The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.
At the moment I would like to emphasize the need for vocational training, for non-formal education in Burma to help all those young people who have suffered from a bad education. They have to be trained to earn their living. They have to have enough education vocational training to be able to set up respectable lives for themselves.
Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.
The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.
The curious company studies the anomalies or the unexpected findings. The company that isn't curious ignores them or punishes people who don't do exactly what they set out to do.
I'm curious. Period. I find everything interesting. Real life. Fake life. Objects. Flowers. Cats. But mostly people. If you keep your eyes open and your mind open, everything can be interesting.
The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.
A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.
It's fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.
Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.
Teens are passionate, questioning, curious, have a bit of the idealism I still cling to, and they're making decisions for the first time that can alter the course of their lives - and sometimes, the course of the world.
You can't build an adaptable organization without adaptable people - and individuals change only when they have to, or when they want to.
Vocational training is the training of animals or slaves. It fits them to become cogs in the industrial machine. Free men need liberal education to prepare them to make a good use of their freedom.
Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.
Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.
I've made some films for the military that are teaching things like cultural awareness and leadership issues, that sort of stuff. And try to, in essence, look at what training they're doing and say, 'This is how you can improve the training from a humanistic point of view.'
The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded.