Tell me about your vision.
My vision is to make people aware
of the power of education,
particularly when it is used with very young children
to influence society.
Of course, education is very empowering
to an individual who wants to change their own lives
and to work towards goals,
but it is also a powerful tool
in the hands of other people,
particularly when it's used with children
that are very young and very influential.
And it's important that parents be aware of this
and that they take time to make decisions
that will impact their children
and themselves in the future.
Tell me more about that.
How has that impacted your life as well?
And yeah.
I was blessed in that I was able to use education
to attain goals rather than perhaps being influenced
by people who wanted to change me away
from my parents' beliefs.
My parents were both teachers, perhaps.
I was blessed in that.
So they were very involved in my education,
very involved in my childhood, my very early childhood.
I sat on my mother's knee and listened to stories.
And so their culture and their beliefs were passed on to me
before I even had time to think about it.
They were just ingrained in me because I always heard them.
But as I got older, I began to see,
particularly in writing this book
and doing the research around this book,
I began to see how much of an influence others could be
on the beliefs and values of children.
The earlier you start influencing the children,
the more ingrained those beliefs become.
For me, it's sort of like T-ball.
We might not have as many children who liked baseball
if they didn't start children at a very young age,
playing it, understanding about practice,
going and committing the time it takes
to get better and better at the skills.
We can use education in culture and values the same way
that they use T-ball to influence you.
That is awesome.
I remember from my childhood,
I'm born and raised in India, by the way.
If you didn't know that.
I have not been brought here.
I moved to United States, I think, when I was 18.
My family still lives in India, most of my family anyway.
They visit when they want to,
but I've created a home for myself and my family here.
And growing up, there were so many things
in our education system that helped me, obviously,
along what I've come along and things I've learned.
There's so many of the things that boxed me
into a way of thinking.
Now, when I'm grown up and done my own research
and realized for myself, I'm like,
wow, those things don't make sense.
And why are they in the textbook still?
And why are the people still teaching it?
And so I've gone through some of that.
Clearly, I've not gone through the American education system
when it comes to like high school and below,
and early years.
But so tell me more about that.
Like what...
Well, as a teacher, I do remember,
and it's sort of funny, but it's not funny.
It's certainly indicative of the impact,
not to the good, that our willingness
to turn over our education,
the education of our children to others.
I was a science teacher when I first started.
And when the books were being adopted each year,
because books were adopted for certain grades,
certain things were taught,
third grade, fourth grade, seventh grade,
I was a middle school teacher.
So I was in the group who was evaluating
the middle school science books.
And as a science major myself, I had been in a lot of labs.
I had seen a lot of things.
And I had lots of activities that my children could do
in the classroom.
But as we began to read over the books,
some of us began to notice that not all of the experiments
in the books that were up for adoption worked.
And so the university, we're very near a university,
a major university.
So one of the professors there wrote a grant
that set up a summer program where we took every book
that was up for adoption in our state at that time.
And we performed every single activity
that was provided in the book that our children might use.
And while some of them didn't necessarily work
quite like you expected it,
or it wasn't necessarily exciting,
there was one that actually exploded.
And so there we are downstairs
in the bottom of the chemistry building,
and it exploded.
And we sent word very quickly to the professor
who was over that particular section.
And he came running back, no, no, no,
y'all must have done something wrong.
So he carried it back to another chemistry lab.
And he redid the experiment,
and it exploded again with him as well.
And so for us in sitting around
and talking about what we had seen,
we began to realize that the people
who put the books together were perhaps writers.
Maybe they weren't necessarily scientists.
So they were putting together ideas that sounded good,
and they might sound exciting enough
to be sold on the market for the public schools,
but they didn't have time or didn't take the time
to actually do the experiments.
And this was truly hazardous.
And of course, reading again about our treatment
of the indigenous people over the years,
you began to see that perhaps we did some experiments
there too without knowing full well
what the end result might be.
So for me, taking the time to study
and look at like you did, go back and say,
that doesn't really make any sense and think about it.
And that takes a commitment of time on the part of parents
to take care of their children.
