What can education learn from the self-help industry?

Why is there a wall between education and self-help?

All learning is personal development, so why do we have two separate industries – one of which is booming and the other of which is definitely not?

Self-help or personal growth – books, courses, coaches, communities, experiences – is a massive and growing market. It's valued at 45 billion dollars globally and is growing 5.5% a year. In the business world, business self-help books are the largest sales sub-category.

This means people are choosing to spend their own hard-earned money to grow themselves. People are hungry to learn.

Meanwhile, the education sector, the so-called learning sector, is a different world.

We call adult learning ‘professional development’ (‘pd’). It’s usually a form of slow torture. Administrators use carrots and sticks to drag educators to pd. Educators suffer through that pd. They're basically zombies showing up to sit in their seats and check off a requirement that means little to them. Imagine a horror movie where the zombies aren't allowed to get up out of their seats.

We treat people the way we’re treated.

Educators then repeat that slow torture model with students, most of whom are bored in school and who develop themselves outside of school more so than in their formal education time.

There’s something fundamentally broken when our education sector is putting out products that no one – even the folks in the system itself – wants.

So what can education learn from the personal development sector?

Human-First

First off, we’re all human beings who want to learn and grow. Self-help understands that. It starts with the learning human: you, a particular human being, want to make a change, right? You want improve your existence in some general or specific way, right? Cool, here are some tools or new ways of thinking that can help you get where you want to go. Try them! Use them! Invest in yourself and see what happens! It's a refreshing attitude. Take it or leave it: the choice is yours because, after all, it's your life.

And many people are taking it. Because, after all, it's their life.

Meanwhile, education pd is like a dysfunctional relationship. It nags you about how you’re not good enough and what you’re doing wrong and how you need to change. And it tells you to change so that you can help someone else who is more important than you (the kids). It micromanages what you need to be like (professional learning standards, professional competencies, professional evaluation systems) to help someone else. Winning recipe, right?

JUST A MINUTE . . . DEEP BREATH: Please don’t think I’m saying kids aren’t important! They are. Hugely so. I taught K12 for 14 years. I’ve been a mom for almost 26. I believe in kids. Truly.

But I also believe in adults. If you want to grow kids, you need to help adults become the best selves they can be.

Or, more accurately, I believe in self-motivation and agency, whether it’s for adults or kids.

Standards = Micromanagement

Frankly, adult selves aren’t different in kind from kid selves; they’re just more complex, with more bumps and bruises behind them, more responsibilities ahead of them – all while they're navigating a more chaotic world. A world that asks them to be creative, critical thinking problem solvers who can collaborate, communicate, and be good citizens. Just like young people need to.

I think the biggest mistake that education organizations make is to treat educators as different, as beings who need to be micromanaged to learn different things than young people do. As a result they come to hate learning. Then they are asked to help young people learn.

The past twenty years of standards-based reform have been exercises in micromanagement of both adults and kids.

The new competency- or mastery-based approach to learning starts to treat young people differently, but not so much adults. One set of competencies for kids, another for teachers, another for administrators. I’m just waiting for the first school to develop parent and grandparent competencies.

We’re going down the wrong path, one that replicates old power relationships.

Human Development Fractals

Instead, let adult educators grow themselves along the same competencies kids do. Let them understand and develop the complexity of what collaboration looks like for a preschooler and 7-10 year-old and an early adolescent and an adult. Let them feel, experience, and understand HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, starting with their own.

Then only will they be able to help kids in the ways they can help themselves.

We’re all human, after all. We all want rich, sustaining, fulfilling, happy, connected, purposeful lives. Don’t we?

That’s why we want to better ourselves. That’s why we self-help or educate ourselves.

Try It Out!

Incubate Learning has built its first self-help course for everyone, including educators, along these principles. It’s called 30-Day Recharge, and it’s designed to help you begin to rediscover your curiosity and sparkle. For yourself. Whoever you are.

Eventually, you may want to apply what you're growing at to young people or others in your life, but right now, it's just for YOU.

As they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on before you help others.

Join the network for free with the link here. Or directly join the 30-Day Recharge below.