Consider one of the oldest self-help books known to man. You may be thinking that I am gearing you up to read a few Bible passages, but you would be wrong. Although the Bible is in a league all to itself, my aim in this article is to give you a glimpse of a different 4000-year-old self-help book that finds its origin in Egypt.

Be warned, NLP is used for every type of manipulation you can imagine. Pickup artists, hypnotists, televangelists and shysters of all categories use NLP to cheat, steal and otherwise trick gullible people. NLP is used by the media and in advertising to convince the consumer to purchase unneeded products. NLP is awesomely powerful. When used correctly and for proper reasons, it can transform educational practice for any educator.

The author – a teacher of music – makes the case that teaching the reading of music IS an interdisciplinary approach incorporating skills required for reading text. The fundamentals of reading and performing music are identical to reading and writing printed text.

This current era of mandated demands in education is creating a marketplace that serves a narrow band of educational outcomes. It forces curriculum into a complicated puzzle box that services a test rather than exciting originality and inspiring thought.

Giving praise for success is the easy part. A trained monkey could handily praise great effort, or even dumb luck. Dealing with perceived failure is the tough part.
There’s one rule I try to stick to with feedback: Be honest, but also be encouraging—anything else will come across as condescending and may damage the self-concept of the student. Feedback should always produce an overall mentality of hopeful growth in the student and should never speak to fixed talent or unchangeable personal attributes. Failure should only be seen and presented as honest feedback for the next performance.

Educating the best and the brightest in this brave new world will take a new and improved educational paradigm. Allowing our educational tools to age in the corner of the classroom will be the mistake that may cost us our future. Throwing away masses of children to inequitable access will ensure that we languish at the bottom of the global pool of employable workers for decades to come.