What would you say, Gwen, is your why about your vision?
Like why do you do what you do?
I just think it's important for our children
to learn to think, to not be,
I guess the common term is dummy down,
to not be spoon fed what other people want them to believe
or want them to know, or what fits, what's easy.
I want all people, all people anywhere,
to be able to think their way through things
that make them feel uncomfortable.
Why does it make me feel uncomfortable?
What can I do?
What are the possible outcomes?
What are the consequences of each of those outcomes?
And so that thought process is very important.
And if our children are not allowed to question things,
they won't grow up with that thinking process.
So for me, I truly believe that the future
of free humanity is based in that critical thinking capacity.
So what's the solution to this big mess?
Oh, wow.
That's more than a 15 minute answer for sure.
But I think that small groups, individuals,
must, they have to be aware, they have to take the time.
Even if you start, even if we start with just one school,
and I think it's started already,
they just need encouragement.
Obviously your parents raised a free thinker,
someone who ventured out on his own,
looked at things, questioned what he saw.
That thinking process is very important
and we have to make sure that it's never squelched.
And that's going to take a lot of people
who accept and understand the consequences
of not being free thinkers.
I completely agree because I don't like talking
about negative things per se,
because I feel like inspiration is the way
to help people see the brighter side of things
instead of focusing on the negative.
Yes.
But in my life, I've seen so many examples
where family members would suppress their negative thoughts
and family members would suppress their own family members
knowingly or unknowingly,
and they would botch the spirit of thinking down,
or the spirit of the person down in a way
that they would not think outside the box.
They would do the norm instead of maybe
what they were meant to do, maybe what they would excel at,
maybe what their strong traits, their skills were.
So I think you're absolutely right
that when it comes to education,
what we put inside us and what we put inside our kids
is very important because they are going
to be shaping the future.
I'm almost 30 now, and according to dad,
I probably lived almost half my life.
So I got like maybe 30, 40, 50 years to live.
And there's other generation moving up.
They're learning what needs to happen in the future.
And they'll be the ones deciding what else happens
and how people are, what do we do?
Do we improve people's life for the better,
or do we make it worse?
So I think it's very important what we teach our kids.
It's funny to me, one of the things is,
a lot of times in friends and family
where kids go to high school,
they spend eight hours of their day in that high school
and they come back and then the kids are irrational,
rowdy, and they're angry, and they do stupid stuff,
and the parents are like,
I wonder what went wrong with my kid?
I'm like, you don't have any idea, eight hours a kid,
what he does and who he learns from.
No idea, you don't know what the heck is gonna happen
when he comes home and he comes in a controlled environment
instead of someone you have no idea who's teaching your kid
what they're teaching your kid,
and not even what they're saying to your kid,
how are they acting in front of your kid?
Like what's their body language,
what is your kid actually picking up?
What kind of people is your kid hanging out with?
Have you even checked his backpack, what he has in there?
You have no idea, and you wanna answer the question,
what's wrong with my kid?
How about everything?
And how about nothing?
It really starts, I think for me,
that was the part of the research of the book
that was so clear to me that it begins so much earlier,
the influence, and it takes so much less influence,
the younger the child, the less influence it takes to actually
or the less action it takes to bring about the influence
that someone might be trying to do on your child.
Because yes, for those children,
an eight hour day in school, that's a portion of their life.
It's not just a portion of their day.
And so that influence stays with them,
particularly if they come home,
and the parents are busy, and I know that parents are busy,
they have jobs, they have lives.
And I like what you said as well about the positive,
there's so much negativity in the world,
and so it's easy to come home and collapse
from a busy day or a hard day,
and just simply sink into that negativity
because it sort of goes along with how you already feel.
It takes effort to be positive.
It takes commitment to think or define something that's good
that you can then share with another person
or give to another person that is what they need
then to keep on with what you're trying to get them away from
if what they are in is negative.
And so that commitment of time,
if the influence has been bad,
your commitment and positivity about how good something can be
just makes all the difference in the world
for those young people.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reaction
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.