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NLP in Education - Why is there so little?

By Chris Harrison - Posted March 2008



During my Practitioner course, a show of hands survey was performed to gauge the background of the course members.

There was the usual mix of therapists, business managers, and IT professionals (something about NLP just seems to attract IT people!).

Within the entire room, there was not one person from the teaching profession - not one person who was planning to use NLP in education.

Teaching seems like an area in which NLP could be hugely beneficial, but it does not seem to have been taken on board.

There seems to be almost no NLP in education!

So why not?

In my opinion, there are a number of possible reasons:

Funding: Here in the UK, it is very difficult to market and sell to schools simply because they do not have much of a budget to spend.

Inertia: In any huge organization where the goal is consistency (all schools teaching the same syllabus to the same level), it is almost impossible to bring in a change, especially the kind of culture change that the establishment wide use NLP would entail.

Lack of Reward: Considering the level of inertia, it really isn't worth a teacher trying to change the system. Why would anyone spent their own money learning something for which they wouldn't be rewarded?

Reputation: Another reason that teachers may not want to try to bring NLP into the classroom is the risk of being seen as messing around or thinking that they know better rather than getting on and teaching. This can lead to other teachers and parents mistrusting the teacher. NLP is still not mainstream enough for most people to try and bring it into a new environment.

Looking on the bright side there do seem to be moves to add more training for NLP in education, and hopefully NLP will become more 'mainstream' in the process.

In the UK, Kate Benson of Meta-NLP is the Society of NLP's International Director of Education, and Meta-NLP have started running course specifically for educators.

Perhaps in the near future I won't have to hear parents explain that their children are being taught how to spell in the most modern method - by sounding out the words.

Have they never tried spelling 'phonetically'?

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