learning the core curriculum, where is the time for kids to specialize? Where do they get those 10,000 hours that they need to become a specialist? So you have to free up time in the child’s day for them to become highly specialized.”

* [Lina discusses one of the exercises she does with the kids.] “You take one of the things the President said, it’s recorded and on video. You take CNN’s take on it, and then you take Fox’s take on it, [and you show it to the kids]. This exercise teaches kids about communication and cognitive bias.”

* “The number one reason anyone disrupts anything is because they’re bored. My kids rate our lessons. If one of our lessons doesn’t get rated highly, we go back to redesign it.”

* “Kids can be bored for a couple of reasons. Either the learning challenge is too much or it’s too low. They’re either bored because they can’t comprehend and progress to the next step, or they’re bored because it’s too simple. One solution is to create scaffolding processes for kids who are over-challenged, whose brains aren’t able to connect what you’re teaching to what they know. The second thing is, if you scaffold within the lesson plan itself, you solve 90% of your problem.”

* “To parents, I say, please be brave. Please be more courageous. Please don’t be scared of change because the world around your kids is changing so rapidly. Embrace it and dare to help them learn differently.”

Full Transcript:

Ismail (00:00)

Welcome, Lina, to our podcast, Patterns and Stories.

Looking back, what do you think were the biggest gaps in the current or traditional education that you wanted to fix? What were the key things that you wanted to address urgently?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (00:28)

You use the word reform, right, in your question, and it’s very difficult to reform anything, especially in education. So you basically just have to go in there, do your disruptive thing, and hope it sticks. It’s as crazy and as simple as that.

I always say I’m a positive disruptor, I’m an outlaw, right? Because I’m always the cowboy trying to do very different things, especially in places like India that are still very conventional in their thinking. We were ruled by the British Raj; the education system was set up by the British in India, and we’ve not really been able to pull away from that.

Where public policy and reforms are really challenging, I think it takes disruptive entrepreneurs just to come in, shake things up, and then when it works, then everybody says, wow, this works, and let’s go along and, you know, shift the journey.

When I came in in 1993 with Kangaroo Kids, we actually only started with 10 kids. Why 10 kids? Because every parent who walked in the door would say, “Will you get my child ready for the entrance exam?” This is into junior kindergarten or grade one of this school. So, they’re saying school needs an entrance exam for a little child who was supposed to be curious and explore and not be taught things by rote. And yet, what these preschools were doing at that time was rote teaching kids. Then, what they did was almost like backward corruption; they’d go and get the exam papers of the entrance exams for three-year-olds and four-year-olds. Then, they would take that back and put it in their curriculum. So, children could answer who the father of the nation is at the age of three. That is such an abstract concept, right? Father of the Nation for somebody who is a historical figure. How do three-year-olds even get their minds around that? They can’t. So, you basically were teaching them how to parrot a response.

And that’s what, in 1993, I started getting away from. I said, No, I will not turn your child into a parrot, but I will do what’s developmentally appropriate for your child. And started teaching parents. And that’s why I write the books, because if you teach parents that there are windows of opportunity in brains that are developing, you explain it through examples and specifics, saying, a child’s got a lazy eye, what does the doctor do? And they’ll say they bandage one eye. But which eye do they bandage? They bandage the strong eye. Why do they bandage the strong eye? Because the weaker eye will now be forced to develop that neural pathway for eyesight in the other eye. But if an adult has a weak eye, doing the same exercise doesn’t work for the adult because the neurocircuitry is already pretty strong. The highways in the brain are already set. So when you explain it to parents with these tangible examples, then parents start understanding, OK, we’re saying that we’re going to take the windows of opportunity that are open between 0 and 6, and we’re going to do the right activities and exploration and allow discoveries. That’s how the brain will develop.

Neuroscience is teaching us so much day after day, and it’s still only the tip of the iceberg. We still don’t know what human consciousness is, for example. Most brilliant scientists cannot actually tell you what human consciousness is. We don’t know all these things, right? But we do increasingly know more and more about the brain, like the example I just gave you. There’s even more we know today about how the subconscious works, how beliefs get set in a child. And we do not [as society] design the education system or the learning sessions in the way their brain actually works. What we’re doing is like a factory model. It’s like compliance, not curiosity.

That’s what we’re teaching kids, right? Behave, sit down. Now, that was when I did in 1993. In 2017, I sold Kangaroo Kids and Billabong because we’re coming to a different age altogether. And remember, I sold it before ChatGPT became a thing, I sold it before AI was already at our doorstep. But because I did so much research, I knew that things were going to change. Things were around the corner. And that is what we call the creator economy. So, what do we have to do in the creative economy? What do we have to teach kids? How do we teach kids to feel emotionally safe when things are changing so quickly?

The outside world has changed so rapidly, but from an evolutionary perspective, our brains and our minds and our hearts and our bodies have not changed. So, how do we do it so that kids feel emotionally safe? They know how to regulate in these times of rapid change. And how do we get deep learning and happiness? Nobody’s saying, “I want to drive a Ferrari.” [They say] I want to be happy. But we don’t teach kids how to be actually happy.

Ismail (05:36)

Lina, I was going through one of your earlier books. I think it is from 2012. “Who Do You Think You’re Kidding?” It’s an interesting title. One of the chapters at the start is titled 21st Century Child. Can you expand a little bit?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (05:57)

Do not read that book. Because the information there is from 2012. Today, if I were to rewrite the book, it would be completely different.

In this world of AI and everything else, who are the types of people who will be valued going forward? From there, you can extrapolate the kind of skills they’ll need. Call them 21st-century skills, just call them human skills, call them whatever. The first type of person in a world full of AI is going to be the highly emotionally intelligent people. Right?

So, you’ll have AI giving you a more accurate diagnosis than a doctor, but you’ll still need a doctor to hold your hand and say what this disease means to you, and how it is going to impact your life, and some of the things you can do to self-regulate. So, I think doctors are going to change from prescribers of medicine to lifestyle doctors who teach you how to cope at an emotional level with what’s going on. So, doctors will actually understand more deeply the connection between the brain, the heart, the stomach, and the gut. The gut is the seat of so many things. We only treat the brain and the heart in terms of education, but we have to teach kids to heal their guts as well, constantly. So, this kind of doctor is going to be very different. He’s going to be forever learning, but he’s going to have a very high EQ.

So that’s number one. Your second person is somebody with what we can call a personal copyright, a personal monopoly, which is a subset of skills and interests that uniquely come together, making it very difficult to replicate this person. Like, take me for example. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of hours about the brain. And in the brain, not just reading about the technical aspects of the brain, right? I’m reading all the research on motivation. I’m reading all the research on when the brain understands why it’s doing something, and why it does it better. What does fear do to the brain? What does joy do to the brain? What are the brain chemicals that get released? How do they get released differently based on your thoughts? So my reading is vast in the area of the brain. Then, my second area of reading, which is very, very vast, is in the area of human behavior. So what makes people stuck? What gets them moving forward? Again, what motivates them? What drives them? How do people come up with deeply curious questions? And if we allow them to follow those deeply curious questions, how could their life really be impacted? And how could humanity be impacted in return? Because kids are really following a path of deep curiosity, trying to solve something, something that they don’t understand about the world, or so forth. So that’s the second type of person. So we’ve got EQ, personal copyright, personal monopoly, and a subset of skills. My other subset of skills is that I understand the science of learning. So I know how to design it based on the brain. But I also keep teaching kids about their brains and their behavior in every session. Because if kids can master their brains, their thoughts, their actions, and therefore their behaviors, they’re going to be successful. That’s a given. But if they master only what is calculus, or what this is and what that is, even though they may get an A+, success is not a given. Because you can master content, but if you have to master yourself, you’re lost.

So, the second type of person is one with a personal monopoly. The third type of person is the most specialized person in their field. So we were shocked this year because there’s an institution in India called the IIT. So everyone was rushing to IITs to become engineers, and this year, for the first time, these kids don’t have jobs. So they’ve spent their entire life preparing to be accepted into the IIT, huge amounts of money to be trained and tutored to be accepted into the IIT, and when they’ve finished the IIT, they’ve got no job. You’ve got to be the best in the field for you to be highly successful. So that’s the third type of person.

And the fourth type of person is a moonshot thinker. A moonshot thinker. Somebody who thinks in a visionary way, in ways that people don’t usually think. People who think in disruptive ways, people who think in divergent ways, people who connect the dots that other people won’t connect, people who think about how to connect A, B, and C to solve a problem somebody else won’t put together easily.

