This is an essay on the topic of how to destroy someone's ability to express themselves and have confidence in their ability to know what they are experiencing and then being able to express their experiences - or, in other words, an NLP investigation into how children at school suffer as their confidence in their own neurological processes is quite literally, being destroyed.

The Creativity Destroyer *

I recently decided to take my son out of state school and “educate him at home”.

Now normally, that means doing more or less exactly what they do in school only you do it at your kitchen table minus the other 40 bored kids and instead of half a dozen frazzled adults of dubious education, morals and motivation, there’s only you.

I must admit to not having thought much further about it past the “For the love of God, just make it stop!” stage and so, after we had taken a full on holiday from the school stress, I acquired a few schooly-type workbooks for my son to do in between playing educational computer games such as Black & White and Spyro The Dragon.

It so happens that I am a specialist in general semantics, neuro-semantics, neuro-linguistic programming and most everything to do with language, how it is processed in the brain and so forth. This is a side effect of my professional involvement with creativity, personal development and human potential in adults and I must confess to never having given much thought to how “language” is actually taught in schools before this particular fine morning in late September.

The workbook proudly claimed to follow the National Curriculum for English and prepare its users for the relevant tests. Not thinking any evil, I gave it to my son, sat back and observed.

What I did observe was so appalling that I thought I would have a heart attack.

Every single exercise in this so called “teaching” manual for “English” was expressly designed to seek out and destroy any form of confidence and/or natural ability with language any given individual would possess to start with.

For example:

Multiple Choice Options.

There were pages after pages of set ups whereby one correct and four incorrect grammatical sentence were being presented, along the lines of:

• The cup sitted on the table.
• The cup sit on the table.
• The cup satted on the table.
• The cup sats the table.
• The cup sits on the table.

Now, before this exercise began, my son was entirely capable of describing the act of a cup sitting on a table in all tenses, all perspectives, all ways, always correctly and always instantly. After staring at the above for five minutes with furrowed brows, he was no longer sure. He was confused, and what’s far more damaging in the long run, uncertain and not confident any more in his ability to describe a cup on a table!

From a neuro-linguistic NLP standpoint, this is completely logical and absolutely what happens when multiple wrong representations and a single correct representation are stored on top of each other and without marking out the correct one in any perceivable way at the time of learning.

Telling him half an hour later which one was right or wrong, or even a second later, would not serve to overwrite the mess of confusion all those wrong choices with the correct one mixed into them at the 20%-80% dilution had by needs created in his neurology and storage systems.

This delayed feedback makes a programme in the child’s head that works like this in future:

• see or hear the sentence or God forbid, try and speak the sentence;
• recognise it as one of very many sentences which are right or wrong, wrong being scary, bad and leading to some form of pain or punishment;
• experience a state of confusion, stress and performance anxiety;
• try and access a memory that has happened in a different time and which will shed more light on the topic (from a stressed state which makes this much harder to access any kind of memory fast and clean, makes the accessing procedure far more likely to fail or be impaired);
• with luck, remember which one was supposed to be the correct one;
• retrieve the correct one from all the incorrect ones which are incredibly similar;
• respond appropriately in the context from which the whole operation arose in the first place.

Now the fact is that people have amazing brains and this kind of MicroSoft programming structure can absolutely produce the goods in its convoluted and self-hamstringing format, but as I look at this over time and as a professional, we would have the following outcome:

Firstly and foremostly, such forms of processing lead directly to an impaired flow from internal representations into natural language expression AND vice versa.

What that means is that an individual running these patterns, should they ever wish to communicate their internal representations with another, such as a lover, whilst attempting to write poetry or giving a public speech, will have all kinds of stumbling blocks that create a barrier between what they want to say, could speak about, would speak about with fluency and power of expression and what they end up being able to produce if they can produce it at all.

The vice versa means that these individuals will have severe problems taking other people’s natural language expressions and converting them back into internal representations easily and as they were designed to – which could and would manifest in having trouble with James Joyce, understanding their loved ones and other human beings in general, being able to read correctly, converting in-coming language into fully integrated learnings and precluding contact between any given individuals mind “inside” and that of another or society in general.

