Meeting with Pasat, why "you have to" kills "I want to"

For Ewa Murach, a Horse Assisted facilitator, the owner of Siedlisko Niebieski Szczur and her wonderful horses with thanks for creating space, where miracles happen.

This summer I had an opportunity to work with a beautiful bay horse, Pasat. I could even try to work with a horse from the ground for the first time. However, unlike other horses, Pasat behaved as if he was thinking “I’ll do what she wants and she’ll leave me alone”. It was difficult to spark any energy and he wasn’t eager to do anything new. He seemed not to understand what I want from him and what for. It turned out that Pasat had been trained for dressage for 15 years. He has been staying with a free herd for a year, but a year was not enough to change him. Ewa, the herd’s owner, said Pasats’ heart is closed. He could only play back what he had been taught.

I thought of many of my students. I’ve been wondering for some time why it has been so difficult to engage them in anything new, not to mention extracurricular activities. Why so very few get motivated by the possibility of going to a week-long international exchange for free. They appear to be so indifferent, and it wasn’t so long ago when I happened to do amazing things with my students. 

However, back then I was working in a lower school, where the pressure wasn’t as high as in the upper school where I work now. The students who came to our school were younger too, and the curriculum wasn’t as packed as it is now, after the recent reform of the system of education.  Alexander Neill, the founder of Summerhill, the first democratic school in the world, wrote that twelve-year-olds, as opposed to younger children, found it more difficult to adapt to the methods based on freedom to decide about themselves used in his school, and the process of recovery from the system school took them a lot of time and wasn’t always successful. 

Are my students like Pasat? - Have many years of training in a system school resulted in them losing the fire in their eyes and in their lack of energy and will to do anything creative? 

As far as I am concerned, the height of absurdity of Polish system of education, in which the documents and the numbers are more important than a human being, in combination with the wave of hatred unleashed against teachers by a big part od Polish society, more and more often make me feel like Pasat - I just want to do only the minimum of what is expected of me and leave.