So, if those are the four types of people that will be valued in the world going forward.

I came across these four types of people after doing lots and lots of interviews, lots and lots of research, and reading. So I’ve interviewed people like Seth Godin. I’ve interviewed people like Angela D. Duckworth, the author of “Grit,” and based on this, I’m saying, “Okay, these are four types of people who will be valued.” Now, if you take those four types of people and you now extrapolate the skills that will create those four types of people, you need an education system that’s highly focused on giving kids the skills and tools of EQ, and in fun and engaging ways, not through theory.

We [Dreamstime] do such interesting things. For example, you watch one scene in a movie and you watch it with four different soundtracks: one that’s motivational, one that’s scary, one that’s romantic. You ask kids to decide on the scene and what is going on based on these four soundtracks. Then, kids immediately start thinking divergently about the impact of music on who they are. Or the impact of watching a movie on how our emotions get affected. And then you’ll teach them that when you watch somebody cry on a screen, the mirror neurons that are the basis for empathy get fired. Even though we are doing this podcast through a screen, our mirror neurons are still firing with each other. We’ve still got a sense of connection.

So you’re going to build divergent thinking in your curriculum. You’re going to build high amounts of EQ, building and developing curriculum; you’re going to give kids free time to specialize. Because if their whole school time is spent on learning the core curriculum, where is the time for kids to specialize? Where do they get those 10,000 hours that they need to become a specialist? So you have to free up time in the child’s day for them to become highly specialized. And then you’ve got to free up time for them to explore different things and ask those deeply curious questions that get them to start thinking about what problem they want to solve in the world. How do they want to contribute to humanity?

Luca Dellanna (12:25)

Thank you so much, Lina. I love what you’re saying, and especially I loved how you said that your 2012 book was already outdated. I remember that when I was at university, I was studying some books from the 60s, and while maybe the principles of the field didn’t change, we definitely should have improved how we are teaching it. And the fact that the book was the same meant that no one was thinking about how to improve the teaching.

I love how you seem so curious and always adapting. How do you communicate this to the teachers who work for you? How do you get them to adapt and change the traditional way of teaching?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (13:18)

So we have a Dreamtime curriculum that we started a year ago, and now, in India, Oman, and Dubai, over 50 schools use it. And we’re only one year in the making. Because the fact is this, that you can’t get teachers to understand the whole range of the research that I’ve done for all these years, brain science, behavioral science, the future context of the world, the science of learning, that’s hours and hours and hours I’ve packed into doing what I’m doing. So I work with people we call curiosity and excitement architects. In traditional lingo, you call them instructional designers. But if you say you’re an instructional designer, then what is an instructional designer gonna do? Gonna take some content and design it to be instructed. So we call them curiosity and excitement architects.

I do the training and work directly with each of these 80 “curiosity and excitement architects.” And what we do is we actually create digitally and physically, so we have workbooks as well, the curriculum that kids will use in the classroom. It’s scripted, it’s got all the prompts and everything else that a teacher will do.

[In one exercise we do,] kids are gonna decode what makes a good story. They’re gonna go in their groups. So one group’s gonna be X (previously Twitter), one group’s going to be Facebook, one group’s going to be Instagram, and one group’s going to be YouTube. It’s relevant and relatable because that is the world that the kids are in. Now they have to understand, and they’ve got handouts, to understand how these four different mediums of telling stories work. How do they use algorithms? How do they hook you? Kids start understanding how the brain is hooked on fear. It’s on alert for fear all the time. That’s why 24-7 breaking news is always horrendous; that’s how it hooks our brains to watch and gets the TV ratings up. So, these are the things that kids learn from doing the simple exercise of taking a concept and creating an emotional story through one of these. They put the music to it. They do everything. Now that’s a way more exciting way for kids to do stories or teach a concept that they’ve learned.

This is all scaffolded in a design. So every classroom now only needs a smart TV, which is not expensive. All of this multimedia and everything else is in the design. The scripting is given to them. For example, the teacher walks around the room, and instead of saying, “Oh, that’s a pretty picture,” she’s got her growth mindset responses, questions to ask, coaching questions, like, “What would happen if you change that color? What do you think would change? How do you think creating the story in this way is going to resonate with an audience? Who is your audience?” So, asking questions that prompt her thinking, but she’s got all the questions with her. They’re in the script. So till we can get to a space where, like, you take an IB school, how can that ever come in and be easily accessible by everyone?

