It''s a big un...

I've had a remarkable morning. Before leaving for Bhutan I tried to maintain a degree of realism to offset the hopes I had for what I would discover here. I will explain the phenomena of Gross National Happiness in the next blog and keep my promise to write about Bhutan, but this morning has to be written about now. Immediately.

The group has just had an audience with the Minister for Education, Lyonpo Thakur S Powdyel. We were greeted very kindly and he took a little time to talk with us about our placements. He proceeded to outline the Bhutanese vision for education. He seemed a little hesitant at first and I was wondering if he was really in the room with us or elsewhere. Then he became animated and embarked upon the most compelling half hour discourse I have ever had the privilege to hear. For those you who have listened and been inspired by Sir Ken Robinson's clarion call for a sea-change in the way we educate children in the west, imagine yourself in the room with me and try to imagine how this man made me feel.

He spoke about how education should be about opening minds and creating better thinking and feeling humans, that education is about enlightenment and not about outfitting students as viable units for an economy. Education is not primarily about jobs, it is primarily about empowering people to live lives of value, to think in enriched and rewarding ways, to outfit the custodians of Bhutan's future with the respect, integrity and honour that will ensure they appreciate what is good in life – the natural environment, relationships with other people, intellectual depth and greater feeling. When he mentioned the development of an aesthetic sensibility he spoke about the ability to differentiate between things of beauty and things that merely have the appearance of beauty (the things fill our shopping malls and offer empty promises of happiness).

He asked us all to challenge the teachers and the students that we meet in our placements. Challenge the teachers? To think about why they are teaching their subject. What is the value of physics to a person in this world? How will it make this person a better person, for themselves, for their family, for the country the society they live in? Do not teach a textbook because there is an exam – teach because the more our students learn, the richer their lives become and the better equipped they are to improve the lives of those around them.

His words echoed the sentiments that Sir Ken aspires to but the breadth and reach of the ideas went way beyond anything I've heard before, and, quite miraculously for me... they were not merely theoretical in their scope but practical in the context of the experiment in education that is happening in Bhutan.

When the previous king crystallised his ideas about the aspirations of a good government into the statement 'Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product', the world largely ignored it as untenable quirkiness. Bhutan was a small country. They stuck to their principled approach and established the 4 pillars of GNH. In Lyonpo's words, it would have been easy for Bhutan to double or quadruple GNP overnight by exploiting the vast resources of the country, but the short-termism and lack of respect for the environment does not correspond with the principles of GNH. Economic progress must not be attained at the cost of the environment or the well-being of the people. Years later the enlightened governance of this tiny country is making an impact on the world. This July the Bhutanese will be expected to show intellectual leadership in a conference about development in New York attended by leading economists and statesmen. The UN member-states have all signed up to a pledge to develop the Bhutanese ideas of GNH in their policies of governance. The world is listening. Now Bhutan is trying to make a new way of education, a way of education that puts real values at the heart of everything that is done in the classroom, just as GNH put those same values at the heart of governance.

Back home I secretly despaired of the parameters that teachers have to operate within – the 'system' of education. Creativity is silenced. The curriculum is not relevant. Standardised testing promotes lack of self-esteem. The mind is not opened. Square pegs are thrashed into round holes. The desperate need to satisfy the dreaded inspectorate leads to wasted time and meaningless initiatives that are costly to children's development. In Bhutan, 'the inspectorate' recently underwent a name-change because they felt the inspections intimidated the schools when they were supposed to supporting them. They hope to phase out inspections as we know them altogether once the developing schools are up to speed. Let me reiterate – this is an aspiration to have no inspections. Whether it's possible or not, it should be strived for because inspections interfere with the education of the students. Does anyone in Chepstow disagree?

My first inspiration to teach came from reading Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game as a teenager, the example of Joseph Knecht's pedagogy being one of enrichment, enlightenment, liberalisation and the opening up of the mind to the wonderful world of intellect, feeling and knowledge. This is idealist education, but Lyonpo expressed it to me today as a realist. It is happening in Bhutan, a place where the leaders clearly inspire those who follow.

Tonight I struck up a conversation in a bar with an ex-army man who just got out of prison for 3 years for drugs offences. I thought to myself... uh-oh. But before I could scamper away, he extolled the virtues of his leaders and told me how he admired them for their insight and clarity of thought. They were further along the path to enlightened thinking than he was. Can you imagine anybody talking about a British Parliamentarian in those terms? Especially after they'd just got out of prison.

Lyinpo closed the proceeding by reminding us that teaching is the most important of jobs because its ongoing mission is to improve the world. When you teach, you make the world a better place instantly. He thanked us for having the hearts to teach and he thanked us for choosing Bhutan as a place to do it.

I am thankful that at that moment I was able to raise my hand and thank him in turn for what he had said to us. I later found out that I spoke for everybody in the room when I told him that we appreciated him expressing his gratitude to us for sharing the knowledge we have of our 'advanced systems', but, coming from education regimes like those described so well by Sir Ken, to hear somebody in his position talk in such an enlightened, critical and inspiring way about education was both refreshing and inspiring to us all. In all likeliness it would be us who learnt the most from this exposure to Bhutan's value-driven approach and our schools back home that would benefit the most from us being a part of such enlightened methods of education. And of course, I recommended Sir Ken to him and told him he could find him on YouTube. To my surprise he had never heard of him!

I didn't record the most inspirational talk I've ever had the privilege to hear, so I can't share it and I can't revisit it. I can't recall it all and I certainly can't convey the impact it had on me with these clunky words. I can only recommend Sir Ken to you all as I did to Lyonpo, even if it does seem quite ordinary now by comparison.

My long-held ambition to come to Bhutan became a conviction a year ago and I stuck to my guns and got here. Now I can say with absolute certainty that I have made the right the decision. I have optimism in me. And some hope. Perhaps the happy-vouchers are kicking in? I am in the right place.

Oh, and I bought a guitar. Happy days.