AWAKE is the most important book on education since Krishnamurti's Education and the Significance of Life. In Dr. Jefferies' vision of education, children thrive through self-inquiry, awakening a new kind of intelligence. Through self-awareness, we can finally evolve humankind to the new consciousness required to end conflict and preserve human survival on Earth. AWAKE walks us through the nature of the mind and the intellect, explaining how this is not our highest source of intelligence, as our current education paradigm presupposes. As Einstein and the other great scientists and mystics have known, in order to access true intelligence, we need to go beyond the mind to pure consciousness. In this, we discover that this intelligence is, in fact, who we are. In the lineage of spiritual teachers including Krishnamurti, AWAKE lays out what our current education system is educating for, why it can never be enough, and what we can do instead. She acknowledges the transformative work of current spiritual teachers Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, asking what the implications of their work are for education. In other words, if what we call enlightenment is the profound clarity of perception that leads to the understanding of why the great problems of our world exist and what to do about them (such as inter-nation, religious, and racial conflict, global warming, poverty, and social stratification) as well as individual struggles such as depression and anxiety, then WHAT ARE THE CONDITIONS THAT BRING ENLIGHTENMENT ABOUT? Dr. Jefferies writes about her own deep insights into life--her own process of awakening--walking the reader through a first-person account to actively demonstrate what's possible. -From the publisher
About the Author: Dr. Jefferies teaches courses in transformative education in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University in Canada. She has taught children of all ages in South America, Central America, and North America. Jefferies is developing a name as a champion of children's voice, autonomy, and inherent authority, in addition to challenging the accepted definition of intelligence and our education paradigm. Kathryn often describes her work in its simplest terms as "Eckhart Tolle applied to education." The questions that frame her work are: What does the fact of enlightenment mean for what we're teaching children, in school and out? and What is the highest vision we can create for education in its purpose to evolve human consciousness? Dr. Jefferies' work also involves realizing the nature of creativity as arising from beyond the intellect-mind and its function as solving the great problems that currently plague our planet. Dr. Jefferies is a Certified Facilitator of The Work of Byron Katie(TM), also called Inquiry Based Stress Reduction(c) and leads workshops for students and teachers. She is a trailblazer in addressing the need for 'mental health' in schools. Using The Work, she leads students back to their own truth and out of their suffering.