That is a thought that I had when I created the curriculum I did. But it goes beyond the IB in that it teaches kids about their brains and behavior deeply. How to master their emotions deeply in a way that the IB framework, with existing teachers and their level of training, cannot do. So this is how we train the teachers. Every time they open the learning management system, it’s a training for them.

And teachers are saying that as they teach kids, they learn so much about themselves, and they start changing their own patterns, belief systems, and ways of thinking about the world. Because, for example, if you’re going to do something relevant in the world today, right? You take one of the things the President said, it’s recorded and on video. You take CNN’s take on it, and then you take Fox’s take on it, [and you show it to the kids]. This exercise teaches kids about communication and cognitive bias.

About how tolerance is not something that we’re embedding in the world, we’re pulling it further apart, creating friction and wars. We’re creating, you know, things like trade wars because the world is not seeing itself as one. Yeah, but kids will learn this through things like this.

All these activities are designed to make kids curious and then get them excited. I’ll give you an example, math’s great too. So, before we start a session, there’s what we call an emotional hook. And an emotional hook shows two faces, one of which is slightly different than the other. We ask kids which one they find more attractive. And they’ll say this one. And we’ll say, you know your brain? I’m not teaching kids what beauty looks like, but the brain’s response – that the brain finds symmetrical faces more beautiful than non-symmetrical faces; that’s a fact. Then you can teach kids how to look at the uniqueness of a person who may not have a completely symmetrical face. But this is a fact, and kids then get, “Really? Is this how it is?” And then we say, okay, research who the most beautiful people in the world are and figure out what their symmetry is. Now they’re hooked into what symmetry is. Then we show them why the brain loves symmetry in nature and everything else. That’s how our brains have evolved, to like that balance and that beauty and that symmetry. Then we teach them about symmetry, and then we want to teach them about the uniqueness of an individual. So then we show them how snowflakes – each one is perfectly symmetrical, but there are no identical snowflakes. Then they go on to create a snowflake of their own. Grade two. So maths, teaching symmetry, but they’ve learned so much about the brain and behaviour that they would not have known if they just learned symmetry from a textbook.

Ismail (19:50)

Lina, thank you for your enthusiasm about it. It motivates us as well. Yesterday, I saw a job advertisement from the World Bank, and the title was “Innovation Officer – Storytelling.” This was one of the strangest job titles I’ve seen. So, in a sense, the job market and everything are changing. I think most of the people in the policy world, economists and others as well, agree that our system, the traditional system, kind of over-prioritizes credentials and under-prioritizes some of the things that you mentioned.

There was this book, which became very popular, by David Epstein called “Range,” which kind of points out that if you’re trained more as a generalist and limit kind of specialization, maybe at a later stage… How do you think about these kinds of issues? The job market is changing; how do we adjust the education of a child to suit the rapid change in the world around him or her?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (21:15)

First thing is, I think I should go and apply for that job. Look, policy is very slow to change. I don’t know how it is in the countries you live in, but we’ve come up with the new education policy, and it’s just a document that’s taken from the best practices all across the world. But how do you go from A to Z? How do you scaffold that process? It doesn’t exist. You can change the policy, but if you don’t have a plan to execute it in its new format, then it’s of no use.

So, for me, I prefer to work at the grassroots with the kids. We’re an education brand where children see something on Instagram and go to their parents saying, “I want to go to this school.” That’s my constant challenge, because education is this strange area where your consumer and your customer are two different people. Someone buys the education, but somebody else is actually experiencing it. We need to start turning that on its head. We’ve got to put the power back in the kids’ hands. The kids know what’s relevant and relatable. They understand that the future will be different. They know how to use ChatGPT and are learning much faster than we are. I think it’s our fear of change that’s holding them back.

When I work with kids, if we’re teaching them about plants, we tell them about all the new avenues of work that are now open. In our teacher training, we explain to the teachers why the learning design is structured as it is. Because if teachers understand the bigger picture—where the world is heading—they can teach more effectively.

We’ve destroyed 52% of the world’s forests. If we don’t raise mindful consumers who feel whole within themselves without needing Gucci, Prada, Maserati, and all of that, then we won’t have a world that can sustain future generations.

That’s what we teach the teachers: why the curriculum exists as it does, what major global problems we’re trying to address, and how these children will become the leaders who tackle those problems.

Then, you work with the kids, teaching them about innovations and emerging trends.

Regarding teacher training, teachers don’t get paid very much in India. I don’t know how it is where you are, but our teachers aren’t properly trained. People talk about Finland’s education system, but look at what Finnish teachers are paid—they earn as much as doctors. You can’t simply transplant Finland’s education model to India when Indian teachers operate in a completely different framework. Your kids end up worse off because you’ve adopted a system that teachers can’t effectively implement.

The second challenge is how to put teachers on a career path that teaches them entrepreneurship and skills to improve their own lives, which in turn inspires them to lift the lives of their students.

I believe that meaningful change rarely happens from the top down. Real disruption begins at the grassroots level and then bubbles up through the system.

Luca Dellanna (24:15)

In every class, there are different students. How do you ensure that everyone is engaged? If there is a disruptive kid, what do you do?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (24:32)

I don’t use the word a disruptive kid, firstly. I say an active child.

We don’t go to the root of why kids disrupt. I’ll ask you. Why would kids disrupt a class?

Luca Dellanna (24:35)

I would say that the number one thing is that the teacher is not interesting or the lesson is not interesting.

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (24:49)

Absolutely. The number one reason anyone disrupts anything is because they’re bored. My kids rate our lessons. If one of our lessons doesn’t get rated highly, we go back to redesign it.

Kids can be bored for a couple of reasons. Either the learning challenge is too much or it’s too low. They’re either bored because they can’t comprehend and progress to the next step, or they’re bored because it’s too simple. One solution is to create scaffolding processes for kids who are over-challenged, whose brains aren’t able to connect what you’re teaching to what they know. The second thing is, if you scaffold within the lesson plan itself, you solve 90% of your problem.

For example, have you ever seen the TED Talk “Paradox of Choice”? It’s a really interesting talk in which this researcher [Barry Schwartz] talks about how excess choice makes us less happy. He goes through the research and explains that once upon a time, you’d go to a store to buy jeans, and you’d have dark jeans or light jeans. You’d pick the color you wanted and walk out. Now you’ve got dark jeans and light jeans, jeans with zips and buttons and buckles, jeans that are stone-washed and ripped—there are millions of types to choose from. And the brain doesn’t like it. The brain gets anxious with too much choice. We believe choice is good because the world of consumerism wants us to believe that, but it’s not always the case. If you teach kids this concept at a very young age, they start thinking about things very differently. So, how would you teach the paradox of choice to kids who are three or four years old? You’d start by showing them two wardrobes. One wardrobe has just two colored t-shirts, the other has numerous t-shirts with superheroes and various designs. You ask them which wardrobe they would choose from, and most kids will pick the one with more options. Then you help them understand, using a simple brain model, what choice does to the brain.

With adults, I explain it like this: Once upon a time, you’d go to a DVD store, pick up a DVD, come home, and watch it. You were very happy. You’d pick maybe two DVDs, make your popcorn, sit down with your family, and watch the movie. It was great. Today, you have hundreds of platforms to choose from, and then hundreds of thousands of movies within each one. The brain gets confused. So, excess choice is actually making us less happy. You can teach this to very young kids, and then when the kids become consumers, they actually train their parents.

I just came back from a conference where somebody asked me how we tangibly see the difference in kids. One of the educators there is a parent whose children attend my online school, and he also uses our curriculum for his school. He gave two examples of the impact he’s seen. First, he was interviewing someone online for a coordinator position. After finishing what he thought was a clever interview, he asked his daughter how he did. She replied, “You were terrible. You didn’t ask a single question that would tell you whether that coordinator has a growth mindset or not, which will make all the difference in how progressive she is as a coordinator.” He was gobsmacked. She then used ChatGPT to show him how to ask growth mindset questions and what responses would suggest a candidate has or doesn’t have a growth mindset.

In his second example, he was at a mall with his younger child, who also attends my school. He asked if she was hungry because he was feeling hungry. She responded, “You know why you’re feeling hungry? You’re looking at the McDonald’s sign, and it’s yellow and red. Red indicates urgency, and yellow indicates happiness, and together they stimulate your appetite. Let’s move away from there and see if you still feel hungry.”

So, children are now thinking mindfully about the world, how it impacts them, and how they impact the world in return. You can teach very challenging concepts to very young children as long as you scaffold them properly. That’s what we do for our teachers.

Ismail (29:10)

Lina, you have formed several educational entities that have changed the field of schooling. For a young person watching this who wants to change the education field, what advice would you give, or what lessons have you learned in the process? India is not an easy place to build these kinds of business entities or implement reforms—it’s a challenging environment. And you also mentioned that you’ve opened Dream Time Learning in Oman, which has a different kind of culture. What are the lessons you’ve learned, and what advice would you give to younger people who want to follow in your footsteps?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (29:55)

Yesterday, I sat with two investors who were looking at whether they should invest in expanding. We also have micro schools. We’ve got two micro schools, and we’re expanding the micro school concept in India. So they came and they were asking that, they came to work out whether they should invest. And I said, do everything for the right reasons. You have to really love children. You really have to want to make an impact in the world. And you really have to believe that because of what you’re doing, the world’s going to be a better place when you die. If you’re doing it for money, money is a process that happens if I think the intention and the thing are correct.

And as Ismail has asked, be very imaginative and be a great storyteller. Because what I do is always so new, I have to be able to tell the stories. When I’m talking to parents, I’m going to have to change because they’ve already got a cognitive bias and belief about what education looks like. To be able to reform that brain and turn those wheels differently in the parent’s brain, I have to be a great storyteller. I’ve got to tell stories not in an abstract way, but with analogies, examples, and stuff like that.

So, for anyone who wants to do it for the right reasons, that is the first thing I’d say. Take a big chart paper or digital board, and first, just write down all the reasons why you want to do it. Why do you want to do education? That’s what I told these guys yesterday, if you’re doing it and you want to safeguard, because you know, the amount of money they’re going to invest, I said that’s nothing to you and it’s nothing to me. Right? So if you’re trying to safeguard that, then you’re coming at this all the wrong way. Think of every reason why you want to do this. And is that enough?

So when I went to my family, I’d already sold my other business, I’d made money, but we are a family enterprise, so we put everything together, two brothers and myself, and I went to them and the question was this: how much money are you willing to risk as a family for me to have the potential to change the lives of children, education, and possibly the world?

So, what question are you asking yourself as to why you want to do this? If you’re going to do something that’s old school, then don’t even do it. Very soon, you’ll be redundant. I think today, even Harvard and IITs and everyone are saying, but what’s next? What’s around the corner? How do we do this? You know, what are we preparing these kids for?

I mean, it’s no mystery that even if you’re a neurosurgeon or just a general surgeon or you’re studying medicine, you’ve gone into your first year of medicine, and by the fourth year, what you’ve learned in the first year is redundant. That’s why I said my book’s redundant. Don’t buy it. Please don’t buy it. It’s old. The information and understanding I now have to rewrite the book are completely different.

“Drama Teen,” which I wrote, is a better book because I wrote it later, and I’d done a lot more reading in the area of neuroscience. That was my book on bringing people together, and my curriculum is as well. So every chapter, for example, deals with teaching the parent what the child, what the teenager is going through, and then teaching the teenager what they’re risking, and therefore bringing them closer together.

Because unless you understand who’s on the other side of the fence and what they’re thinking and why they’re thinking, what baggage they have brought to their thinking, what experiences they have brought to their thinking, you can’t change their thinking. So, for any entrepreneur wanting to get into education, I just say do it for the right reason. Because then magic happens. When you’re doing it for the right reasons, your intention is correct. I’m telling you, the whole universe really does conspire.

Ismail (33:23)

The other important party in education is the parent.

There is an interesting quote in your old book from Hodding Carter: “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children; one is roots, and the other is wings.” It was a nice quote. But if you look at a newspaper these days, it is as if empathy has disappeared from the earth. It’s a challenging time for parents as well. So, what advice do you give parents these days?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (34:01)

It’s only as much courage as a parent has that they can actually make an impact on the child. So we’ve got to a place where the child is being challenged on all counts. You’ve got two parents working. Now these parents are feeling guilty. So they over-give to the kids. That’s making their kids weaker. It’s getting their kids to feel like they can get things from the world without having to work for them. It’s not good for their brains or their behavior.

