Professional and personal skills

Human begin our professional life in day care. Professional life is anything that we or our parents pay to do or we get paid to do.

School is training or vocational institution.  However, the clients are not the children. The clients are the parents, like an adult corporation that send its employee for training. Parents send their children schooling to help them prepare their vocational skills. Now, the question is what is the motivation for the parents to send their children to school or the philosophy of the school in teaching the children?

However, the traditional school philosophy acts as if it is the customer and acts like king and expect the children and parents to follow. The government who regulate educational system expects all parents and children and the schools to follow to satisfy its needs instead of to regulate ethics and law.

In business, isn't the customer the kings? If I have to pay lots of money for something or service, I expect a high quality of service and products. Isn't the job of school or institute that provide service to provide high quality of service that produce results? Not too high and not too low?

Learning is not the only activity in life. But, learning is the only activity in professional life. But professional activity is not the only activity in life. We are a person not our profession. Our profession is only part of our personhood. So, what is there other than our profession?

It's difficult to answer because we have been brainwashed by this competitive, proggressive culture that motivate competition. It divide professional and personal as something we must do and something we want to do, work and play, work and leisure, work and recreation.

Instead, personal life is anything that we do when we are not training professionally. Even athletes don't train 24/7 everyday. Vocational become impulsive without awareness.

The job of any vocational institution is to teach and train vocational skills and provide safe environment where the trainee can learn the skills. Instead, traditional school is trying to teach to live and force the trainee to learn the skills. The motivation to learn must come from inside not outside. The institution's only job is to provide curriculum or organized training presentation and environment where a trainee can learn effectively and easily.

When we don't distinctively separate professional and personal, we are making more professionals than persons. We ignore personal needs to meet professional needs. Because, we are persons who study and work and not the other way around.

Instead, the job of the institution is to prepare an effective and motivative learning curriculum and environment instead of being coercive. The job of the trainer as service provider is to provide the service that the customers need.

We differentiate between adult training and children training. Adult training should copy the children training instead of the other way around. Unfortunately, many trainers don't care about providing service but care more about getting paycheck.

Personal life is combination of giving and taking. Yes, most of human childhood will be spent on learning activities before he can be independent and has the ability to give. Vocational activity is preparing independent behaviors and skills to provide for self. Most of the philosophy of going to school is to get a job, to get a good job. But, life is more than just a job.

School is life training environment where children learn about their environment. With this view, learning activity becomes full of wonder and curiosity. And, we can merge professional activities in our personal life. Children are naturally learning to be independent and understand their world, so step aside and help them instead of intervene and trying to take over this learning process.

We, the adults, who are teaching our children need to ask one big question in everything we do with our children: Am I doing this activity for my benefit or the child's benefit? There are many adults who relate to their children because it's a job or because they just need something to do. When we involve in children's activity, are we following their activity or are we asking them to follow ours?

Personal life is more powerful than professional life because it is backed by nature. We are born and will die as a person not our profession. Personhood is our nature, our profession is our nurture. Personal experience and skills are more powerful than professional experience and skills. Professional life is preparing us to help operating a bigger "social Personhood" such as corporation or government agencies. So in a way, to be less a person to help creating others' bigger person. We sacrifice our personal life for our professional life.