Chapter Six ~ Knowledge IS NOT Power - USING it IS!

Your team is down by a point with time running out. They pass the ball to you. What do you do?

You know what to do, shoot the ball!

But no matter how much you know what to do and how to do it, if you don't do it, all your knowledge is nothing more than potential power.

You have to shoot the ball.

What made me think of this? Yesterday I returned to the classroom after a 13 day absence. Some problems came up that I had to take care of. One student missed me so much that she hugged me and wouldn't let me go for 2 minutes. In the week before I left I had made a big impact on her feelings. I now owe it to her to make a big impact on her abilities. I need to make her truly powerful.

She didn't stop smiling the entire hour-and-a-half of class, at one point proudly showing me her pencil with "Knowledge is Power" written on it. Now that we have even less time together we have to make her education that much more meaningful, and that much faster. To do this we have to cut through the myths and lies of education.

And one of the biggest is that "Knowledge is Power".


Most of our time in school is spent acquiring lots of knowledge, but never being required to do anything with it other than spit it back out on a test.

We don't teach an athletic sport like basketball by having kids come into a gymnasium and sit on the bleachers all day. The coach doesn't stand in front of them telling them all about how to play the game while they all sit there taking notes for an upcoming written test. This makes no sense because it doesn't develop basketball players.

Yet this is exactly what we have been doing in education for years. The kids don't get out of their seats and "get on the court" to practice applying their knowledge of the game. They don't have to practice showing what they know. And because they don't get to practice using their knowledge, they don't get the great increase in knowledge they would naturally acquire in the process.

And the student I wrote about in Chapter 3 that was the last one to earn his freedom, became the first one to design a successful experiment and eligible to show what he knows to other classes.

Can you imagine what will happen when millions of students spend their days practicing using and improving their knowledge? Wouldn't "knowledge" become much more meaningful and powerful?

Wouldn't we graduate millions of higher-level thinkers and problem solvers out into the world?

And wouldn't millions of impossible situations and poor conditions become possible and powerful realities?

Can you imagine a movie made about these many powerful students instead of the few powerful teachers? I can, and even though this latest challenge that kept me out of the classroom for so long has caused me to want to give up, and cost so much to fix that I don't know how I can afford to continue teaching, I know I must. I must use what I know with all my power.

I've been searching for love my entire adult life, and finally found her. Maybe not in human form, but in what I do each day. I have to hold onto this and protect her with my life, even if it means my death.

Because if love is worth living for............then it's absolutely worth dying for.

I might look like a warrior on the outside (thanks Grace), but I have to become much more of one on the inside. If I'm going to keep and protect this incredible love alive for who we are and what we can become, I have to become a whole lot more than I currently am.



Click on this link A King at His End for a video well worth watching, and a reflection of what's going on inside. I may not be full of confidence and security right now, but I am full of power and passion. And love, great love is the only thing keeping me going........either to the realization of my dream, or to my death.

Either way I win, because I'm using the knowledge that I am free to live any way I want, and using that power to choose to live and to die for something that really matters. Something bigger than myself.