On that lovely September morning, my fluently expressive 9 year old began to stutter as the words no longer organised themselves organically and automatically, for his language acquisition had been entirely unconscious – learning by example, trial and error, and embedding the grammatical structures requisite for expressing your internal processes in the language called English with unconscious grace and without any effort whatsoever.

I took the so called “teaching manual” away and began to look at the other exercises and every one of them had a similarly detrimental and downright destructive effect by its very structure, function and design.

I could clearly trace how the various adult language dysfunctions I was dealing with on a daily basis in my clients and that truly destroyed their abilities to function successfully as humans were designed to function, to these specific exercises, dysfunctions such as:

- writer’s block;

- believing themselves to be stupid/dyslexic/of low intelligence;

- inability to access creative expression;

- lack of confidence in all communications contexts;

- problems with expressing internal states, emotions, feelings, desires etc;

- interpersonal communication difficulties;

- internal communication breakdown (i.e. not having rapport with your own unconscious mind which leads to conflicts, self sabotage, procrastination etc.);

- public speaking problems – and these include not just standing in front of millions with a microphone but also “public speaking on paper” – from writing a love letter to an audience of one, to writing an article, test or anything at all in the end that might be read by one who may find the flaws in the grammar!

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is a scary discovery indeed.

My son is safely at home with me and being protected from being exposed to such things at an age where he is not yet fully confident in his own languaging abilities and highly susceptible to a meltdown of his language processing devices as they were meant to function. I would put forth the proposition, as obviously children develop at different paces and some are faster in reaching a point where they may begin to cope with conscious analysis of unconscious processes without destroying those unconscious processes’ elegant functioning, that a full 80%-90% of all children in the Western World are being damaged long term and probably irretrievably by the standard forms of teaching grammar at the age it is taught, or should I say, perpetrated.

I would further put forth the proposition that this is going to affect males much worse than it is affecting females. Firstly, females develop faster so many of them may already in possession of a complete circuit of unconscious language processing which is then not damaged quite so radically anymore; but also, whether by genetic design or cultural programming or both, females tend to speak more amongst themselves and so have had more practise in general before being faced with the “language destroyer” has handed down by the governments in the Western World in the form of their national curricula.

Now you might think, ok, so language is being destroyed. No big deal. But wait a minute. Language is the vehicle by which artistic expression takes place – how the creative internal processes of our amazing minds are being brought across the threshold from internal to becoming manifest in the “real world”. By choking off language you choking off the input of one person’s mind flowing out to be accessible to everyone else.

Language is not just words. That is just one of the languages. Music is another, visual art, and, of course, mathematics.

Being a “girlie” myself, I “can’t do maths”. I had a flat out E all the way through although my IQ is at genius level. I have no confidence in myself even adding up three numbers without the aid of a calculator.

I do not know how “maths acquisition” works, but if the grammar workbook is anything to go by, it is absolutely possible that mathematics is being taught in a similar way and serves to destroy people’s general ability to unconsciously compute at that level in a similar way.

It would be intriguing to ponder on what the Western World would be like if it was populated by people who had full access to their creative abilities in language, mathematical systems and systemic thinking, and, most importantly, inter-human communication.

It would be intriguing to ponder what would happen if such people set to work with a vengeance and with the confidence intact that they can create change, innovation, even flow. People who were to be able to express their own creativity and share this with others in return, creating circuitry that would become more than the sum of their parts or individual contributions.

I cannot help but wonder about this. What I know about neurological processes and learning acquisition is not a well kept secret. It cannot be not known by those who decide on what generations of children are put through in those incredible institutions called “schools”.

So why is it still going on, in this 21^st century, all around the world in school classes even as you are reading this because they are now nearly all exclusively based on Western curricula?

I truly don’t know the answer to this.

All I can do is continue my work to reverse and repair some of the damage with adults as best I can and keep telling people that they can express themselves, can learn to re-contact their creativity, strength and purpose of volition and do whatever needs to be done to heal, one individual at a time, the long term effects of “The Grammar Conspiracy” and “The Creativity Destroyer”.

© Silvia Hartmann 2001

A 2011 Update - Ten years later, the boy in question, who never saw another English language school book after this day, is studying Sports Journalism at London University and has just had his first two interviews published in a professional sports magazine.