Almost everyone has experienced the - lifelong - effect of an outstanding teacher, a teacher who pays full attention, free of judgement or comparison and who responds, always, with kindness and compassion, even when enforcing necessary sanctions.

Such teachers represent about 5% of all teachers, a percentage which seems to be stable over time, and they seem to be heterogeneously spread throughout our schools.  From interviews, I know that they are created despite the system, not because of it.

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When we pay full attention to people, free of judgement and comparison, something changes within us. Paying attention in this way our minds are quiet and the thoughts that tend to arise represent new connections that our neural networks have made from something we already know combined with something that we are perceiving in, or receiving from, the other person. We now know something new.

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At the very heart of the changes taking place in our societies is a shift from treating people as things to treating people as people. That’s all, really.

If we treat people as things, we get one type of society, that may have served in the past but is unable to handle the complexity of the modern world.

If we treat people as people, we open a much greater range of possibilities and a capability for handling complex, iterative problems.

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The shift that is taking place in the world is long overdue yet, is only slowly gaining momentum.

For too long people have been treated as cogs in a machine to be forced to fit in and be valued based on how well they perform their work, on doing things right, with that value being reduced relentlessly over time.

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