Second, we bubble wrap them. Because we’re reading these newspaper headlines and we’re getting more and more fearful as human beings, we’re starting to protect our kids more and more and more. So we’re bubble wrapping them. I traveled to Australia by myself when I was 14 years old. I allowed my son to travel to Australia by himself when he was four years old. Unaccompanied minor. Because I knew, and he was ready. So, as a parent, I need to know what my kids are ready for. So, when a parent asks me if I should put my kid in boarding school or not, I say it’s not an either/or general question. You really need to know your kid and where your kid’s going to thrive the most. And then, therefore, you make sure that you put a child in the environment where it’s going to thrive.

All I can say to parents is that the future actually belongs to those who dare to learn differently. And the problem I’ll tell parents is that the decision is in your hands. So you’re going to have to dare to allow them to learn differently. And because only in that differently will they actually be ready for this new world that’s around the corner. And we don’t know what this world looks like, let’s be honest. Nobody knew what was happening in areas of the world would actually happen like that. I don’t even think people who voted in favor would have thought that these are some of the outcomes that would happen. We don’t know what comes around the corner. The only certainty we have is that there is uncertainty. So, in a world of uncertainty, what are the skills? Like those four types of people, in a world of uncertainty, what skills do you bring to being? So self-regulation is really important. In a world that’s really changing, you need to be able to center and regulate. In a world that’s really changing, you’ve got to be a lifelong learner, but then how do you become a lifelong learner? You’ve got to be excited about learning.

So that’s what we do. We don’t measure, you can’t measure whether a kid’s a lifelong learner. If I say that as a school, we produce kids who are lifelong learners, come to our school. As a parent, I’d say, How do you measure that? Because the kids left your school and got off. How are you going to measure whether they actually turned out to be a lifelong learner? But if they’re excited about learning, if they’re deeply curious, and they’re excited about learning, you know you’ve got a lifelong learner. Because learning’s not a chore, right? Even on Sundays, I’m learning, because it’s like this unearthing of mysteries that the brain loves. Teaching a fact the brain doesn’t love. The unearthing of mysteries the brain loves.

So, you know, for example, we’re teaching Harry Potter, and the kids go, you know, to platform nine and three-quarters, and they disappear through it. We ask them if that is likely to be like a parallel universe, a wormhole. Now they’re going into quantum physics, and they’re learning about parallel universes. And we’ll ask kids who are learning about atoms and molecules and matter, we’ll say, could thoughts contain matter? Could thoughts be made up of matter? Now they’re going down a rabbit hole of curiosity, and because the greater learning is in the mysteries, it’s not in the facts. You know, to open up those mysteries.

So yeah, to parents I say, please be brave. Please be more courageous. Please don’t be scared of change because the world around your kids is changing so rapidly. Embrace it and dare to help them learn differently.

Ismail (37:37)

I have a colleague whose son finished a degree overseas, and he asked me to advise his child about the importance of reading. So his concern is, as seen in some of the statistics, that people are not reading these days; even in the school system, or when you complete a degree, there is not as much reading of books. So what do you think? Is this a trend, or is this something we should worry about?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (38:10)

So the first thing is this: reading was once something that we feared. I don’t know if you know this. Historically, when the technology of the printing press happened, we were scared of kids reading because we thought that it would take away from their memories. But I don’t come in education from a place of fear; I come from a place of possibility. So, reading was once the only way we absorbed information. And that’s great for a visual learner. But what about if you’re an auditory learner? Why don’t I let you use an audiobook? Or why don’t I let you learn from podcasts? Are you going to learn less from podcasts than you are from a book? Whatever we’re talking about could be written in a book. Or somebody could be watching this and get the same amount of information. Or somebody could be listening to it while they’re walking in the morning and get the same amount of information. So I never come from a place of fear. I come from a place of possibility.

The second thing is, if we want kids to be readers, give them interesting stuff. You know, we’re giving kids, we’re still giving them Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, when kids don’t even know how to handle their emotional states or relationships or anything else. Right? Even if we’re teaching Harry Potter or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we make it so relevant and relatable. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we’ve got these different kids who’ve been brought up really differently. We actually teach kids parenting styles and what makes for the best parenting style according to research. Then the kids go and study these characters and go back and decode what their parenting style would have been for these kids to turn out like that. Kids who believe that they can flaunt any rule have no respect. When they want something, they will just jump in and grab it. So, we’ve got to make all of this really relevant and relatable. Parents used to ask me, when I ran Billabong High, if I had comic books in my library, and they would be against that. I said, you know, if your kid picks up a book and reads it, it doesn’t matter what it is; the art of engagement is what’s important.

Now, reading is such a wide thing. Are you talking about fiction or nonfiction? Now, if kids understand that nonfiction or fiction takes them to places of imagination and that the ideas that they get, I mean, and that’s just the way we do it, right? So we take, I think it’s an old science fiction book. And in it, there’s a paragraph. And we give that handout to kids and say, “Read this paragraph and what is it describing?” And they’ll say the iPad or the tablet. And I said, Do you know when this book was written? This book was written when these technologies were science fiction. Today, they’re a science fact.

So, do you know the power of reading? Because somebody has read that, stored it in their subconscious, whether it was Steve Jobs or whoever else has read that book, stored it in their subconscious, read something else, stored it in their subconscious, and those things then have come magically together to create the tablet, the iPad, the iPhone.

Luca Dellanna (40:59)

As a closing question, what is one question that you wish podcast hosts asked you about, but you usually don’t get the chance to talk about much?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (41:11)

Why do I place such an onus on mastery of the self?

If everything in this world is about what happens from when the child is born, our jobs as parents are like any other animal in the animal kingdom job, which is, tomorrow, if I die, my child should be better off than today. I’ve given survival skills, thriving skills, all those skills to my kids before I die. That’s my job. That’s my job as a parent. If parents actually think of that as a job, then it’s fantastic.

The second is that I have a saying, and nobody asked me why I say it. I said every human being should feel that their biological child is one of their children, and all the other children of the world are their karmic children. The spiritual children, however you want to put that word. Then we won’t see wars. Then we won’t see this, you know, policies that are just at odds with each other. Then we won’t have the corruption. Because we don’t think that way. Because then our education system teaches us to compete, not collaborate. That’s where corruption comes from. We use the basis of corruption like Dark Waters, the Teflon story, how somebody, for power and profit, took human lives. He was a murderer. These guys knew what they were doing, and they still went on doing it for commercial gain. What kind of world are we living in? When we’re willing to plunder people, we’re willing to plunder the planet, we’re willing to plunder animals at any cost as long as it gives us money. Does that money buy us happiness? It does not; depression is on the rise in the world. Suicides are on the rise in the world. So we’ve gone terribly wrong. We should fix it.

Ismail (42:55)

One final question we ask all guests is for some book recommendations on the theme. I think you mentioned a few of your books as well, the book about mindset. Do you have any?

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (43:08)

I’ll give you one book that changed my life. It’s called “The Biology of Belief.” It’s by Dr. Bruce Lipton. And it transformed how I see the connection between science and consciousness, science and spirituality, however you want to put it. I’m not religious; when I say spiritual, I’m not coming from any point of religion. But it explores how our thoughts, environment, and beliefs can actually shift our DNA.

We think we’re born with genetics that we can’t shift, but this book gives us insights into how we can actually, through our thinking, through the beliefs we set up, rewire our DNA. Now imagine the power of that for teachers, for educators, for parents. That potential is unlimited.

So we’ve got to move from the confines of a limited curriculum: “This is what we’re going to teach at this grade, we’re going to teach this, and these are the learning outcomes, boom, boom, boom, boom. This is how we assess and grade, and when you get 99 or a hundred or fail or whatever else.” That’s prescriptive, and it’s very narrow. The world is so vast. So if you can come from teaching from a place of possibility, potential, and hope, it’s great.

Luca Dellanna (44:21)

Thank you so much, Lina. I’ve really loved this, and it’s probably like the video call in which I’ve been the most emotionally touched, because I also feel so strongly about those topics, and I can see their impact.

So, thank you so much for doing what you’re doing and for helping others see what’s behind it and why it’s important.

Lina Ashar Dreamtime Learning (44:44)

Thank you so much, Ismail, and thank you so much, Luca.

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