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Transcending Education

Here are the 4 key points to work on specifically and very concretely to transcend the limits of the education we have received, or to be worked on to transmit education qualitatively beyond what an honest parent can transmit.
The meaning of these 4 points is explained in the article 'What is a successful education?'

1. Managing one's emotions

Learning to manage one's emotions, through Steven Hayes' ACT psychotherapy, or its simplified SH+ version from the WHO, possibly supplemented by Aaron Beck's CBT psychotherapy. SH+ can be worked on alone. CBT requires a third party who can eventually be the parent. As long as we are taken over by our emotions, we cannot satisfactorily lead the problem resolution of point 2.
See the article Putting an end to the abusive use of psychotropics and psychotherapies.
In the diagram below, managing one's emotions is represented at the bottom by the 'get out of the washing machine drum' icon.

↣ WHO website - BD Doing what matters in times of stress, and audio exercises
     The comics and audio exercises are available in French.

2. Learning structured communication through problem solving

Communicating well is not optimizing one's communication: forget injunctions like 'don't say ...' but rather '...', because they lead you to have a discourse that masks what you really are, and this does not last long. Communicating well is not to skip any of the 4 steps of problem solving, and especially the problem analysis step, which allows synchronizing with your interlocutor by sharing your experience, and overcoming the differences in meaning that we attribute to words.
Problem solving is what allows us to transcend our human nature, and reduce social violence, including within the family. See the article What are the conditions to be met to produce serious reasoning? Problem solving.
In the diagram below, learning structured communication through problem solving is represented in the middle by the 'do it together' icon.

Adaptation to young children

During kindergarten, and a good part of primary school, children give an important place to the marvelous, to the detriment of rationality. Therefore, the problem solving in 4 steps can be difficult to implement. However, this does not justify falling back on 'applying social rules'. Indeed, problem solving can perfectly be applied with young children, by adopting the following simplified modality:
1. The adult presents the problem.
2. The adult asks the child if they have a solution. At first, the child most often answers no.
2. The adult proposes a solution.
3. The adult waits patiently for the child's reaction, and expresses if necessary that at this moment, they can make a counter-proposal, and that if they don't find one now, we can come back to it later.
As soon as the child formulates a proposal (at step 2) or a counter-proposal (at step 4), the adult carefully refrains from defending their own solution, and switches to assistive mode to help the child strengthen their counter-proposal until it becomes applicable, and will then be accepted in place of the solution proposed by the adult.

The idea is twofold: 1. Convince the child that they have a say in the course of events, that they are not reduced to applying / undergoing what is told to them. 2. Show them that this is done by elaborating constructive proposals, and not by contesting / being reluctant.

3. Acquiring a solid philosophy

Reading and rereading the various articles on this site, to gradually absorb this worldview, whose virtue is to be consistent with empirical data. It is neither idealized nor tinged with contemporary prejudices (as much as possible). Conversely, all beliefs not consistent with our empirical data result in social violence. Indeed, these beliefs prevent practicing problem solving satisfactorily, and impose themselves at the expense of others.
If at first you don't fully understand the articles on the site, it's not a problem, just persist, because they overlap and illuminate each other, and discuss them with others who understand them better.
In the diagram below, acquiring a solid philosophy is represented at the top by the 'worldview' icon.

4. Explicitly defining the person one wishes to become

To move forward, to be able to act, it is necessary to clarify, explicitly define, the person we wish to become, in contrast to remaining locked in the representation we currently have of ourselves. This is where all our individual freedom is exercised. These are axes 3 and 5 of ACT psychotherapy. It is not only about specifying the profession or activity we wish to pursue, but also our personal values and the nature of our future relationships with others. Regarding our values, we should stick to what we can and accept to actually put into practice at the expense of our social ambition, to avoid falling into hypocritical display. Indeed, the clarification at this step 4 is primarily addressed to ourselves and serves to orient our decisions, actions, and efforts towards what truly matters to us.
In the diagram below, explicitly defining the person one wishes to become is represented on the right by the 'pave your own path' icon.

Pedagogical approach

Conventional education tends to function as follows:
1. Establish a hierarchical bond, based on a mix of status position (parent, teacher, etc.), affective (the child seeks protection), and recognized competence (the adult knows more things).
2. Gradually have the young person integrate social conventions and morals.
However, observing adults very quickly shows the child that rules are often irrelevant or not applied. The child's motivation thus ultimately rests on the strength of the bond, and requires introducing a layer of hypocrisy, denial, or self-deception between discourse and practice to make social arbitrariness more acceptable.
The problem for many contemporary teachers is that status recognition is no longer strong enough (in many families, school is no longer presented as the main source of access to social success), and not compensated by a supplement of recognized competence (especially because teachers tend to have never worked outside the school and university world).

In a transcended educational approach, the educator does not arrive with ready-made solutions (social conventions and morals). They start from the problems encountered by the child (difficulties identified by the child and rejection of their behavior by others), help them anticipate the probable consequences of their actions, and explore alternative solutions. The educator is therefore the one who allows the child to find more relevant solutions, because more effective, better controlled in terms of consequences, and requiring less effort because better adapted to them. This pedagogical approach corresponds to the analysis phase of problem solving. It leads the child to progressively forge their own line of conduct, based on their personal experience and personality, instead of simply conforming to the social norm with more or less good will and success.
Thus, the shift towards transcended education moves the affective bond from a prerequisite to obtain the child's motivation for something that will gradually emerge from shared successes, and the status bond becomes secondary compared to recognized competence.

In both educational approaches, the child's good will is an indispensable prerequisite. However, it is not reinforced on the same bases.

Moving from conventional to transcended education requires going beyond the paradigm of social conventions and moral rules as the basis for a satisfactory social life. For this, we can work on what ACT psychotherapy calls mental flexibility.

Evaluation of the 4 points of transcended education, from the perspective of values

A therapy may not necessarily involve implicit or explicit values, and that is a quality.

However, educating necessarily involves the communication of values.

Therefore, it is reasonable to propose values in the form of texts, which can be discussed, as in French or philosophy classes, as opposed to proposing them in the form of discourses to deliver (don't say '...' but rather '...'). Thus, they remain external to the educator and generate fewer contradictions. Moreover, at step 4 (Explicitly define the person one wishes to become), the young person can take distance and specify their own values: the texts only served as a support to allow them to build themselves from solid bases not contradicted by current scientific knowledge.

Conversely, it is not reasonable to overwhelm the young person with a mass of texts, most of which have already been contradicted by current scientific knowledge, as is done in philosophy classes: this only has the effect of inducing confusion by overwhelming the young person with a mass of elements related to the history of ideas, and whose sorting and contextualization require a good mastery of the main lines of all current knowledge, which the young person does not yet have.

Evaluation of the 4 points of transcended education, from the perspective of scientific validation level

Let us now examine the scientific validation level of the 4 points of the proposed transcended education method:

Note: in these summary tables, we added psychoanalysis for comparison with what we selected at point 1 of transcended education.

Here is finally the mnemonic diagram corresponding to the 4 points to work on to transcend education: